The Life of Dad

by Anna Machin

  As we know, in humans there are three main networks within the brain implicated in parenting behaviour: the limbic system, the empathy system and the mentalizing system – that’s the basic emotions, emotional intelligence and mind-reading. The first is ancient and present in all mammals, whereas the second and third sit in the neocortex. These two systems – the basic and the advanced – are linked by two-way channels of communication, allowing the human parent to provide a multilayered parenting service. In their study, Eyal Abraham, Talma Hendler, Orna Zagoory-Sharon and Ruth Feldman focused on the density of neural connections within and between these three areas in twenty-five heterosexual biological mums and twenty homosexual biological dads, all primary carers. The Israeli team found that, regardless of whether the primary carer was a mum or dad, both the parents’ behaviours and their neural structures could predict how well their child navigated the social environment of pre-school. So, the most basic of parenting behaviours – touch, simple soothing speech and gaze – underpinned a child’s ability to regulate straightforward emotions such as joy. Further, the extent to which parent and child were in bio-behavioural synchrony during infancy – that’s behaviours, physiological measures and bonding hormones all in synchrony – predicted how well a child could handle their more complex emotions, such as frustration and anger, and parents who were warm and positive but used suitable levels of control and employed boundary-setting – those are the social rules being enforced – had children who were well socialized within the pre-school setting.

  But beyond these clear behavioural links, there was also a striking relationship between these skills and parents’ brain structures. Again, those children whose parents had higher densities of grey and white matter in the emotional areas of their brain were generally more positive, could regulate their simpler emotions by self-soothing and were more socially engaged. Parents who had higher densities of grey and white matter in the empathetic areas produced children who, again, were more positive, but this time employed quite complex behaviours to regulate their stronger and more negative emotions. Finally, where parents showed good levels of grey and white matter in the mentalizing area of the brain, their children exhibited more socialization – they understood and complied with adults’ requests more regularly, were willing to share, and helped and comforted others. Further, and more strikingly, there was a direct link between the density of connections linking the limbic and empathetic areas of the parent’s brain and their child’s oxytocin level at pre-school age. It’s as if their parents’ brains were the actual physical foundation of the child’s emotional and behavioural development.

  Why do these results matter? They matter because they show us how social competencies are able to cross generations. The parents in this study had advanced abilities in the emotional, empathetic and mentalizing skills that are required to be a successful, social human. And via their parenting behaviour, mums and dads were are able to pass these abilities on to their children. Secondly, they matter because the ability to grasp these basic behaviours at a young age sets you up for life. Individuals who have good emotion regulation and socialization as young children go on to achieve more in their personal relationships, education and employment as adults.

  So, as a dad, it is important to nurture these key socialization skills in your children and the most effective time to achieve this is during those first 1,000 days, up to your child’s second birthday. It is important that you mirror the types of social skill you expect them to display, take the time to tune into their emotions and needs so you can support them appropriately, encourage bio-behavioural synchrony through play and put in place firm boundaries for when a behaviour is unacceptable so your child gets an unambiguous message about what is good behaviour and what the world can do without. At times this can be tough, particularly if your boundaries are met with the mother of all tantrums, but by modelling what is acceptable and calling out what is unacceptable, you are bestowing a valuable gift on your child: the survival-critical ability to master the social world.

  While this is the ideal, for some children, their father’s circumstances may make being involved at the necessary level and time difficult or impossible. For these children, having a father who struggles to be appropriately involved in their child’s life, be it as a result of work, ill health or separation, can lead to significant issues with social behaviour. One consequence of a lack of suitable father involvement is social withdrawal. The opposite of emotional engagement, social withdrawal describes a reduction in or complete lack of positive behaviours and a reduction in negative behaviours – the child turns in on themselves. It can be caused by a characteristic of the child and is seen in children who have autism spectrum disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder or an attachment disorder. But it is also seen in the children of depressed parents, the argument being that the child tries to cope with the dysfunctional relationship by mimicking some of their carer’s behaviours, such as sadness, lethargy and lack of animation – a much less positive illustration of the power of synchrony. As we become increasingly aware that a significant percentage of new fathers suffer with postnatal depression and that a father’s transition to parenthood can last up to two years, there is clearly a risk that a child’s emotional and behavioural development can be negatively impacted by their dad’s mental health during the precious pre-school years.

  Several recent studies provide evidence of this. In their study of 260 infants, Finnish child psychiatrist Mirjami Mäntymaa and her colleagues found an association between the risk of a child displaying social withdrawal and a father’s perception of their mental health during the year preceding the experiment. My colleague in the Department of Psychiatry at Oxford University, Paul Ramchandani, has spent over a decade exploring the impact of poor mental health and psychiatric disorders in fathers on their children’s development. He has found that having a father with depression during the postnatal period increases the chances of behavioural conduct problems and poor language development in boys when assessed at three and a half years. Fathers who experience prenatal and postnatal depression increase the risk of their child displaying the symptoms of a psychiatric disorder at the age of seven. Why does the relationship found in these two studies exist? It may all be down to that most human of attributes – how we talk and what we talk about.

  In 2012, Ramchandani gathered a group of thirty-eight new fathers together. All were the parents of 3-month-old babies, boys and girls, but nineteen of them had something else in common: they were clinically depressed. He asked all the dads to spend three minutes talking to and playing with their child without the use of toys. He recorded their interactions and then analysed the contents of their ‘conversation’ with their child. What he found was that fathers who were depressed tended to talk mostly about their own experiences and feelings while interacting with their child, rather than focusing on the joint experience of play. Further, their vocabulary exhibited what is known as a negative bias. They were much more likely to use negative language and be openly critical of themselves and their child. A child’s ability to develop a secure attachment to their carer and develop their own mentalizing skills – those skills that enable us to understand another’s thoughts and emotions – is based in part on the ‘meeting of minds’ which occurs during the interaction between a child and their carer. In interactions that involve a depressed father, this meeting of minds does not occur, as the father is largely self-focused, meaning that the child’s attachment and mental development may be impaired.

  However, if you are a father who struggles with his mental health, the story need not be one of relentless negativity. The door to contributing positively to your child’s development does not close with a resounding thud on their second birthday. As we know from teenagers, the brain continues to develop and alter throughout our lives and researchers have identified other periods in a child’s life when receiving the correct input can make up for the less than optimal circumstances of the past. By taking the opp
ortunity afforded to you by the ever-developing human brain, you can seize these periods of heightened sensitivity to reassert your presence and be a positive influence in your child’s life. And one of the key moments to seize is that period of rapid change and upheaval that heralds the arrival of your very own teenager.

  I mentioned at the start of this chapter that we are the only species, as far as we know, to have the adolescent life stage and it is believed that this evolved to give our children time to learn everything they needed to know to succeed in our world. In the environment in which we evolved, this meant accompanying dad out into the savannah to learn the skills of tool production and hunting and taking the time to hone your social skills to ensure you could plan and cooperate successfully with your fellow hunters. All critical survival skills. Today, it might equally mean teaching them to cook, use the washing machine, involving them in a team sport or encouraging them to take on a new physical or mental challenge to broaden that all-important college application. But beyond teaching, fathers have a unique role to play in the development of that most vulnerable of teenage traits, their mental health.

  As Poppy has grown up, by far the best way of teaching her things is letting her do stuff, as long as it is safe. The reverse of ‘do as I say, not as I do’. Sometimes you have to let them do stuff and sometimes they might fall off things, bump into stuff and get quite upset by it. Let them be kids. You need to expose them to stuff. They are tough and they will bounce back from a lot more than you think they will. Expose them to risk and challenge by the games you play with them, the books you read to them; expose them to as much stuff as possible so that later in life they can cope.

  Nigel, dad to Poppy (five) and Isabelle (two)

  Life is full of obstacles, full of issues, and it is best to approach them like, ‘Okay, fine, let’s get on with it.’ Because some people just get bogged down in negativity. I want her to always be glass half full rather than half empty.

  Noah, dad to Judy (seven)

  Resilience describes the ability of an individual to act and adapt positively to a difficult or challenging situation. It is the characteristic that Noah and Nigel are determined to instil in their children, despite their young age. Resilient people tend to be more socially active, are more flexible and report higher levels of satisfaction with their life than non-resilient people. One of a father’s key jobs, on the behavioural evidence, is to expose his child to challenging or adverse conditions so that they develop the characteristics of a resilient person and can confront and overcome the sticks and stones that life may throw at them. This does not mean exposing your child to twenty-mile route marches in a force 10 gale but allowing your child to take physical and emotional risks in the knowledge that they can return to you as their warm and secure base. And in an interesting angle on this discussion, a team from Shaanxi Normal University in China, led by psychologist Baoshan Zhang, argues that a father’s unique ability to influence his child’s mental resilience is all down to his gender.

  Zhang and her team argue that resilient people tend to have masculine personality traits: social dominance, goal orientation, self-confidence, psychological capability, optimism and the ability to see the funny side. Now, she and her team are not arguing that only boys or men can have these personality traits, girls and women can too. What they are saying is that in our gendered world, these traits are seen as ‘male’ and, as such, men tend to adopt them and are, therefore, in a position to pass them on to their children. They asked 748 secondary school students, aged eleven to sixteen, to report on two aspects of their fathers’ involvement in their lives: the extent to which they perceived him as emotionally warm and the extent to which he was punitive, or handed out the discipline. They also asked the students to indicate their level of agreement with a series of statements – for example, ‘men are brave’ – which would be used to assess, firstly, their perception of a male stereotype and, secondly, the extent to which they identified with a male gender role.

  What they found was fascinating. As we might expect, children who perceived their father as emotionally warm exhibited higher resilience, whereas those with overly punitive fathers exhibited low resilience – warm behaviour breeds good mental health, while hostility breeds the avoidance of challenge and difficulty. But it was not simply the fact that warmth led to resilience. What appeared to be happening was that the warmth and closeness between child and father allowed a reciprocal relationship to exist whereby the child, regardless of gender, took on some of the male-gendered characteristics of their father, which, it is argued, underpin resilience. Now, such a conclusion is controversial, as it suggests those who are female-gendered are not resilient. But it is an interesting explanation for why dads do seem to have a particular responsibility for their children’s ability to deal with challenge and risk and come out still smiling on the other side.

  And this unique and individual influence on mental health is not limited by the culture of fathering but is universal. In populations from South and Central America to China, from Europe to America, it is powerfully the case that fathers have a special role to play in their child’s future mental health. In a study with a similar finding, Argentinian developmental psychologist María Cristina Richaud de Minzi found that fathers had a separate and more profound impact on their children’s mental health than mothers. In her group of 860 8–12-year-olds, Richaud de Minzi found that where the child was securely attached to their father, they had a much-reduced risk of exhibiting symptoms of depression or reporting feelings of loneliness. In contrast, children who reported insecure attachments to their fathers were much more likely to report sensations of loneliness, a fear of being alone and loneliness in their relationships with both their parents and their peers.

  Why do dads have such a profound impact on teenagers’ mental health? It is because of the combination of two factors: the dad’s focus on encouraging social competence and autonomy and the unique environment of development in which a teenager finds themselves. Being a teenager is all about beginning to move away from the parents who have formed your environment to date and entering a new world, where your key sphere of influence is your peers. To achieve this successfully, you have to be confident in your ability to operate independently and build healthy and reciprocal relationships by displaying your best prosocial behaviours – behaviours that are positive, helpful and intended to promote social acceptance and friendship, such as empathizing, sharing and appropriate emotional control. Because your ability to do this is largely down to the attachment you form with your dad, and being unable to operate in the social world can be an alienating and stressful experience, there is a direct relationship between the relationship you have with your dad and the likelihood you will suffer from depression or anxiety.

  But this relationship is not just significant during your teenage years. How you relate to your father throughout your teenage years can have long-term consequences for your physical and mental health well into adulthood. We have met the stress hormone cortisol before, in Chapter Eight. Although in small quantities it is invaluable in enabling us to overcome immediate causes of stress or threat, long-term flooding of your system with it leads to an inability to cope with stressful life events and has negative consequences for your physical health; it increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, high blood pressure and cancer. In 2017, psychologists from Arizona State University and San Francisco University studied what impact shared father–child time during adolescence had on the cortisol levels of young adults as they carried out a stressful task. The team found that where dads reported spending time with their children – sharing leisure activities or household chores such as cooking – these children, as young adults, had lower cortisol levels having carried out a stressful task than those whose fathers had engaged less. Further, these results held across ethnic groups and whether the dad was the biological father or the step-father. Previous studies have highlighted the importance adolescents place on the amount of time t
heir dads spend with them in assessing how important they are to their father, which has knock-on effects for self-esteem and mental health, and this study implies that this psychological well-being is underpinned by a functioning neurochemical system. So, the message to dads of teenagers is: make sure you spend one-on-one time with your child. It doesn’t have to be a special activity – cleaning the car or cooking the Sunday roast is perfect. But it is a crucial time that will make them feel important to you and go a long way to reinforcing your bond, which, even though they are moving away from you, remains as vital to their well-being as ever.

  But what you pass on to your child is not simply your life experience or your best recipe for the Sunday roast. Your lifetime’s legacy is also written in your genes. Epigenesis is the phenomenon whereby the environmental impacts on a father’s development during his childhood are capable of being inherited by his children. This is quite a hard concept to grasp. Obviously, a biological father contributes 50 per cent of his child’s genes, but as genetic material – by this I mean DNA – cannot be altered during a lifetime as a result of environmental conditions, it was believed that anything a father ate, drank or inhaled before conceiving his child couldn’t alter his genes and, as such, this couldn’t be passed on to any children. A father could live hard and fast in the comforting knowledge that, while his behaviour might have a psychological impact on his children, there would be no fundamental change to their biology. We now know this is not the case. Characteristics that a father gains during his life time before he has a child are genetically heritable and have the power to impact both positively and negatively on his child’s development.