In a letter to a Canadian advice column, a grandfather described a quiet grief: he has not yet met his second grandchild. The rift, he explained, stems from years of tension between his wife and his daughter-in-law, a cold war that has left his son “caught in the middle” and two small children growing up without one set of grandparents. The columnist, Rebecca Eckler, urged him not to let go. “Summon your son immediately,” she wrote, “for a private, calm and honest conversation.”

That grandfather’s predicament is a single thread in a larger, often unspoken pattern. A study of 898 estranged parents and adult children in the United States, published by researchers from Texas Christian University, Creighton University and others, found a sharp asymmetry in how each side explains the break. Parents frequently pointed to a child’s sense of entitlement or the influence of a spouse; adult children overwhelmingly cited toxic behaviour, emotional neglect, and a childhood of conditional love. “Parents bring a child into the world and assume the child will follow their path,” said Kazi Rumana Haque, a lead psychosocial counsellor in Dhaka. “But a child is a separate person with separate opinions. When parents belittle a child’s achievements or use silence as punishment, the wound is remembered into adulthood.” The estrangement, researchers note, is rarely sudden. It is the slow sediment of years.

If estrangement marks one end of the fatherhood spectrum, the other end begins at birth. Two studies published in the American Journal of Public Health examined the mental health of new fathers. A survey of 4,290 first-time fathers in Ohio found that 6.6% showed symptoms of depression and 11% anxiety. Those who took unpaid leave were 58% more likely to report anxiety than those with paid leave; fathers who wanted leave but could not take it, often citing financial pressure, had elevated rates of both depression and anxiety. A separate longitudinal study in Sweden, following 746 fathers, suggested that a leave of moderate length—neither a few days nor many months—was most protective of psychological well-being. Craig Garfield, a paediatrician at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, called paid leave “not just a workplace benefit but a public health issue.”

Amid these large structural forces, a smaller, almost absurd ritual persists: the dad joke. A study from the University of North Carolina, posted on PsyArXiv, analysed thousands of these puns and found that their predictable, wordplay-heavy structure can trigger laughter that measurably lowers cortisol—by more than 36% in a single session, according to a 2023 review—while raising dopamine and endorphins. Paul J. Silvia, the psychologist behind the work, noted that the simplicity of dad jokes makes them legible across generations, a rare shared language in families where deeper communication may have frayed. In a kitchen in Jakarta, a father’s corny pun might momentarily dissolve the day’s stress; in a suburb of Toronto, it might be one of the few sounds that still travels easily between a parent and a teenager.

The grandfather who wrote to the advice column is still waiting for a conversation. The new father in Ohio who could not afford to take leave is still navigating sleepless nights with a heightened risk of anxiety. And somewhere, a father is about to deliver a pun so predictable that, for a moment, the hormone cortisol dips across the room. The threads of family life, research now confirms, are pulled taut by policy, memory, and the smallest of words.