Who knew that fathers were biologically equipped to nurture children?
When James Rutherford’s son, Toran, was born last summer, the 36-year-old businessman decided he didn’t want to work full-time anymore. He had sold his Calgary-based telecommunications company two years before, felt financially secure and could afford to spend time with his son. “I am the sole caregiver for two days,” he says. “We have a blast. Bringing home the bacon is important, but there’s more to being a dad.”
Many of Canada’s four million fathers are starting to agree with Rutherford. The time working fathers spend with their children tripled from the 1970s to the ‘90s, rising from 30 to 90 minutes a day. Statistics Canada reports that from 1976 to 2005 the number of stay-at-home dads grew six times, from two to 12 percent. With all these changes, fathers are suddenly a hot topic with researchers. Everything—from their sweat glands to their play habits—is under the microscope. There’s more to Dad than you ever knew.
The Hard Wiring
Ross Parke, a Canadian professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, says it was always thought that mothers were hormonally primed to be parents, and fathers learned child-rearing culturally. However, says Parke, “Fathers are better prepared biologically for parenting than we previously thought?’ In several studies, Katherine Wynne-Edwards, a biology professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, found that a father’s levels of the male hormone testosterone dropped in the weeks surrounding his baby’s birth. She also found that levels of estrogen and prolactin, normally associated with females, rose.
Prolactin promotes milk production in women and stimulates maternal nurturing behaviours such as nest building in some species. Alison Fleming, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, found that fathers with higher levels of prolactin are more alert to a baby’s cry, and those with lower levels of testosterone feel more like responding to it. Experience plays a part, too. Second-time fathers have higher levels of prolactin and lower levels of testosterone than first-timers.
Changes in brain activity might also help. Dr. James Swain, a Canadian assistant professor in the Yale Child Study Centre, looked at the brains of 25 couples at two to four weeks and three to four months after their babies were born to see how they responded to their infants’ cries. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, he found that brain activity in both mothers and fathers was strikingly similar to what you would find in someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). This maybe why new parents feel the need to keep constantly looking in on their newborns to make sure they are okay. “We’re not saying parents are mentally ill,” says Swain, “but that there’s an overlap in some of the same circuits that are overactive in patients with OCD.”
At two to four weeks the moms showed more of the OCD activity than the dads, but by three to four months the dads were catching up. Swain also found that both parents reacted more strongly to the cries of their own infant than to those of others and both were at least 80 percent correct in identifying which cry was their own baby’s.
Dad’s Pheromones
Pheromones are chemical signals that can change behaviour, and all sorts of creatures—from insects to humans—emit them. They can stimulate behaviour as well as inhibit it. Robert Matchock, an associate professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University~ Altoona, thinks fathers’ pheromones may help to explain why girls reach puberty when they do. In a study of nearly 2,000 female college students, he discovered that “women who grew up without their biological father in the household experienced sexual maturation four months earlier, on average, than women who lived with their biological father.” Matchock thinks fathers may emit a pheromone that slows their daughters’ sexual maturation, something seen in other mammals and possibly nature’s defence against inbreeding. His research was published last year in the American Journal of Human Biology. Next on the horizon are experiments that will directly test how girls are affected by the underarm sweat of their fathers, a rich source of pheromones.
Dad Talk
Nadya Pancsofar, a graduate research assistant at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), is interested in how children learn language. When she looked for research about how fathers help, she found very little. But she discovered that dads may have a bigger role in their children’s language development than was previously suspected. Pancsofar and Lynne Vernon-Feagans, a professor of education at UNC, co-authored a study of 67 toddlers who had two working parents. The tots whose fathers used a bigger vocabulary with them at age two scored higher on a language test a year later. The study did not find that the mothers’ vocabulary significantly affected the results. “We are confident that fathers who use more diverse vocabulary have a positive impact on their children’s later development,” says Pancsofar. The research was published last November in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.
Dad Style
Many “father” researchers are intrigued by the fact that dads have a different parenting style from moms. Whereas mothers like to soothe and calm down their children, fathers like to excite and stimulate them. Roughhousing is a favourite playtime activity; and dads like to encourage their children to take risks—to go to the top of the monkey bars, for example. Andrea Doucet, a sociology professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, is the author of Do Men Mother?, a book about stay-at-home dads. She found that this pattern is pretty ingrained even in stay-at-home dads. “Fathers redefine how we see parenting,” she says. “We tend to think of nurturing as protecting and holding on to the child. What fathers do particularly well is promote children’s independence and let go in a loving way.”
When Vancouver dad Jason Pavich cooks steaks, for instance, he lets his ten-year-old son, Josh, light the barbecue, “as long as he is safe about it.” The 32-year-old father is divorced and takes care of his son every other week.
Involved Dads
Marie-France Leclerc, a French-immersion elementary school teacher in Lindsay, Ont., has been on the job for 18 years. She says that the first time a dad came to help her out in the classroom was eight years ago, but dads are no longer a novelty. “The kids are so happy when they come,” she says. A 1997 U.S. study by the National Centre for Education Statistics looked at nearly 17,000 students from kindergarten to Grade 12 and found that there is a payoff when dads participate in activities at school, such as volunteering or attending regular school meetings, parent-teacher conferences and class meetings. The children get more A grades, enjoy school more and take part in more extracurricular activities.
Dads boost their children’s school performance in other ways, too, by reading to them or helping them with their homework. John Lentz, a busy pathologist in Toronto with 11-year-old triplets, two boys and a girl, somehow finds time to help them, especially with their math. “Because they’re in the same grade and the same class, they have the same homework,” he says. “If you don’t lose your cool and you try to be positive, they really seem to appreciate it. They ask me, ‘Can we go over the homework as a team?’”
For fathers, just spending time with their kids brings immediate as well as long-term gains. Children of involved dads are more popular, get on better with their peers and are more empathetic, according to a University of Guelph research summary published in a 2002 Father Involvement initiative—Ontario Network newsletter. It also reported that teenagers with involved fathers are 80 percent less likely to have been in jail and 75 percent less likely to have become unwed parents. And girls whose fathers take an interest in what they do are more likely to stick with extracurricular activities such as sports, art, music and reading, according to a 2004 U.S. study. One of the largest and longest studies to show such benefits comes from Britain, where 17,000 children have been tracked since their birth (all in the same week in 1958). In 2004 Ann Buchanan, director of the Oxford Centre for Research into Parenting and Children, and colleague Eirini Flouri published the results of that tracking in the British Journal of Educational Psychology. They looked at children whose fathers helped care for them at the age of seven by reading to them, taking them on outings and taking an interest in their education. The children did better in school and later in life, were less likely to get into trouble with the police or to have mental-health problems and were more apt to form stable relationships. “Dad’s involvement before the age of seven lays the ground for a lot of goodies later on,” says Buchanan.
Many fathers know this already. “We do things that I think are good family-bonding things,” says John Lentz. “We have movie nights on Saturdays. We all get into our jammies and sit on the sofa. We make popcorn. It’s a tradition, which I think makes our kids feel comfortable.” Joe Di Fonzo, another Toronto dad, believes sharing activities together, such as sports, is key. He has seven Sons, ages nine to 22, all living at home and all sports fans. “We get pretty intense watching our favourite football team play,” he says. “Sometimes we’ll get out to an outdoor rink around the corner and all be on the ice together. Things like that are fun.”
These days, if fathers are away from home a lot, they can still spend time with their children, thanks to modern technology. Gary Boutiier of Victoria has been in the Canadian military for 19 years and has a girl, ten, and a boy, 13. Recently, when he was on a six-month tour in the Persian Gulf aboard HMCS Ottawa, he stayed in touch with daily emails, video conferencing and a website where the family could post photos. He’s obviously developed a close relationship with his children. Says his wife, Glennis, “When he’s home, the kids won’t leave his side.”
Kerry Daly, a University of Guelph family-relations professor and the director of the national Father Involvement Research Alliance, is heading up a five-year research project on fathers, with results expected at the end of 2008. Daly became interested in fathers in the early ‘90s, and since then has seen that the amount of time mothers and fathers are spending on child care and housework are coming closer together. “Fathers are doing more, mothers a little less,” he says.
Doucet thinks that’s good news all around. “It ends up being shared parenting. In terms of the kids, it means they have two caring parents who can both take charge.”
By Claudia Cornwall
Reader’s Digest,
June 2007
When James Rutherford’s son, Toran, was born last summer, the 36-year-old businessman decided he didn’t want to work full-time anymore. He had sold his Calgary-based telecommunications company two years before, felt financially secure and could afford to spend time with his son. “I am the sole caregiver for two days,” he says. “We have a blast. Bringing home the bacon is important, but there’s more to being a dad.”
Many of Canada’s four million fathers are starting to agree with Rutherford. The time working fathers spend with their children tripled from the 1970s to the ‘90s, rising from 30 to 90 minutes a day. Statistics Canada reports that from 1976 to 2005 the number of stay-at-home dads grew six times, from two to 12 percent. With all these changes, fathers are suddenly a hot topic with researchers. Everything—from their sweat glands to their play habits—is under the microscope. There’s more to Dad than you ever knew.
The Hard Wiring
Ross Parke, a Canadian professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, says it was always thought that mothers were hormonally primed to be parents, and fathers learned child-rearing culturally. However, says Parke, “Fathers are better prepared biologically for parenting than we previously thought?’ In several studies, Katherine Wynne-Edwards, a biology professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, found that a father’s levels of the male hormone testosterone dropped in the weeks surrounding his baby’s birth. She also found that levels of estrogen and prolactin, normally associated with females, rose.
Prolactin promotes milk production in women and stimulates maternal nurturing behaviours such as nest building in some species. Alison Fleming, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, found that fathers with higher levels of prolactin are more alert to a baby’s cry, and those with lower levels of testosterone feel more like responding to it. Experience plays a part, too. Second-time fathers have higher levels of prolactin and lower levels of testosterone than first-timers.
Changes in brain activity might also help. Dr. James Swain, a Canadian assistant professor in the Yale Child Study Centre, looked at the brains of 25 couples at two to four weeks and three to four months after their babies were born to see how they responded to their infants’ cries. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, he found that brain activity in both mothers and fathers was strikingly similar to what you would find in someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). This maybe why new parents feel the need to keep constantly looking in on their newborns to make sure they are okay. “We’re not saying parents are mentally ill,” says Swain, “but that there’s an overlap in some of the same circuits that are overactive in patients with OCD.”
At two to four weeks the moms showed more of the OCD activity than the dads, but by three to four months the dads were catching up. Swain also found that both parents reacted more strongly to the cries of their own infant than to those of others and both were at least 80 percent correct in identifying which cry was their own baby’s.
Dad’s Pheromones
Pheromones are chemical signals that can change behaviour, and all sorts of creatures—from insects to humans—emit them. They can stimulate behaviour as well as inhibit it. Robert Matchock, an associate professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University~ Altoona, thinks fathers’ pheromones may help to explain why girls reach puberty when they do. In a study of nearly 2,000 female college students, he discovered that “women who grew up without their biological father in the household experienced sexual maturation four months earlier, on average, than women who lived with their biological father.” Matchock thinks fathers may emit a pheromone that slows their daughters’ sexual maturation, something seen in other mammals and possibly nature’s defence against inbreeding. His research was published last year in the American Journal of Human Biology. Next on the horizon are experiments that will directly test how girls are affected by the underarm sweat of their fathers, a rich source of pheromones.
Dad Talk
Nadya Pancsofar, a graduate research assistant at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), is interested in how children learn language. When she looked for research about how fathers help, she found very little. But she discovered that dads may have a bigger role in their children’s language development than was previously suspected. Pancsofar and Lynne Vernon-Feagans, a professor of education at UNC, co-authored a study of 67 toddlers who had two working parents. The tots whose fathers used a bigger vocabulary with them at age two scored higher on a language test a year later. The study did not find that the mothers’ vocabulary significantly affected the results. “We are confident that fathers who use more diverse vocabulary have a positive impact on their children’s later development,” says Pancsofar. The research was published last November in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.
Dad Style
Many “father” researchers are intrigued by the fact that dads have a different parenting style from moms. Whereas mothers like to soothe and calm down their children, fathers like to excite and stimulate them. Roughhousing is a favourite playtime activity; and dads like to encourage their children to take risks—to go to the top of the monkey bars, for example. Andrea Doucet, a sociology professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, is the author of Do Men Mother?, a book about stay-at-home dads. She found that this pattern is pretty ingrained even in stay-at-home dads. “Fathers redefine how we see parenting,” she says. “We tend to think of nurturing as protecting and holding on to the child. What fathers do particularly well is promote children’s independence and let go in a loving way.”
When Vancouver dad Jason Pavich cooks steaks, for instance, he lets his ten-year-old son, Josh, light the barbecue, “as long as he is safe about it.” The 32-year-old father is divorced and takes care of his son every other week.
Involved Dads
Marie-France Leclerc, a French-immersion elementary school teacher in Lindsay, Ont., has been on the job for 18 years. She says that the first time a dad came to help her out in the classroom was eight years ago, but dads are no longer a novelty. “The kids are so happy when they come,” she says. A 1997 U.S. study by the National Centre for Education Statistics looked at nearly 17,000 students from kindergarten to Grade 12 and found that there is a payoff when dads participate in activities at school, such as volunteering or attending regular school meetings, parent-teacher conferences and class meetings. The children get more A grades, enjoy school more and take part in more extracurricular activities.
Dads boost their children’s school performance in other ways, too, by reading to them or helping them with their homework. John Lentz, a busy pathologist in Toronto with 11-year-old triplets, two boys and a girl, somehow finds time to help them, especially with their math. “Because they’re in the same grade and the same class, they have the same homework,” he says. “If you don’t lose your cool and you try to be positive, they really seem to appreciate it. They ask me, ‘Can we go over the homework as a team?’”
For fathers, just spending time with their kids brings immediate as well as long-term gains. Children of involved dads are more popular, get on better with their peers and are more empathetic, according to a University of Guelph research summary published in a 2002 Father Involvement initiative—Ontario Network newsletter. It also reported that teenagers with involved fathers are 80 percent less likely to have been in jail and 75 percent less likely to have become unwed parents. And girls whose fathers take an interest in what they do are more likely to stick with extracurricular activities such as sports, art, music and reading, according to a 2004 U.S. study. One of the largest and longest studies to show such benefits comes from Britain, where 17,000 children have been tracked since their birth (all in the same week in 1958). In 2004 Ann Buchanan, director of the Oxford Centre for Research into Parenting and Children, and colleague Eirini Flouri published the results of that tracking in the British Journal of Educational Psychology. They looked at children whose fathers helped care for them at the age of seven by reading to them, taking them on outings and taking an interest in their education. The children did better in school and later in life, were less likely to get into trouble with the police or to have mental-health problems and were more apt to form stable relationships. “Dad’s involvement before the age of seven lays the ground for a lot of goodies later on,” says Buchanan.
Many fathers know this already. “We do things that I think are good family-bonding things,” says John Lentz. “We have movie nights on Saturdays. We all get into our jammies and sit on the sofa. We make popcorn. It’s a tradition, which I think makes our kids feel comfortable.” Joe Di Fonzo, another Toronto dad, believes sharing activities together, such as sports, is key. He has seven Sons, ages nine to 22, all living at home and all sports fans. “We get pretty intense watching our favourite football team play,” he says. “Sometimes we’ll get out to an outdoor rink around the corner and all be on the ice together. Things like that are fun.”
These days, if fathers are away from home a lot, they can still spend time with their children, thanks to modern technology. Gary Boutiier of Victoria has been in the Canadian military for 19 years and has a girl, ten, and a boy, 13. Recently, when he was on a six-month tour in the Persian Gulf aboard HMCS Ottawa, he stayed in touch with daily emails, video conferencing and a website where the family could post photos. He’s obviously developed a close relationship with his children. Says his wife, Glennis, “When he’s home, the kids won’t leave his side.”
Kerry Daly, a University of Guelph family-relations professor and the director of the national Father Involvement Research Alliance, is heading up a five-year research project on fathers, with results expected at the end of 2008. Daly became interested in fathers in the early ‘90s, and since then has seen that the amount of time mothers and fathers are spending on child care and housework are coming closer together. “Fathers are doing more, mothers a little less,” he says.
Doucet thinks that’s good news all around. “It ends up being shared parenting. In terms of the kids, it means they have two caring parents who can both take charge.”
By Claudia Cornwall
Reader’s Digest,
June 2007