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Dimension-specific associations of father involvement with self-harm among rural children in China: the distinctive negative association of recreational involvement in a cross-sectional study
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DOI：10.1186/s13034-026-01155-9.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
Self-harm is an important risk issue in child and adolescent mental health. Previous research has shown that family relationships and parental support are closely associated with self-harm among children and adolescents. However, father involvement is usually treated as a global construct, and its internal dimensional differences as well as their heterogeneous associations with self-harm remain insufficiently examined, particularly in the context of rural children in China. Using a publicly available dataset on rural children in China, we treated “deliberately hurt oneself during the past year” as a binary outcome and estimated two sets of sequential binary logistic regression models. The first set examined the association between the total father involvement score and child self-harm. The second set further decomposed father involvement into five dimensions—rule teaching, life care, academic support, emotional communication, and recreational involvement—and sequentially adjusted for individual-, family-, and peer-level variables. The prevalence of self-harm was 24.7% among rural children. After adjusting for gender, anhedonia-related symptoms, anxiety, family conflict resolution style, guardianship type, family structure, and peer help, the total father involvement score remained significantly and negatively associated with self-harm (OR = 0.782, 95% CI [0.637, 0.959]). In the dimensional models, only fathers’ recreational involvement remained significantly associated with lower odds of self-harm (OR = 0.738, 95% CI [0.551, 0.989]). In addition, girls, anhedonia-related symptoms, and anxiety were associated with a higher risk of self-harm, whereas peer help was associated with a lower risk. Family conflict resolution style, guardianship type, and family structure did not show stable significance in the multivariable models. Additional interaction analyses indicated that the interaction terms between fathers’ recreational involvement and anhedonia-related symptoms, anxiety, and peer help were all non-significant. The association between father involvement and rural children’s self-harm varied across dimensions. Recreational involvement showed a relatively independent negative association with past-year self-harm. Given the cross-sectional design, these findings should not be interpreted as evidence that recreational involvement reduces self-harm. Rather, they suggest that shared, activity-based father–child interaction may be an important relational context for further longitudinal and intervention research.
Keywords:
Self-harm
Father involvement
Recreational involvement
Rural children
Anhedonia
Anxiety
Peer help
China
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