Research has found that the love (or lack thereof) of a father affects a boy’s behavior, self-esteem, emotional stability, and mental health. While this is also true of a mother’s love, Ronald P. Rohner, Director of the Center for the Study of Parental Acceptance and Rejection at the University of Connecticut, states that in some cases, “The withdrawal of a father's love seems to play a bigger role in kids' problems with personality and psychological adjustment, delinquency, and substance abuse.”
The presence of a father’s love in the lives of their sons boosts their boys' sense of well-being and actually plays a significant role in their boys' emotional and physical health.
For good or bad, we fathers are teaching our sons about what it means to be a man. Spending time with them, being honest with them, giving them constant words of encouragement, and showing love to their mother gives them confidence, teaches them the importance of integrity, shows them how to value themselves and others, and proves to them, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they matter.
But fathers who don't take their role seriously, often in an effort to appease their guilt, continue to downplay their role in the lives of their children. They excuse their lack of regular involvement in their kids’ lives by reasoning that it’s not the “quantity” of time they spend with their children that’s important, it’s the “quality” of that time. There is an old Greek term that describes that kind of thinking: loadus of crapicus. Boys need their fathers’ love and nothing shows that love more than spending time with them.