The Equal Opportunities Commission report, Parental care and employment in early childhood, uses statistics from the Millennium Cohort Survey, which surveys 30,000 parents of 19,000 babies born in 2000 and 2001, to examine trends among young families.
Parents were surveyed when their babies were nine or ten months old and again when the child reached three. Developmental problems at age three were found to be more common where the father took no time off at the birth or did not use flexible working.
Although 80 per cent of fathers took some time off around a child's birth, the report concludes that there is a divide between the 'have' and 'have not' families, with low-income fathers less likely to take two weeks of paternity leave around a child's birth. Over 80 per cent of managerial/professional fathers had access to flexible working when their child reached nine to ten months old, while only 46 per cent of fathers in semi-skilled or unskilled jobs had flexibility.
Shirley Dex, co-author of the report and professor of longitudinal social research at the Institute of Education, said, 'It was interesting that a lot of things that we think of as being part of a mother's relationship with a child were really mirrored with the father's relationship. The people who took paternity leave are more likely to be more involved generally.'
The paper is available at www.eoc.org.uk.