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What Can We Learn About

Fatherhood From Science?


In honor of Father's Day, we explore some scientific studies on
brain and hormonal changes that evolved to ensure we nurture
our young.
By Dov Michaeli, MD, PhD June 17, 2018

A while back, I listened to a fascinating interview on NPR with Paul Raeburn

talking about his book, Do Fathers Matter? What Science is Telling Us About

the Parent We’ve Overlooked. Here is a smorgasbord of amazing information


served in the book:

 older men having babies can be a cause of autism,

 men can get morning sickness during the pregnancy,

 men can get postpartum depression,

 men’s attitude toward the unborn baby can affect the baby’s
personality throughout his life (mechanism unknown),

And, just as in the mother, the expectant’s father oxytocin and prolactin—who
knew males even had it—rises and stays up during the newborn’s infancy.

One fascinating bit of data he shared during the interview shines some light on

our social attitudes, including us scientists. In his search of the science database,

PubMed, for the term “motherhood”, Raeburn found over 200,000 citations,

but for fatherhood, about 20,000. That’s a ratio of 10:1. Does that mean the

father is not considered as consequential to the baby’s well-being as the mother?


I can already hear the cries of protest rising from the aggrieved fathers who view

themselves as great dads. Yet, isn’t it curious that all the blurbs singing the
book’s praises on the full-page ad in the magazine, Scientific American Mind
(July/August, 2014), were written by women?

Science actually tell us quite a bit about fatherhood

An article in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) by

Israeli scientists examined the brains of fathers (not to worry, they used imaging

techniques). What they found is quite fascinating. But before we delve into their

findings, let’s deal with a methodological issue: How do you control for the

presence of a mother in the triangle of baby/father/mother? Whatever you may

find occurring in the father’s brain, it would be open to the criticism that

“obviously, the mother’s influence is not accounted for.” Well, the ingenious

solution was to measure brain oxytocin and parenting behavior in 3 groups:

primary caregiving mothers, secondary caregiving fathers, and primary


caregiving homosexual fathers raising infants without maternal involvement.

The study revealed that parenting implemented a global “parental caregiving”

neural network, by and large, consistent across parents. This “caregiving neural

network” integrated the functioning of two systems. The first being the

emotional processing network, including subcortical and paralimbic structures

associated with vigilance, salience, reward, and motivation. The second

network, the “mentalizing” network, (involving frontopolar-medial-prefrontal

and temporoparietal circuits) is implicated in social understanding and


cognitive empathy.

These networks work in concert to imbue infant care with emotional salience,

attune with the infant state, and plan adequate parenting. Primary caregiving

mothers showed greater activation in emotion-processing structures, whereas

secondary-caregiving fathers displayed greater activation in cortical circuits,

associated with oxytocin and parenting. Primary caregiving fathers (these are
the homosexual fathers) exhibited high amygdala activation similar to primary

caregiving mothers, alongside high activation of superior temporal sulcus (STS)

comparable to secondary-caregiving fathers and functional connectivity


between amygdala and STS.

What functions does the STS serve? It is involved in the perception of where

others are gazing (joint attention) and is, thus, important in determining where

others’ emotions are being directed. It is also involved in the perception of


biological motion (as opposed to motion of inanimate matter).

In individuals without autism, the superior temporal sulcus also activates when

hearing human voices. Among all fathers, time spent in direct childcare was

linked with the degree of amygdala-STS connectivity. This dose-response


relationship lends a great deal of validity to the finding.

The take home lesson is that fathers’ brains are malleable, and the same

neural pathways are activated in infant caregiving as those of


mothers.

Is parenting good for you?

Most anthropoid primates (humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, baboons, gibbons)

are slow to develop—their offspring are mostly single births and the inter-birth

intervals are long. To maintain a stable population, parents must live long

enough to sustain the serial production of a sufficient number of young to

replace themselves while allowing for the death of offspring before they can
reproduce.

A study published in PNAS looked into this issue. The results confirm what we

knew all along: In species where the mother is the primary caregiver, she lives
longer than the male. In species in which the males participate at least equally
in offspring-rearing, they live as long as the female. What about us?

Human data from the Swedish population from three historical periods indicate

a female survival advantage going back to 1780, which are the earliest records

available. The female advantage is evident throughout more than two centuries

in spite of large differences in mortality rates. Similar female advantages were

recorded in the earliest data from England and France in the 19th century, and

the female advantage has been present in most countries throughout the world

in the 20th century. A female survival advantage has also been found among

adults in the Ache, a well-studied hunter-gatherer population living in the


forests of eastern Paraguay.

These data strongly suggest that the survival advantage in human females has

deep biological roots. Although human fathers have a significant role, human
mothers generally bear the greater burden in caring for their offspring.

The downside of male parenting

Before you grab the baby from mom’s arms in the vain hope of increasing your

lifespan, consider these studies. One study showed that fathers reporting 3 or

more hours of daily childcare had lower testosterone at follow-up compared

with fathers not involved in care. I know, I know, it makes perfect evolutionary
sense.

You don’t (or rather the mother doesn’t) want a horny father to beget (this is a

biblical euphemism) a new baby while the present one needs so much care. Still,

low testosterone is so…uncool. And, your worst fears of this evolutionary

imperative are confirmed in another study titled, Testicular volume is

inversely correlated with nurturing-related brain activity in human


fathers. Enough said. Your testicles are going to shrink when you take care of

your baby. Is the prospect of longer longevity (however remote) worth the cost
of low T and shrunken testicles?

Well, don’t worry my fellow fathers, it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. The jewels

regain their previous volume once the child-rearing period is over. And you are
back to the races.

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