Fathers’ direct care (e.g., carrying, sensitive caregiving, cultural transmission) can potentially improve children’s health, well-being, and social development. However, between- and within-culture variation in fathers’ roles in these domains remains understudied, particularly in work on small-scale societies, and we know relatively little about how these roles intersect with indirect paternal care (e.g., provisioning, resource defense) to shape child health outcomes. We use data from Bondongo fisher-farmers of the Republic of the Congo to test the relationship between a man’s relative fit to a local cultural model of fatherhood and his children’s health as measured by local perceptions, anthropometrics, and biomarkers of psychosocial stress (Epstein-Barr virus [EBV] antibodies) and immune activation (C-reactive protein; CRP). Results indicate that Bondongo fatherhood is multidimensional and that higher-quality direct care is associated with better child health and growth, whereas the association with indirect care is less clear. Additionally, paternal care was unrelated to CRP or EBV, but marital disputes correlated with elevated EBV antibody titers, suggesting that psychosocial stress is related to these family dynamics. Thus, Bondongo fathers’ care helps shape children’s health, consistent with the local cultural model and evolutionary frameworks suggesting a broad and flexible role for hominin fatherhood.
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