Infant Behavior & Development 33 (2010) 689–694 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Infant Behavior and Development Short communication Child temperament and paternal transition to non-residence Eirini Flouri a,∗ , Lars-Erik Malmberg b,1 a Department of Psychology and Human Development, Institute of Education, University of London, 25 Woburn Square, London WC1H OAA, UK b Department of Education, University of Oxford, 15 Norham Gardens, Oxford OX2 6PY, UK article info Article history: Received 5 August 2009 Received in revised form 13 January 2010 Accepted 4 June 2010 Keywords: Child behavior Fathering Fathers Temperament abstract Using the Millennium Cohort Study data this study showed that, even after adjustment, resident biological fathers of high-regularity children at 9 months were less likely than resident biological fathers of low-regularity children at 9 months to become non-resident by the time these children were 3 years old. © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Voluminous evidence has been collected since the 1970s to either support or refute Moynihan’s (1965) ‘pathology of the matriarchy’ hypothesis that the absence of a father is destructive to children, particularly boys, because it means that children will lack the economic resources, role models, discipline, structure, and guidance that a father provides (Amato, 2000; Silverstein & Auerbach, 1999, for reviews). Amato and Cheadle (2008) recently summarized the evidence for the three broad theoretical perspectives relevant to this literature. The most popular perspective, which they referred to as the standard family environment model, assumes that many single-parent families formed through parental separation are less than optimal settings for children’s socialization and development. Consequently, exposure to these environments increases the risk of a variety of problems for the children. The second perspective, or the passive genetic model (Plomin, DeFries, & Loehlin, 1977), assumes that parents’ and children’s behaviors are linked because of genetic transmission from parents to children. Parents with problematic personality traits, such as neuroticism or a predisposition to engage in antisocial behavior, are more likely than other parents to experience inter-parental conflict and separate. Because parents transmit these traits to their biological children genetically, children in these families are prone to a variety of difficulties (D’Onofrio et al., 2007, for a recent review). Therefore, the links between parents’ separation and children’s behavior are spurious as the causal mechanism connecting these parents’ and children’s behaviors is genetically inherited predispositions. Finally, the child effects model also challenges the standard family environment model by pointing out that, as the vast majority of studies in this literature involves correlations derived from cross-sectional data, the alternative explanation that children’s behavior is the cause rather than the result of parental separation is plausible. Our study contributed to the research linking fathers’ non-residence and children’s behavior by asking, in line with the child effects model, the question of whether early child’s behavior contributes to father’s transition to non-residence. This ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 0 2076126289; fax: +44 0 2076126304. E-mail addresses: e.flouri@ioe.ac.uk (E. Flouri), lars-erik.malmberg@education.ox.ac.uk (L.-E. Malmberg). 1 Tel: +44 0 1865274047; fax: +44 0 1865274067. 0163-6383/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.infbeh.2010.06.001