Natasha Cabrera
University of Maryland
Natasha Cabrera has been studying fathers for the past 10 years. In her previous position with NICHD, she collaborated with the Family and Child Well-being Research Network to develop a major initiative called Developing a Daddy Survey (DADS), which coordinated measures of father involvement across major studies in the field, provided a set of measures for others to use, and, with Child Trends, worked on the psychometric characteristics of these measures. In addition, she has been involved in conceptualizing, designing, and measuring father involvement in the national evaluation of Early Head Start. With a group of colleagues, Dr. Cabrera has worked on Early Head Start Fathers’ studies for the last 5 years. She has written a number of papers on policy, methodology, and the implications of father involvement on child development. She is the co-editor with Catherine Tamis-LeMonda of the Handbook of Father Involvement: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (2002) and took the lead on the above-mentioned review of the fatherhood literature with S. Hofferth and others in 2000.
Dr. Cabrera has found that fathers whose children are enrolled in Early Head Start are involved with their young children but face many barriers including unemployment, marital conflict, substance and alcohol abuse, and programs that are not prepared to serve fathers. In contrast to popular belief, the majority of Early Head Start children have fathers who are involved in their lives. She and her colleagues are now examining whether early parental involvement predicts later involvement and what factors predict father involvement. She also found that fathers who are responsive and communicative with their children have children who score within the normal range on measures of cognitive development. Positive father-child interactions can make a difference in children’s development.
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