Last summer, in a failed attempt at humor, Clorox ran an online ad that declared, “Like dogs or other house pets, new dads are filled with good intentions but lacking the judgment and fine motor skills to execute well.” Although the company pulled the ad amid a flurry of scorn from the online commentariat, it nevertheless played to a remarkably widespread stereotype — that fathers are somehow unfit to raise children.

In “Do Fathers Matter?” — spoiler alert: they do — the veteran science writer Paul Raeburn jumps to Dad’s defense, drawing on several decades of research and his own experience as a five-time father. What emerges is a thought-provoking field piece on the science of fatherhood, studded with insights on how to apply it in the real world.

Historically, developmental psychologists have largely dismissed fathers as irrelevant. Nearly half the articles on child and adolescent psychology published in leading journals from 1997 to 2005, for example, make no mention of fathers; before 1970, when fathers weren’t even allowed in delivery rooms, less than a fifth of the research on parental bonding took them into account.

This bias reflects a deeply ingrained assumption that fathers play a marginal role in how their children turn out, a belief enshrined in the theory of infant attachment, which grew out of the work of the British psychiatrist John Bowlby in the second half of the 20th century. “It focused exclusively on mothers,” Mr. Raeburn writes. “The role of the father, Bowlby believed, was to provide support for the mother. In the drama of childhood, he was merely a supporting actor.”