The Life of Dad

by Anna Machin

  Nigel, dad to Poppy (six months)

  For some dads, the gap between what they had expected fatherhood to be like – true co-parenting – and the reality is less of a negative than we might envisage. For them, slipping back into the more traditional roles of maternal caregiver and paternal provider feels comfortable and allows ample opportunities to bond by being ‘fun dad’. But for others, like Nigel, it can mean coming to terms with having to swiftly rethink their chosen fathering identity, having spent the nine months of pregnancy carefully honing it. If this is you, then the realization that you might not be able to be the equal parent that you wanted to be can lead to emotional upheaval. You might feel resentful that your partner gets to see the best bits of your baby during the day – the singing classes, soft play and toddler groups – while you get the grizzly, pre-bed version. Or you may feel guilty that your partner is left alone all day to deal with the challenges of a newborn while you still get your hour of uninterrupted lunch break and the welcome opportunity to stare mindlessly into space that it affords. For many of the dads I have studied, who come from all socio-economic backgrounds, the realization of the reality of twenty-first-century Western fatherhood results in change. And in a world of many competing demands on their time and attention, the thing that gives in many cases is work. In real terms, this can mean taking the risk of a financial and career hit – the less demanding job, more flexible hours, lack of promotion – to make sure you are present to teach and nurture your child:

  My job doesn’t pay very well at all, it pays rubbish, but it allows me to be the father that I want [to be], because I know that if I have to go to work at six in the morning I will be back by three, and I can pick [my daughter] up from school. My plan has always been to be there for dinner and I always want to be there to help with homework in the evenings. They are the standards I have set for myself.

  Mark, dad to Emily (four) and George (three)

  As we will see in Chapter Ten, where we will look at dad’s influence on child development, in the physically benign but socially and intellectually challenging environment of the West, sacrificing your career to some extent has huge benefits for your child’s physical and emotional well-being. But some dads go further. Where money and culture allow, the shift in priorities that becoming a dad brings can lead them to be the first to exploit the opportunity to truly turn words into action and take on the mantle of that most twenty-first century of dad roles – the stay-at-home dad:

  In March this year, Dawn went back to work and I was still setting up my business, and we needed one income coming in. So, the sensible thing was for me to look after Rosie full-time. From March until July I was the primary carer, which was fantastic. I loved it. I used to go to all the baby classes, go out with the mums and have picnics in the park. Generally, they were absolutely lovely. I think Dawn got a bit jealous sometimes when I would go off to the park with her friends!

  Ben, dad to Rosie (eighteen months) and one on the way

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  Why should this gap between what you imagine fatherhood to be like and the reality matter? It matters because one of the key causes of poor mental health in new dads is precisely this gap between hope and reality. Combine this with the stress caused by trying to balance work and home life, coupled, in some cases, with the pressure of being the only wage-earner in a financially strapped household, and a new dad can find himself under significant, and possibly health-breaking, strain. And, as poor mental health affects not just the man, but his partner, his child and, ultimately, society, it is a gap with which we should all be concerned. As we will also see in Chapter Ten, children need their fathers to be as present as possible to help create a healthy developmental environment. While an absent wage-earning father can provide many indirect benefits that will ease a child’s life course, nothing can replace the impact that spending time – however brief – with your child has on your child’s psychological and behavioural development. The resolution to this tension is unlikely to be swift or straightforward; whether women can have it all is still an ongoing debate, decades on from the advent of feminism. But we do know that in those countries where the balance between work and home life is the most successful, it is often as a result of a combination of factors: carrot and stick from government, a well-funded policy and, most crucially, the voices of dads and mums clamouring for change.

  It should be clear by now how incredibly flexible dads can be, ready to respond rapidly to changes in their child’s circumstances, all with the aim of ensuring their survival. But such behavioural flexibility cannot occur without a parallel change in the computer that drives it all: the brain. And luckily the paternal brain has proved itself to be just as flexible in responding to new experience as its owner. We have known for some time that becoming a mother leads to structural changes in the mother’s brain; areas that enhance her maternal skills see an increase in grey matter. But it is only very recently that a similar phenomenon has been recognized in new fathers.

  In 2014, developmental neuroscientist Pilyoung Kim, from the University of Denver, Colorado, recruited a group of sixteen biological dads and subjected them to MRI scans at two to four weeks following their child’s birth and again at twelve to sixteen weeks to explore whether new fatherhood led to any changes in brain structure. She wanted to know whether becoming a dad had any impact on the volumes of grey matter – the actual neurons or brain cells that generate the signals – and white matter – the axons or fibres that link the neurons – in the brain. What she found was that the areas at the centre of the brain involved in attachment, the expression of nurturing behaviour and the ability to interpret and react to infant behaviour, showed significant increase in size. Interestingly, it is these areas of the brain that not only show activation during father–infant interaction but carry one of the highest densities of oxytocin receptors, suggesting that an increase in size and activation is paralleled by an increase in neurochemical reward for the father as he forms his attachment to his child. Increases in grey matter volume were also seen in the outer layer of the brain, known as the neocortex. It is here that our higher cognitive functions sit and one area, the prefrontal cortex, plays a key role in complex decision-making – something that is essential for parenting a human child. Kim’s study shows us that as well as shifts in their hormone levels around the time of a child’s birth, human fathers exhibit a shift in their neural structure, in response to their new role and environmental conditions, akin to that seen in mothers.

  Kim’s 2014 study was groundbreaking in showing us that fathers undergo just as significant an anatomical change as mums as they embark on the path of new parenthood. But in one of the most exciting fatherhood studies of recent years, Eyal Abraham, a neuroscientist from Bar-Ilan University in Israel, has built on Kim’s work by studying primary caretaking fathers – in this case, his participants were gay fathers – and revealing the neural flexibility that underpins their behaviour. Generally, in the more traditional parenting team where roles are split along gender lines, we see differences between mum and dad in the areas of the brain that are activated when interacting with their child; largely the pattern is emotional centres for mum and cognitive areas for dad. This difference underpins the difference in their roles within the family, and we’ll take a more in-depth look at this in Chapter Eight. But in his study, Abraham showed that the brains of primary caretaking gay dads saw activation in both areas of the brain and that a new neural pathway had developed to enable the two distinct areas – one at the very centre of the brain, the other on the surface – to communicate and synchronize behaviours. In this case, the flexibility of the human brain has been exploited to enable gay dads to fulfil both the mother’s and father’s roles, ensuring that the child still gets exposure to the ideal developmental environment. Whether the same is true for heterosexual primary caretaking fathers, where a mum may still be present to fulfil her role, is unclear, but what is astonishing about Abraham’s and Kim’s work is that they show us th
at dads are not only primed to instigate a swift behavioural response to environmental change but that evolution has seen fit for this fast response to be underpinned at the anatomical and physiological level as well.

  If you are a dad, then you may be grappling with identifying what role to adopt in your child’s life, particularly in this period of rapid change in our perception of who a dad should be. However, what is almost definitely the case is that you are approaching fatherhood very differently to the dads of only fifty years ago. And here we see our own example of the flexibility of fathering here in the West. In the space of only one generation, dads in the West have changed beyond all recognition. You are in the birthing room, sharing night feeds, changing nappies, giving baths, puréeing food and singing songs. What has changed in your environment to precipitate such a rapid turnaround in style? The causes are threefold. Firstly, you now live in a globalized world and it is less likely that you live within easy reach of your parents, meaning that you have had to step into the caretaking role most often adopted by your extended family in past times. Secondly, childbirth has become highly medicalized and incredibly swift. Instead of a nice stay in hospital, you and your partner will find yourselves processing this amazing change in your lives while trying to recall that antenatal class where you practised changing a nappy on a plastic doll, a poor substitute for the wriggling, crying infant in front of you. And thirdly, we now understand how important it is to a child’s development to have their dad’s input, meaning that men are feeling empowered, albeit by a society that is a bit slow to respond, to be more hands-on with their children than ever before.

  The environment of fathering in the West has changed drastically and fathers, exploiting that wonderful flexibility, have changed their behaviour to meet the challenge and continue to ensure their children’s survival and success. As we will see in Chapter Nine and Chapter Ten, this has had only positive consequences for children, as dads are more on hand to give their unique input and care. But while dads may share the same overarching goal, how each of you approaches fathering is a complex web of genetic and environmental factors that are unique to you. And that is the story of the next chapter.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Who’s the daddy?

  Genes, Psychology and Hormones

  Okay, let’s complicate matters a little, just for fun. We now know that human fatherhood evolved as a consequence of a very real threat to the survival of our species that saw us teetering on the brink of extinction. We know that a new father experiences changes in his hormone levels and brain structure just as significant as those of his partner, which help him fulfil his role within the parenting team. We know that the role of the father is hugely flexible, enabling him to ensure the survival of his child within the fast-changing, big, wide world. We know that being a dad is about more than mere genetics; action is key. We know that the type of father a man becomes is not a free choice, but is influenced by a complex of factors including the social, ecological, economic and biological environments in which he exists, resulting in astonishing diversity. We know all this. But what is missing from this list of broad but important conclusions is the man himself. If we zoom in from the global to the individual, part of who a father is is driven by his innate biology, physiology and psychology – the elements that make him different to everyone else. In this chapter, I want to try to understand what it is about your unique biology and your unique life experience that help shape you as a dad. And to start, let’s reacquaint ourselves with that most male of hormones – testosterone.

  Testosterone is the hormone that gives men their broad chests, deep voices, strong jaws and famous inability to multitask. It is also the hormone that motivates all men to find a mate and reproduce. But, as we know from Chapter Two, it is not your friend if you want to curb a wandering eye and settle down to a life of domestic bliss. We also know that to try to achieve some balance between the drive to mate and the drive to parent, which is vital to our species’ survival, new fathers experience a drop in testosterone levels following birth that is hypothesized to increase their focus on the family and decrease their desire to experience the world outside the front door. But beyond this global effect, it also operates after birth at the individual level to influence the extent to which a man is motivated to be a sensitive father. And it is testosterone’s role in individual differences between dads that I want to explore here.

  All men have a baseline level of testosterone, and this varies between individuals. It is the reason some men are more reproductively successful than others and the reason some men appear to be more cut out for fathering. In one of the very first studies focusing on the neurobiology of fathering, in 2002 Alison Fleming from Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, studied the influence of baseline levels of testosterone on the responsiveness of fathers and non-fathers to the cry of a distressed, unrelated infant (don’t worry, it was a recording, no babies were prodded during the course of the experiments). Dads’ responsiveness was measured via a questionnaire that asked them to rate their response on a ten-point scale with respect to ten different emotions – including annoyed, distressed, sympathetic and alert – and by measuring their heart rate. She and her team found that, firstly, fathers were more sympathetic and felt a greater urge to respond to the cry than either non-fathers or fathers who had been played a control sound – a random, unrelated sound that made sure that any results were not just the result of hearing a noise. Secondly, and more significantly for understanding variation in individual fathering behaviour, men with lower testosterone, be they fathers or non-fathers, were more sympathetic and motivated to act to help the child than those with higher levels. Fleming concluded that while testosterone does seem to influence the shift from mating to parenting, this may be partly a shift towards an increase in the empathetic behaviour vital to good parenting rather than simply a shift away from a desire to reproduce. And the differences in individual testosterone levels meant that some men found it easier and more natural to display empathetic behaviour and help the baby than others.

  * * *

  The human brain is a wonderfully complex organ. As we know, it is six times as large as it should be for our body size, it is dominated by a vast, many-folded neocortex that allows us to speak, learn, cheat and think, and it is capable of dictating our behaviours and desires in a range of domains – sensory, motor, emotional and cognitive – at both the conscious and unconscious level. To achieve this, it produces and is controlled by a vast array of neurotransmitters, some of which we have already encountered, which in conjunction with their receptors stimulate behaviours, prompt our senses, shape our memories, develop our thoughts and motivate us to act. It is a mesmerizingly confusing and beautiful organ to study, but among the complexity we can be sure of two things. Firstly, that it is rarely the case that one neurotransmitter acts alone and, secondly, that evolution has ensured that we carry out survival-critical behaviours by rewarding our actions with a flood of addictive, feel-good chemicals in the brain. Evolution bribes us to do the right thing. Along with the euphoria-inducing endorphins that we will encounter in the next chapter, the most studied and well-known of these chemicals is dopamine. We have met dopamine before, along with its frequent partner oxytocin, in Chapter Two, when we explored how a dad can bond to his unborn child, but it is equally as critical to your relationship with your child, and how you father, after birth. Remember, it is your go-to chemical for pleasurable feelings. It is released when we fall in love, when we drink alcohol and when we eat our favourite sugary food. And if you are a father, it is also released when you see a child.

  Ten years after Fleming’s pioneering research on the role of testosterone in fathering behaviour, Jennifer Mascaro, Patrick Hackett and James Rilling, anthropologists and neuroscientists, again from Emory University, used our now greater knowledge of the interconnectedness of the brain’s neurochemical system and the latest advances in scanning techniques to study the interplay between dopamine, oxytocin and testosterone and th
eir impact on individual differences in fathering behaviours. They recruited eighty-eight heterosexual, biological fathers and fifty non-fathers and asked them to give blood samples so that their baseline levels of testosterone and oxytocin could be measured. Following this, each man was placed in a functional MRI (fMRI) scanner – enabling their brain activity to be viewed in real time – and shown pictures of the faces of adults and children with a range of emotional expressions – sad, happy and neutral. Their results indicated some striking differences between fathers and non-fathers, and between individual dads, when viewing images of children’s faces (interestingly there was no discernible difference when viewing adults). Firstly, the blood samples revealed that fathers had significantly lower levels of baseline testosterone but higher levels of baseline oxytocin – on average a third more – than non-fathers, implying that all the fathers had been hormonally primed to provide child-focused, affectionate care. Low testosterone primed their empathetic skills and high oxytocin encouraged them to bond. Further, we know that low testosterone renders the positive effects of oxytocin on a man’s fathering behaviour even more powerful, making this combination of neurochemical dosages the perfect cocktail to motivate child-to-dad bonding. Secondly, the fMRI scans showed that the areas of the brain linked to empathizing, the recognition of facial emotion and the all-important dopamine reward centres were significantly more active in dads as compared to non-fathers. So, dads were more skilled at, and focused on, reading the emotions of the children and, in return, they received a powerful dopamine reward. But within the group of dads, those who had the lowest testosterone showed the greatest activity in areas linked to the processing of emotional faces and the reward centres, meaning that these fathers were the most skilled at understanding emotion and received the biggest dopamine hit of all. Having low testosterone not only makes you the most focused on your family, but it also makes you more empathetic, increases the wonderful effects of oxytocin on the relationship between you and your baby and makes sure you get the biggest possible dopamine reward. It is often the case that when I tell fathers that having a child will supress their testosterone they laugh knowingly – here lies the road to emasculation. But really, trading a bit of testosterone for the wonder of your relationship with your child and one of the greatest neurochemical rewards the brain can supply isn’t that big a loss, is it?