There is a paradox in the way I relate to my daughter and to my son. With Jinaki, who is three-and-half- years old, I pretty much know how to behave and what to say. Yet, because she's a girl, there are certain tendencies which I cannot anticipate or understand in the way her mother will.
My son Kyle, who is a 19 months old, is in most ways a typical boy. When Jinaki started standing at around 11 months, one of her first acts was to go to my bookshelf and start pulling down books. Kyle showed no interest in the bookshelves until he was walking, but he never pulls out books from the lower shelves. Instead, he climbs up the plastic step-stool in the study so he can throw down books from the higher shelves, each time watching me with a grin and saying, "Book fall dong!" He also imagines he can run even though he's really just doing a fast shuffle. And, unlike his sister, he thoroughly enjoys it when I fling him on to the bed.
Yet, with all that, I feel less certain about how to relate to Kyle as compared to his sister. I still haven't quite figured out why this is. The best hypothesis I have is that the father-daughter model available to me is more acceptable than the standard father-son model. From the gender point of view, neither of my children fit the stereotypes: Jinaki rarely plays with dolls, but she does like to play dress-up; Kyle sometimes puts on his sister's sequined ballet skirt and pink toy shoes and clack-clacks around the house, but trucks are his favourite toy.
Interestingly, research shows that fathers are more prone to teasing their children than mothers. As a satirist, I am even more prone to this than normal fathers (and I got a lot of practice with my sister's 10-year-old daughter Kaelyn, a habit which she continue to not appreciate to this day). The researchers found that teasing helped children deal better with ambiguity when they were older.
Mind you, none of this is going to affect either child's development in important ways. As a father, my most important duties have already been fulfilled: I am educated and I am around. In Gender and Parenting, edited by W Bradford Wilcox and Kathleen Kovner Kline, experts cite research from developed societies showing that a father's education level correlates with a boy's delinquent behaviour in adolescence–ie the sons of educated fathers are less likely to get into trouble–while, for girls, the father's presence has the same effect, no matter what his education level.
At the other end, the absence of a father appears to make boys unable to deal with stress effectively, which may be a factor in why violent criminals typically come from single-mother homes (tied in with the fact that fathers tend to constrain mothers' tendencies to emotionally abuse their children).
In line with the stereotype, though, a father's "human capital" traits affects both boys and girls: which basically means that, in order to be the most effective father, I should probably have spent more time learning skills for a real job, rather than learning to write articles about parenting.