'Dad brain' is real
What happens when men become fathers
When Darby Saxbe was nine, her parents divorced. One reason? Her mom felt her dad wasn’t pulling his weight at home. But after the divorce, Darby’s father stepped up: under her parents’ joint custody arrangement, he functioned as a single parent to the three children every other week. “He became this amazing dad,” recalls Saxbe. “During the weeks that we were with him, he did all the cooking, housekeeping, did our homework with us, mended our clothes, and planned our schedules.” Then, Darby’s mom remarried a man who loved to cook and worked mostly from home. “So I grew up with a working mom and two models of men who were more hands-on at home, and I’ve always been interested in fathers and flexibility and how people’s roles can change, both men’s and women’s.”
Saxbe channeled this interest to a career as a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, where she studies “dad brain”: the changes men’s brains and behaviors undergo when they become parents. This is a relatively new field: until recently, most research on parenting focused on mothers. But a 2014 study found that fathers who served as primary caregivers to their babies showed similar brain responses to infant stimuli as primary caregiver mothers. Scientists in the growing field are finding that men’s brains and bodies change when they become fathers in ways that help with their new role, countering the stereotype of the hapless dad who could not diaper a baby to save his - or the baby’s - life. She writes about her work, and more, in her newsletter, Natal Gazing.
I find Saxbe’s work fascinating for what it tells us about our brains and preconceptions about parenting. We chatted about her research, its significance, and what we can learn from mouse dads. I had so much good stuff that I split it into two posts, so look out for another one next week.
“The cool thing about studying fathers is that they’re not undergoing pregnancy, but they are acquiring parenting experience, so it's a way to tease apart the effects of pregnancy hormones from the effects of interacting with a new child,” Saxbe explains, “if we see brain and body changes in men, it tells us there's something about parenting experience that is meaningful for remodeling our neurobiology, above and beyond pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding.”
Some of the changes Saxbe observed in fathers mirror those seen in mothers. After becoming parents, men and women experience a loss of gray matter in brain regions associated with social cognition. Shrinking brains sound bad, but they can be helpful. “If you think of it as an adaptive kind of pruning or organizing to support more efficient processing, it seems like the brain is becoming more streamlined,” she explains. Similar processes occur in childhood and adolescence, helping the brain function more quickly and efficiently. However, compared to mothers’ brains, the changes in fathers’ brains were more subtle and less universal: the more time fathers spend with their babies, especially as their primary caregivers, the more likely their brains are to change.
Do the brain changes in new dads mainly reflect adaptation to a new role?
“Yes, I think so. There's other evidence that as we acquire new skills, you find structural or functional change to the brain. If you think of parenting as a series of skills that often involve empathy, social cognition and thinking about other people's minds, they cause structural changes in what we call the mentalizing network, the structures in the brain that help us understand the minds of others.” In other words, when a person of any gender spends most of their time caring for a baby, the brain adjusts to make them better at it. It’s a brilliant survival strategy and a puncture in the inflated balloon of stereotypes about who should stay home with the kids.
Similar changes appear to happen in the minds of primate and rodent dads. “If a male mouse in the wild sees a pup, it’s probably going to either avoid or attack it. Yet, after becoming a father, at least in a biparental species like the California mouse, that same male mouse is going to nurture and cuddle with that baby. So something is turning on in the brain that keeps us from killing offspring and instead supports nurturing. We're still figuring out the biochemistry of what that is. Otherwise, no species would survive, right?”
Though her findings seem to fly in the face of the belief that men are not as ‘naturally’ inclined to parenting, Saxbe cautions that we still don't know what role pregnancy plays. “It’s hard to tease apart socialization from biology. Women are raised from an early age to be mindful of other people’s feelings, pro-social, we praise girls for being nice, companions and nurturers. Boys don’t get that encouragement or support. Then there’s the hormonal experience of pregnancy. I think there is a head start that biological mothers get because the hormones are starting to change in ways that prime nurturing behaviors. But we know adoptive mothers and fathers also form incredibly strong bonds with their children, so you don’t have to go through pregnancy to be a good parent. ”
“My brother is a stay-at-home dad and he’s awesome, so playful and fun and creative, and he loves to cook,” she adds, “everyone has different skills and I think we want a world where everyone can use their talents in the best way.”
Although dad-brain research is still taking baby steps - Saxbe estimates that about a dozen scientists are working in the field - it’s far behind the culture. “There’s been a sea change in men’s involvement in parenting,” notes Saxbe, “in just three generations, we see a shift in how men think about parenting and it’s mirrored in time diary data: men’s daily time with kids had quadrupled since the 60s.” This sounds impressive until you realize that it went from 15 minutes to an hour a day. Still, it’s a significant change. This may imply that the brains of fathers from different generations may be wired differently. But it’s not just a modern phenomenon: Saxbe notes that there are some hunter-gatherer societies in which men participate enthusiastically in infant care (and other societies in which males opt out completely from parenting). In these times of intense backlash and the bro-ing of the culture, I take comfort in this: all over the world, dads are cooing to their babies and getting ready to take their toddlers to the playground, and as they’re doing so, they are rewiring their brains, their children’s and ultimately, the world.
Next week: The downside of parenting and what we should really do to support families.