SINGAPORE – Children grow up with better problem-solving and word-recognition skills, as well as fewer behavioural problems, when their fathers take at least two weeks of paternity leave, a ground-breaking local study has found.

The study is based on data from the ongoing Singapore Longitudinal Early Development Study (SG-Leads) of more than 5,000 children. It looked at the families of 3,895 children born since May 1, 2013, when one week of government-paid paternity leave was introduced.

“This is the only study worldwide to be able to establish this relationship,” says its principal investigator, Professor Jean Yeung, director (social sciences) at A*Star’s Institute for Human Development and Potential. She was assisted by Dr Li Nanxun, a scientist from the institute.

The study is unique as it used data from a nationally representative sample of children, and had rigorous controls to rule out factors such as socio-economic and demographic factors, family relations and the effect of domestic helpers and grandparents, Prof Yeung adds.

Families were interviewed between 2018 and 2019, when their children were aged three to six, and again in 2021, when the kids were three to eight. The study did not ask fathers if they took paternity leave in a continuous stretch or broke it up.

The interviewers tested children’s academic performance in their homes, using letter-word identification and applied problems skills involving numbers from the fourth edition of the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement, an international standardised test.

Children whose fathers took two weeks of paternity leave or more, on average, scored at the 62th percentile on applied problems, compared with the 50th percentile of kids whose fathers did not take any paternity leave.

However, Prof Yeung says these figures are before controlling for socio-economic or demographic variables and were not included in the statistical analysis of its research paper published in the Journal of Marriage and Family in March.

Families also answered 30 questions about their children’s behavioural problems, from externalising ones such as “being mean to others or deliberately destroying one’s own or others’ things”, and internalising ones such as “being too clingy or anxious”. Parents were also asked about the state of their relationship with their kids and their marriage.