For those who visit Fark.com you would know that the headline above is a "farkism", where they sneer at actual studies like: Does beer makes you fat, or students use free laptops from schools for porn. Fark notes:  Apparently there's an entire wing of the US government working hard on studying things that just don't need studying. The Maxim Institute out of New Zealand just put out a massive135 report that seems to fit this category. And to press this matter further this is a study on studies on fathers (got it?)  

The question:  Dofathers make unique contributions to the lives of their children? 

The short answer: Yes. Fathers who pay close attention to their kids end up with well adjusted kids.

There it's done: I could end this post now, and I'm sure we'd get a few giggles on the brush off, after all this is one of those papers that will be read by nearly no one except for the author himself and a few hard core daddy bloggers.  What bothers me the most about these studies is the dads who need this information the most are the least likely to read it.  If you stuck one paragraph in front of one dad who needs a few parenting lessons with a gun to their head, they couldn't understand it if they tried. I could hardly digest it myself.   

But hey, researcher Daniel Lees spent a lot of time on his homework, and even added pictures to the poster board, so instead of giving him a checkmark, I figured I'd go through all his research and put it into one easy to read table. I even added a translation to each of their key findings. 

Nonetheless it's still pretty dull.  So if you are happy with the short answer above, skip the long answer, scroll to the bottom and click the button  that says "Yes I have read this entire post and I agree to your short answer" If not you may read on to the long answer below. Good luck! 

The long answer:

SECTION 1: Literature review (or why we chose the studies we studied) 

 The reports studied had to be in English, published on or after 1990, (sorry Kyle Pruett you did do a few after 1990 that deserved a look but you weren't chosen). They picked the studies to be studied from a "database" (google?)  and books using the keywords   "father" and "involvement," and more specific combinationssuch as "father" and "child" and "unique." They found  2,657 hits with only 24 studies meeting the "criteria for inclusion because research into the possibleunique effects of fathers is relatively new." All studies had to have been in a "peer-reviewed journal or anedited academic book" and the studies had to measure both mothers and fathers contribution.