Editorial: Paternal Anxiety and Children's Anxiety and Related Symptoms: An Overlooked Risk Factor

The influence of caregivers on child and adolescent development and psychopathology risk is well documented over decades of research. However, for far too long, the focus has been squarely on mothers; it has treated fathers as indirect or secondary influences on their children's development, and paternal psychopathology, parenting practices, or attachment relationships have received relatively limited attention.¹ This has been problematic both because it has fueled a tendency to sometimes blame mothers for the problems that children go on to have and because caregiving roles have changed markedly over the past few decades. Fathers, in particular, have tripled the time spent with their children over the past 3 decades. ² Moreover, these estimates do not take into account recent shifts in post-pandemic parenting, which results in even greater involvement of many fathers with their children and underscores the need to expand our view of caregiver influences on child psychopathology. The meta-analysis of 98 studies by Zecchinato and colleagues³ is, therefore, an important step forward, as it considers links between paternal anxiety and the risk of a child developing emotional and behavioral problems in addition to anxiety and depression. Once relegated to the periphery in our understanding of risk, fathers are now in the spotlight, and with good reason.