There’s a new report out from the Institute for American Values and the Center of the American Experiment, which examines some of the ways that men and women’s brains and bodies change when they become parents.
While the physical changes that happen in women during and after pregnancy are well known, Mother Bodies, Father Bodies, by W. Bradford Wilcox and Kathleen Kovner Kline highlights the research showing that men experience changes too..jpg)
The review of evidence finds that in mammalian fathers both exposure to the mother and caring for offspring change animal dads in ways suggestive for human dads. They show hormone changes in males during a mate’s pregnancy, and among those who cared for previous offspring, changes occur earlier in pregnancy. Several studies credit animal mothers with enhanced boldness, food-finding ability and problem-solving after the birth — traits enhanced in nurturing males, too.
Human males experience a similar drop in testosterone when they become fathers, and there tend to be accompanying changes in behaviour. From an article about the study in the Deseret News:
A father tends to work harder than childless peers and consequently earns more. He engages in an active way that seems to improve his life emotionally.
That’s “one of the great things” that has happened in our culture in the family, Wilcox said. We expect more of men, of dads. The engaged-father model has important benefits for kids and men both.
What’s interesting too is the way that some of these changes seem to depend on a man’s relationship with his child’s mother:
Wilcox said the changes men experience when they are physically close to a mate and children lead them to be less aggressive and more interested in settling down. Their own biology primes them to be better caretakers in the wake of becoming dads. But those who don’t live with their kids are less likely to enjoy these benefits of parenthood.
“The changes in the expectant dad seem to be mediated by contact with the expectant mom. He doesn’t just automatically get it. It’s being around her, mirroring, touching, hopefully in a positive relationship,” Kline said.
Finally, the report finds that typical styles of parenting that men and women tend to adopt seem to be different, and to complement each other to some extent. The report doesn’t try to argue that all men parent inexactly the same way (nor indeed all women), or that they way they do is entirely genetically determined. It follows the evidence that shows that genetics, environment and social conditioning all play importants roles. As David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values, puts it, the conference that lead to the report was an attempt to get away from the “polarizations and simplicities that often accompany discussions of this, depending on where one stands on the conflict of the day. ‘Everything is biology.’ ‘Nothing is biology.’ ”
But, if the report is to be believed, the pattern of complementarity does seem, in the aggregate, to be a real phenomenon.
The whole report is available here. [1]