In families where both parents work outside of the home, fathers who use a wide variety of words when chatting with their children may be strengthening their youngsters’ language skills, a new study shows.

Researchers who watched 2-year-olds interacting with their parents found that the more diverse vocabulary a dad used in these encounters, the more highly developed the child’s language skills were at age 3.

“It seems to be important for fathers to be talking to their kids and to be using a variety of words to their child,” Nadya Pancsofar, a graduate research assistant at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and study co-author, told Reuters Health.

Most research on how parents influence children’s language development has focused on mothers, she noted in an interview. “Our study was one of the first to look at the contribution of fathers’ vocabulary to children’s language development.”

Pancsofar and co-investigator Dr. Lynne Vernon-Feagans analyzed information from a study of 120 children recruited from 11 childcare centers. All had begun attending the centers before their first birthday. Data were available for 92 families when the children reached 2 years of age, and for 67 families when the children turned 3.

“These fathers were on average pretty highly involved in their children’s daily care,” Pancsofar noted.

The key factors that predicted a child’s language development were the diversity of the father’s vocabulary, the mother’s level of education, and the quality of the day-care the child was receiving, the researchers found.

They determined childcare quality based on several factors including child-teacher-ratio, teachers’ interactions with children and teacher’s education level.

Pancsofar said she would not conclude from the study that a father’s language input matters more than a mother’s. Instead, she said, they demonstrate that a father’s contribution matters. While early childhood education and intervention efforts have traditionally focused on mothers, she and Vernon-Feagans note, the study suggests they should include fathers, too.

SOURCE: Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, online 2006.