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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A response from the authors of the article on the indicators of human rights performance and compliance, and the process of producing indicators about children's rights in Tanzania is presented.

Enthusiasm for techniques of measuring and assessing performance in statistical and comparable ways is sweeping the field of human rights, as well as many other spheres of social life such as health, education, and global governance. But as global standards and measurement systems are applied to the complex array of local systems of governance, community, and social life around the world, the project of measurement faces the double challenges of commensuration and translation. Using a case study of the pilot test of a set of indicators developed to assess compliance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child in Tanzania, this article examines five types of translation involved in using human rights indicators: quantitative, conceptual, linguistic, cultural, and structural. These translations pose challenges to measuring phenomena not previously counted and understood as measurable within local communities. This is the paradox of measurement: to make something known it must be countable, but if it has not already been translated into commensurable and quantifiable terms, it is difficult to count and may remain unnoticed and uncounted. Issues uncounted in the past tend to remain ignored or poorly counted in the future. Insofar as decisions about what to count are under the control of governments and experts rather than local communities, this tendency to replicate existing subjects of counting tends to make visible issues that such groups consider important and neglect others that may have greater importance for local groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]