by Anna Machin
For the rest of this book, we will stay firmly in the present. We will explore how evolution has invested heavily in shaping men to be fathers – neurologically, genetically, physiologically and psychologically – and how, by being close to their children, today’s fathers garner benefits that are of value not only to them and their children but also to our wider society. But the message from our evolutionary past is this: fathers are not mere adjuncts to mothers, occasional babysitters or bag-carriers. They are the consequence of half a million years of evolution and they remain a vital part of the human story.
PART TWO
Conception and Pregnancy
CHAPTER TWO
Babies on the Brain
Pregnancy, Identity and Embracing the Bump
There is an oft-quoted but ill-founded belief that mothering is instinctive – women are born to want, and are born fully equipped to care for, children. Speaking as the mother of two young daughters, I can assure you it is not instinctive; I will never forget the steep learning curve of first-time motherhood, which made even negotiating cleaning my teeth or emptying the dishwasher while caring for a newborn seem an insurmountable task. However, I did have a head start compared to my husband. Pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding are hugely emotional and physical experiences underpinned by a sea of wonderful hormones, which are there to prepare our bodies for motherhood, ease the pain and trauma of birth and motivate us to form quick and deep bonds to our new babies – vital if we are to continue to care for them despite the lack of sleep and constant demands for food. In contrast, fathers have no such experiences to rely upon and it would appear, on the surface at least, that the nine months of pregnancy pass by without much impact on the prospective dad, beyond some stressful visits to IKEA and a bit of elementary cot construction. For fathers, it would seem to be the case that the process of becoming a parent and bonding with his child can only really start once his baby is born.
When does a father become a father? Let’s see. It might be at the point he expresses a desire to have a child. Or with the moment of conception. Maybe during pregnancy, when the realization of the need to adopt a new identity dawns. Or it may only commence at the point of birth. In this chapter, I want to explore what happens to a dad during pregnancy. I want to look at his biology, his psychology and his behaviour. To understand how he begins to form the crucial bond with his unborn child, work with his partner to create a parenting team and begin to form his new identity of ‘dad’. For many years, it was felt that it was only when he was holding his newborn child in his arms that a man became a father and the relationship with his baby began. Before this point, pregnancy was something that was quite clearly happening to someone else. But would it be so surprising to hear that, with the momentous changes in anatomy and behaviour that were the cause and consequence of the emergence of fatherhood, evolution saw fit to ensure that, even before birth, dads were firmly tied into the family?
Oxytocin is a hormone with a multifaceted role. Produced by a tiny structure at the base of your brain called the pituitary gland, it has several important roles within the body. It is responsible for the commencement of labour, the production of milk and the manufacture and motility of sperm – all vital stages in the journey of reproduction. But it is within your brain that its real power is apparent. For oxytocin is the lubricant that causes many new bonds to form: lover to lover, parent to child, best friend to best friend. It acts a little like alcohol, reducing any inhibitions to forming new partnerships, causing you to walk across the room and strike up conversation with the object of your desire. We all have a baseline level of oxytocin and variations in this level between individuals, caused by both our genes and our environment, mean that we are all different in the extent to which we face down our shyness and plunge into new relationships. And this includes the father–child relationship. We will look at how a man’s individual characteristics affect his fathering behaviour, and the ease with which he bonds with his baby, in later chapters.
In addition, oxytocin works closely with another key neurochemical: dopamine. Dopamine is described as a reward chemical and acts in an area of your brain called the reward centre, because its release results in feelings of intense happiness and euphoria. You will be able to imagine what I mean if you recall the pleasure associated with eating chocolate or your favourite takeaway – that’s dopamine. Dopamine and oxytocin have a wonderful working relationship, particularly when a new bond is starting to form. Firstly, in combination they work to make the brain more plastic, meaning that it is easier to make changes to its neural structure – vital when you need to form new memories or learn new facts about someone. Secondly, they complement each other really well. I like to describe their relationship as being a little like ‘good cop’ and ‘overenthusiastic cop’. Dopamine – our overenthusiastic cop – acts to give you the vigour and motivation to get off the sofa and form that new relationship. But enthusiasm can sometimes mean that the finer points of relationship formation are missed in the flurry of activity. So, oxytocin – acting to silence our fear circuits and promote our affiliative circuits (which motivate us to form and then maintain our relationships) – dampens the more extreme impacts of dopamine on our ability to concentrate, meaning that you are afforded enough calm headspace to make the relationship work.
For many years, oxytocin was seen as the female love hormone, largely because of its association with birth and breastfeeding, but in recent years it has become clear that it is as crucial to male relationships as female. And it is essential to the formation of the human parenting team. Recent research has shown that fathers and mothers who live together during pregnancy exhibit similar levels of circulating oxytocin within their blood. The team behind this finding is headed by Professor Ruth Feldman, a developmental psychologist from Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Feldman and her team are arguably the most prolific and impactful contributors to our knowledge of the neurochemistry of fatherhood. They are a wonderfully diverse group, and their work on the neurobiology and neurology of fatherhood, together with contributions from the fields of psychology and behavioural science, have led the way in our understanding of what it is to be a dad. But on discovering this amazing synchrony in baseline oxytocin between expectant mums and dads – its sheer ubiquity among couples ruling out the possibility that it is simply a coincidence – even Feldman and her team could not give an absolute explanation of why it existed. They just knew that it had something to say about the fundamental importance of the parenting team to a child. Their many hours of behavioural observation led them to suggest that this neurochemical phenomenon may have something to do with the close parallels in behaviour that we have all observed between two tightly bonded lovers – the common phrases, shared gestures and mirrored body language. They observed that when two people are in a close and supportive relationship, this is often reflected in a mirroring of speech and movement and that this is paralleled by a synchrony in a range of measures – known as physiological markers – such as heart rate, body temperature and blood pressure. They coined the term bio-behavioural synchrony to describe this phenomenon. The team hypothesized that the cause of the synchrony in oxytocin levels in parents-to-be could be explained by taking this observation of behavioural and physiological synchrony one step further, to suggest that this close relationship is underpinned by similar brain activity and hormonal levels, including those hormones that are vital to our long-term relationships. It is as if evolution has acted to ensure that, even before birth, dad and mum are primed to approach the parenting of their baby from the same viewpoint by ensuring they get an equal neurochemical reward. This work, as with so much of the work on fatherhood, is at an early stage, but it does seem that this mechanism could explain the close relationship between oxytocin levels in prospective parents. And this push for synchrony isn’t limited to the merely neurobiological. The parents’ psychology also undergoes a fundamental transformation.
An individual’s personality can be split into five d
ominant elements, known in the psychological community as the ‘big five’. First developed in the 1970s by two research teams, who independently managed to arrive at the same conclusion, and based on the analysis of thousands of personalities, the concept of the big five posits that every personality, regardless of your language or culture, can be boiled down to five essential elements. These five elements are: extraversion (the desire to seek out relationships, stimulation and fun – your classic party animal); openness (a wish to gain new experiences); agreeableness (empathy with others); neuroticism (anxiety and a heightened sense of threat); and conscientiousness (the ability to organize, plan and stick to the rules). All personalities contain these elements to a greater or lesser degree, and it appears, although debate still rages, that your personality is relatively stable for your lifespan. But the practical and behavioural changes that accompany the major upheaval that is new parenthood do appear to cause a degree of beneficial disruption. As with oxytocin levels, parents-to-be who cohabit during pregnancy seem to undergo some change in their personalities to bring them into line with each other.
I am aware from my own studies that dads’ personalities undergo a change – once-patient men become less patient fathers and the once-timid can find new confidence in being a dad. But in their study of new and established parents, Sarah Galdiolo and Isabelle Roskam of Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium found firm evidence that these changes in dad are mirrored in mum. In their long-term study of 204 parental couples, followed from pregnancy to one year after birth, they found that as compared to non-parents, parents saw an alignment in the degree to which their personalities expressed openness, agreeableness and neuroticism. These are all factors that orientate a person to be aware of someone else’s life experience and be prepared to accommodate them, and are fundamental to the healthy functioning of the family. By experiencing a degree of synchrony in their personalities, mum and dad were being primed to be empathetic to each other’s experience, to be open to the experience of a new baby and alert to threats to the family. Take Nigel’s experience as an example:
There have been times when [my friends] have said, ‘Oh, we’re going to go out on the Friday night for drinks and stuff, and you’re welcome if you want to, but you probably can’t, because you have Poppy.’ And I find myself thinking, It’s not so much that. I still want to see my friends and it’s not that I can’t any more; it’s just I’m getting older, I have a kid and I feel responsible for her. It’s not that I’m not allowed to, I just don’t want Liz to be at home looking after Poppy while I’m out with my friends, just going to pubs, having drinks. It’s not a special event. It’s something I can do any time, and this is a time I should be at home, because Poppy is changing every day.
Nigel, dad to Poppy (six months)
However, Galdiolo and Roskam found that while mum and dad were in tune regarding these family-orientated aspects of personality, the element that drives them to seek out excitement and reward outside the couple – extraversion – did something different. For mum, this aspect of personality was unaltered by becoming a parent, but for dad there was a significant decline in the extent to which this formed part of his personality. Once they are on the road to parenthood, the personality of a father alters from being one orientated to outside experiences to one that is inward-looking, towards the familiar and comfortable – the family. Nigel’s quote above illustrates this change in perspective perfectly. If you are a dad-to-be, then what these fascinating instances of biological and psychological synchrony and asynchrony are telling us is not only that evolution wants you to act as a baby-raising team alongside your partner, but that during pregnancy you are not simply an interested bystander but are being primed biologically and psychologically to contribute fully to that team.
* * *
I built the cot and put the nursery together, put up some shelves . . . it was all me. It’s been quite nice, that’s my way of contributing. She is busy growing a baby, which I can’t do, but I can do the physical stuff here . . .
Tim, expectant dad
Fathers nest. Often, when I ask the fathers I study, like Tim, what they are doing during the pregnancy to prepare for the arrival of their baby, their responses are scattered with anecdotes about painting nurseries, constructing furniture and carrying out extensive research into the best buggy or car seat. Indeed, it is fair to say that buggy shopping seems to get fathers particularly excited, especially if there is scope for a three-wheeled, off-road option. While we may laugh at this sudden flurry of DIY, for the dad-to-be, who may struggle to find a way into the pregnancy, being able to make this contribution helps him to feel involved. But beyond this, many dads also speak of their growing relationship with their baby. Often, they describe how they sing, talk or even read to the bump, gaining huge joy from any movements the baby makes in response. Many imagine what their future child will look like and what experiences they will enjoy together.
Attachment, a term coined by psychologists to describe the intensely close bond that develops between two people, is fundamental to the parent–infant bond. The father of attachment theory is British child psychiatrist John Bowlby, who began his work in the 1950s. Bowlby rejected previous theories of attachment that posited that the bond between parent and child was motivated by the child’s hunger or the requirement for dependency, something that the child should outgrow by adulthood, and argued that it is based upon a deep emotional bond between parent and child that is crucial to the child’s healthy development. As such, many mammalian infants, including us, are born with an innate drive to seek out their attachment figure. Much of Bowlby’s early work focused exclusively on the mother–infant attachment and positioned it as a behaviour directed from the child to the mother, rather than being two-way. Today, we know that the latter is true – mothers form attachments to their children as well – and that it is also a phenomenon of the father–child relationship. The most common attachment relationships are those between parent and child and between romantic lovers, but they can exist between very close friends and even, some would suggest, pets and owners. Attachment is hard to define – it is one of those phenomena that is difficult to pin down, but psychologists know it when they see it. If we were to observe an attachment relationship – be it romantic, parental or based in deep friendship – we would see two people who crave physical closeness, who constantly monitor each other’s emotional reaction to help themselves assess the environment and who become distressed on separation. Think of a puppy separated from its mother or a young child from its parent. We will revisit attachment in Chapter Seven, when we look at the development of the relationship between dad and baby after birth, but here I want to think about the relatively new idea that this bond can begin to form even before birth.
It is beyond debate that a mother forms an attachment to her unborn baby – a process that is given a huge boost by her ability to feel her baby moving and the experience of going on an intensely physical and emotional journey in partnership with her child. This has been referred to as the mothering privilege. But is this really a privilege that only mum can benefit from? There is now a powerful body of evidence to suggest that this privilege can be shared. Dads can feel the same powerful tug of love for their unborn baby, and they have been helped in this in no small way by the advent of the ultrasound scan. With the arrival of this technology, fathers could, for the first time, step beyond their imagination and actually see and hear their baby. Tim’s recollection of his first scan makes it clear how powerful this experience can be:
I think the scan was the first time I began to believe it. Not that I didn’t believe it before, but the scan gave me the reassurance that it was real. Knowing for the first time, seeing the evidence on the screen, it was brilliant. Incredible. I was amazed, elated, incredulous.
Tim, expectant father
Although it was pioneered in Glasgow during the 1950s, ultrasound use during pregnancy only became routine in the UK during the early 1970s, and it wasn’t
until the end of that decade that it made an appearance in the United States. So, today’s fathers are one of the first generations to routinely be given this opportunity to see their unborn child and, overall, the ability to see one’s baby during pregnancy is a positive thing. For the fathers in my studies, whether to attend scans is generally a no-brainer and while there are anxieties surrounding the possibility of discovering issues with the baby, in the majority of cases the overwhelming emotions when baby is finally seen are ones of relief, pride and joy. In these times of rapid innovation, parents can now not only hear and see their baby, but they can get the full surround-sound experience with a 4D scan. These scans show the baby in three dimensions and in real time – that’s the fourth dimension. The opportunities for early discussions about who he or she looks like are endless. For fathers, who are largely unaware of the physical exertions of their unborn child, this affords an amazing opportunity to parallel the experiences of the mother. Gone are the days of the grainy black-and-white image, to be replaced by an all-singing, all-dancing movie that can be downloaded to a DVD and taken home with you to view at your pleasure as many times as you like. In a study of the comparative impact of 2D and 4D scanning techniques on prospective parents, Pier Righetti and his colleagues, based in the departments of obstetrics and gynaecology at two Italian hospitals, found that fathers experienced a much greater leap in attachment to their unborn baby following a 4D scan as compared to a 2D scan, even when their attachment was measured two weeks after the appointment. It is possible that the opportunity to view your child moving in three dimensions, combined with the freedom to rewatch them again and again, enables fathers to remain connected to their child throughout the long nine months of pregnancy.
