A fathers age has an unexpected effect on kids social skills

A father's age has an unexpected effect on kids' social skills A father's age has an unexpected effect on kids' social skills Scientists have examined how  maternal age  affects baby health for decades, but only recently started to investigate if the  father’s age  matters. Adding to the small but growing pile, researchers analyzed kids’ behaviors from early childhood through adolescence and found that the age of men at conception had a great effect on their child’s social skills.Follow Ladders on Flipboard!Follow Ladders’ magazines on Flipboard covering Happiness, Productivity, Job Satisfaction, Neuroscience, and more!The  study, published in the May 2017 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry(JAACAP), looked at data from more than 15,000 sets of twins in the UK, obtained from the Twins Early Development study (TEDs). The team focused on the developmental patterns of social skills and noted differences in areas of hyperactivity, emotionality, as well as conduct and peer problems. Then, separately, they compared whether paternal age had more of an influence t han genetic and environmental factors.Results showed that children born to fathers younger than 25-years-old and older than 51-years-old showed more prosocial behaviors in early development, but there was a ceiling. By the time they reached adolescence, these kids had fallen behind their peers with middle-aged dads. This was true across the board for social behaviors but no other domain, even after researchers controlled for maternal age. Further genetic analysis revealed that social development was primarily driven by genetic factors, rather than environmental. Notably, those genetic effects became more significant as paternal age increased.“Increased importance of genetic factors observed in the offspring of older, but not very young fathers, suggests that there could be different mechanisms behind the effects at these two extremes of paternal age,” Dr. Magdalena Janecka, lead author of the study, explained in a news  release. “Although the resulting behavioral profiles in t heir offspring were similar, the causes could be vastly different.”Like many complex experiments, this raises more questions than it answers and more research needs to be done to duplicate results and determine biological correlations.  Still, Dr. Janecka and her team hope that doing so will offer more insight into parental age and the potential risks associated with it, including but not limited to autism or schizophrenia, which  past studies  have suggested. Until then, use the phrase “old man” with caution.This article originally appeared on Fatherly.You might also enjoy… New neuroscience reveals 4 rituals that will make you happy Strangers know your social class in the first seven words you say, study finds 10 lessons from Benjamin Franklin’s daily schedule that will double your productivity The worst mistakes you can make in an interview, according to 12 CEOs 10 habits of mentally strong people