Fathers play a crucial role in their children’s socio-emotional and cognitive development. A plausible intermediate phenotype underlying this association is father’s impact on infant brain. However, research on the association between paternal caregiving and child brain biology is scarce, particularly during infancy. Thus, we used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to investigate the relationship between observed father–infant interactions, specifically paternal sensitivity, and regional brain volumes in a community sample of 3-to-6-month-old infants (N = 28). We controlled for maternal sensitivity and examined the moderating role of infant communication on this relationship. T2-weighted MR images were acquired from infants during natural sleep. Higher levels of paternal sensitivity were associated with smaller cerebellar volumes in infants with high communication levels. In contrast, paternal sensitivity was not associated with subcortical grey matter volumes in the whole sample, and this was similar in infants with both high and low communication levels. This preliminary study provides the first evidence for an association between father-child interactions and variation in infant brain anatomy.

父亲在孩子的社会情感和认知发展中起着至关重要的作用。潜在的这种关联的中间表型是父亲对婴儿大脑的影响。但是，关于父亲照顾和儿童大脑生物学之间关系的研究很少，特别是在婴儿期。因此，我们使用磁共振成像（MRI）研究了3个月至6个月大婴儿（N = 28）的社区样本中观察到的父亲与婴儿之间的相互作用，特别是父亲的敏感性与局部脑容量之间的关系。我们控制了母亲的敏感性，并研究了婴儿在这种关系上的沟通的调节作用。T2加权MR图像是在自然睡眠期间从婴儿获得的。较高沟通水平的婴儿，较高的父亲敏感性与较小的小脑体积相关。相比之下，在整个样本中，父亲的敏感性与皮层下灰质的体积并不相关，这在高和低交流水平的婴儿中相似。这项初步研究为父子互动与婴儿大脑解剖结构变化之间的关联提供了第一个证据。