How important is early paternal engagement? Deriving longitudinal measures of fathers’ childcare engagement and exploring structural relationships with prior engagement and employment hours

Paternal childcare engagement is a focus of work–family policy debates yet there is little consensus about what engagement means and how it might be measured. Drawing on Lamb’s (1986) classification of paternal involvement, we run confirmatory factor analysis on a sample of two-parent households from the UK’s Millennium Cohort Study to derive latent paternal engagement measures at nine months, three, five, seven and eleven years old. Structural Equation Modelling is used to explore the relationship between the engagement measures and parents’ employment hours. Employment hours have a significant association with paternal childcare engagement in the early stages of a child’s life, but it is paternal engagement in the previous time period that has a far stronger effect at every age. Specifically, paternal engagement in the first year of parenthood is important for fostering ongoing engagement until the child is at least age eleven, and this positive effect builds over time.