Why the best words a new dad can hear are ... it’s a girl!
Because fathers of daughters become richer, live longer and make better husbands. Only one problem: They’re more likely to vote Labour...
Household Panel. More than 10,000 people were interviewed to study their voting patterns before and after the birth of their children. On average, it was found that each daughter raised a man’s likelihood of casting a Left-wing vote by more than two percentage points.
Having sons did not have the same effect. And women who had boys moved in the opposite direction and became more Right-wing.
The likely explanation is that, over time, dads of daughters may unconsciously become more sympathetic to paying higher taxes and increasing healthcare funding, which is traditionally a female voting tendency, according to Andrew Oswald, professor of economics and behavioural science, who co-authored the study.
He said: ‘It’s remarkable. We can detect a change in the first 12 months of a baby arriving in the house. If you started off moving toward the Lib Dems when your first daughter was born, you could be voting Labour by the time the next one comes along.’
SHE’LL MAKE A FEMINIST OF YOU
DOnALD TRuMP is probably not the first person who springs to mind when you hear the word ‘feminist’.
But it was his daughter Ivanka who persuaded him to become the first Republican president to include paid parental leave as part of his 2018 budget.
His predecessor Barack Obama, who has two daughters, Malia, 18, and Sasha, 15, was also the first president to publicly describe himself as a feminist — and said that his dinner time chats with his girls helped change his mind on same-sex marriage.
Psychologist Dr Cliff Arnall says men often become more protective when they have daughters: ‘If a father sees another man being rude or disrespectful to a female worker, then it’s not a big jump for him to think “That could happen to my daughter”.’ Averil Leimon also says that fathers who have daughters often learn to become more comfortable dealing with women in a non-sexual way.
‘Fathers of daughters have to learn to sublimate their sexual responses to nubile teenage friends of daughters, to au pairs and so on,’ she explains.
‘Most of them succeed. So instead of seeing women as mothers or sexual partners, men start to see women more as human beings in their own right.
‘Such men are also probably more able to develop emotional literacy while interacting with daughters — and this may have a general knock-on effect in their dealings with other women.’ Though quite where this leaves President Trump after his comment in 1997 that his then 16-year-old daughter Ivanka ‘was hot’ is uncertain.
HE’LL CHANGE THE WORLD
Men who have daughters are more likely to try to change the world for the better, according to research.
All of the last five male prime ministers were fathers of girls.
Dads become more caring at work, too, according to research by the university of Miami.
Companies run by executives with female children were found to spend 13.4 per cent more of their income on corporate social responsibility programmes.
What better example is there than Facebook CeO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan who gave birth to their first child, a daughter, Maxima, in December 2015.
After she was born, they posted ‘A Letter to Our Daughter’ in which they announced plans to give £34 billion to a new organisation to promote equal rights, improve education and move over to sustainable energy sources, telling her: ‘Like all parents, we want you to grow up in a world better than ours today.’
And Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates decided to set up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — four years after having his first daughter, Jennifer, in 1996.
DAUGHTERS WILL ENRICH HIS LIFE
HAvInG girls doesn’t just make you a nicer boss to work for. A study last month found it could also make you better off.
A survey of venture capitalist firms, which are traditionally male-dominated, found that when they were headed by senior partners with daughters, they had more gender-balanced workforces, increasing the number of women they hired by 24 per cent.
On top of that, they also saw investor returns rise by about 4 per cent.
Averil Leimon says: ‘It’s been proven over and over again that hiring more women is good for business and gets you better returns.
‘In my view, if you are a boss allowing yourself to be softened by a daughter, it also makes you a more evolved man.’
. . . AND A BONUS FOR THE GIRLS
IT uSeD to be assumed that a mother’s love was the most important factor in how a daughter turned out. But a growing body of research has found that fathers are just as important, if not more, to the future happiness and success of a girl’s relationships.
According to the Children’s Society, daughters of men who are more closely involved in raising the children develop better friendships with others, more empathy and more self-worth.
They are also more likely to wait to lose their virginity until they are ready and not get involved in risky sexual behaviour, according to a study in the Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology.
Dr Angharad Rudkin, a child clinical psychologist at the university of Southampton, says: ‘When it comes to measures of wellbeing, one that stands out for girls is whether they have good relationship with their dads.
‘If they feel they have their seal of approval, they take that forward into their lives and into healthier adult relationships.’