Why a stay-home dad can be bad for boys (but not girls)

Boys looked after as toddlers by stay-at-home dads are slower and less ready for education than other children when they start school, says the large-scale survey.

But intriguingly, the same does not apply to girls.

Researchers who investigated 6,000 families to discover what happened when mothers went out to work and fathers took over looking after the children warn that couples should beware of swapping traditional roles.

Elizabeth Washbrook, of Bristol University, said: "We should not simply assume that children will be unaffected by the dismantling of traditional gender roles but consider their needs, as well as those of their parents."

The research does not go on to examine whether the damage to boys' prospects is permanent or whether they catch up over the years. But it sounds a powerful note of caution over the Government's long-standing policy of pushing mothers of young children out to work and encouraging fathers to stay at home to care for them.

Ministers are expected to introduce rules allowing a father 26 weeks of paid paternity leave when the mother goes back to work early in the child's life. This month the Government said it was investigating further laws to allow fathers "to be able to play a bigger part in bringing up their children".

The Bristol project - which was financed by the Government's Economic and Social Research Council - examined the lives of children living with both their natural parents. It made careful controls to ensure its findings were not skewed because of the relative wealth or poverty of those involved, or by illness or depression among mothers.

Dr Washbrook said: "I find robust evidence that boys - but not girls - who spent at least 15 hours a week in paternal care when they were toddlers performed worse on academic assessments when they started school."

She added: "This cannot be explained by the economic or psychological characteristics of parents in these families, nor by the characteristics of the child."

The study was intended to examine the effects of the mass movement of women into work. It observed: "Maternal employment is now the norm for mothers of children under the age of three in two-parent families.

"The introduction of paid paternity leave for the first time in 2003 is one example of the way in which governments around the world are attempting to promote greater gender equality in family life as well as in the workplace."

The study suggested a series of reasons why mothers might be better at looking after children than fathers, including biological and cultural. It cited the benefits of breastfeeding as one advantage of care by mothers.

It said women might be more confident and more skilled at bringing up children, and that there might be "harmful emotional effects" from the absence of a mother.

"These effects may be magnified if maternal absence is due to employment that increases tiredness and stress, and hence reduces a mother's sensitivity to a child's needs."

The warning over the impact on children of stay-at-home fathers follows a series of studies of childcare over the past five years which have found that toddlers who spend long hours in daycare appear to be less well-adjusted and do less well at school in some fields than those brought up at home by mothers.

• Most modern mothers are so busy juggling work and home that they have less than two hours to themselves each week, a survey suggests.

Nearly a third say they have less than an hour of free time, while another quarter have between one and two hours.

At the same time they are plagued with guilt about the amount of time their children spend on unhealthy indoor pastimes - but are afraid to let them play outside without supervision.

Busy roads head the list of concerns, followed by drugs, violent crime, terrorism and paedophiles.

Experts warned that mothers were suffering a crisis of confidence as traditional family support-networks eroded and TV programmes about parenting, such as Channel 4's Supernanny, left them feeling more inadequate.

Patricia Carswell, a "life coach" for mothers, said: "There are huge expectations on mothers today to provide a mythical perfect childhood. They feel overwhelmed."

She added: "There is a whole TV industry based on the proposition that parents are basically incompetent and it doesn't help."

A total of 1,600 mothers were polled by the internet site Mumsnet. Only three per cent said they had 16 hours or more to themselves each week.