Growing up without a father may transform the structure of children’s brains, a new research suggests. 
A study carried out by Research Institute of the McGill University Health Center and recently published in the journal Cerebral Cortex says that fatherless children have a higher risk of being more aggressive and angry.
The research, which was carried out on mice, compared the social behaviour and brain anatomy of young mice with two parents to those growing up with mothers alone. The team said the findings had direct relevance to human society, the Daily Mail reports.
They used California mice, which, like humans, are monogamous and raise their offspring together.
Mice separated from their fathers showed greater aggression, anti-social behavior, and “abnormal social interactions” than those raised with both parents.
“The behavioral deficits we observed are consistent with human studies of children raised without a father,” said Dr. Gabriella Gobbi, the report’s lead author.
However, more groundbreaking was their finding that the neurobiology of the young mice is affected.
“This is the first time research findings have shown that paternal deprivation during development affects the neurobiology of the offspring,” Dr Gobbi said.
Francis Bambico, of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, who also worked on the project, said: ‘Because we can control their environment, we can equalise factors that differ between them.
‘Mice studies in the laboratory may therefore be clearer to interpret than human ones, where it is impossible to control all the influences during development.’
The brains of the fatherless mice developed differently, Dr Gobbi said, with the main impacts seen in the prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain which controls social and cognitive activity.
The difference was far more pronounced in daughters than in sons and females raised without fathers also had a greater sensitivity to the stimulant drug amphetamine.
Dr Gobbi said: ‘The behavioural deficits we observed are consistent with human studies of children raised without a father.
‘These children have been shown to have an increased risk for deviant behaviour and in particular, girls have been shown to be at risk for substance abuse.
‘This suggests that these mice are a good model for understanding how these effects arise in humans.’ The report said the behaviour of the mice was ‘consistent with studies in children raised without a father, highlighting an increased risk for deviant behaviour and criminal activity, substance abuse, impoverished educational performance and mental illness’.
It added: ‘Our results emphasise the importance of the father during critical neurodevelopmental periods, and that father absence induces impairments in social behaviour that persist to adulthood.’ Dr Gobbi said the results suggested both parents are vital for children’s mental health development and hoped the findings would spur researchers to look more deeply into the role of fathers.
