Do Fathers Matter?: What Science Is Telling Us About the Parent We've Overlooked (16 page)

She enlisted one hundred Israeli couples with five-month-old infants to participate in her study. Each family was videotaped three times at home—once with only mother and infant, once with father and infant, and once with the whole family. Not surprisingly, fathers and mothers engaged their infants’ emotions in different ways.

The study showed that mothers and fathers were equally capable of matching their emotions to those of their infants, but each parent offered different experiences to their child. In addition, the degree to which parents and infants synchronized their emotions was greater between mothers and daughters and between fathers and sons.

The emotional pattern in mother-infant interactions ranged from low to medium intensity, and it depended upon the pair gazing into each other’s eyes and sharing facial and vocal expressions. The pattern between fathers and infants was much more intense, with sudden peaks that became more common as play progressed. Feldman found that the emotional connections between both parents and their infants could influence the kinds of relationships the children had with others much later in their lives. “Fathers and mothers are equally capable of engaging in second-by-second synchrony with their infant … mothers are not unique,” she wrote. Father-son pairs showed the highest synchrony, and it revolved around intense emotional peaks related to play.

All of this suggests two things. Fathers clearly have important connections with their infants; and they treat infants differently than mothers do. Evidence for this keeps accumulating, and it underscores the importance of fathers spending both quality and quantity time with their young babies. We now know that men who take time off from work after the birth of their infants are more involved with them later on—which is in turn related to more positive evaluations at work. Everybody wins—fathers, kids, and employers.

But what happens in families in which paternal leave is irrelevant, because the father doesn’t have a job? Natasha J. Cabrera of the University of Maryland wanted to know if relationships between fathers and infants would be different in poor and disadvantaged families—sometimes referred to as fragile families. She looked for the answer in data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a collaboration between Princeton and Columbia Universities to follow 5,000 children born in large American cities between 1998 and 2000. About three-fourths of the children in this study were born to unmarried parents. Cabrera and her colleagues found that fathers who were emotionally engaged with their partners before their children were born were more likely to be involved with the children a year later and three years later. It was an intriguing and useful discovery, because it offered an opportunity to help fragile families. If fathers could be encouraged to get involved during pregnancy, they had a good chance of staying involved with their kids after their birth. Fathers should establish relationships with their children before they are born.

*   *   *

Many of these discoveries about fathers and fatherhood have encouraged others to study fathers, and we’re getting new insights into fatherhood all the time. One important insight came from a group of Israeli researchers who looked at the involvement of mothers and fathers in caregiving with an emphasis on nighttime behavior, just as Barry Hewlett had done, staying up late to observe Aka fathers at night. For many fathers, bedtime is when they get home from work, and a prime opportunity to spend time with their children. Specifically, the researchers wanted to know if fathers’ involvement had any link to sleep patterns. Plenty of studies had linked parenting and infants’ sleep, but most of them focused on mothers.

So the researchers recruited fifty-six couples during their first pregnancy, and gave them questionnaires one month and six months after their babies were born. They also assessed infants’ sleep with monitors attached to the children to record movement and sleep diaries kept by their parents. (They did not control for any kind of sleep training the parents might have used.)

Mothers, they found, were more involved than fathers in both daytime and nighttime care. But higher father involvement in overall care was associated with fewer nighttime awakenings by their babies. “To our knowledge, this is the first study that assessed how paternal involvement in infant care is related to infant sleep,” the researchers wrote.

Another question was whether fathers have a unique influence on behavioral problems in their children. Paul G. Ramchandani of the University of Oxford was one of the first to look at this. His idea was that children whose fathers were more engaged with them, and more sensitive and responsive, would engage in fewer so-called externalizing behaviors, which can include tantrums, biting, and kicking. This behavior is normal for many kids from about twelve months of age until the end of their second year, when it begins to subside. But in about 6 percent of children, it continues, and can last throughout childhood. Children exhibiting the highest levels of these behaviors as preschoolers have shown higher levels of oppositional behavior as adults. The persistence of these externalizing behaviors can have lifelong consequences.

Looking at mostly middle-class families whom they met at home when their infants were three months old and again at one year, the researchers found that more remote father-infant interactions were associated with a higher rate of aggressive behavior in the children. The effects were greater for male infants than for girls. And that held true regardless of how mothers behaved with the infants.

*   *   *

Now we know that fathers can establish a relationship with their children even before they are born and can influence them in many ways—from their sleep patterns to their long-term behavior. And we know that children can help sculpt their fathers’ brains. But what else? Are there other ways in which babies shape their fathers?

One way to answer this question is to look at men’s testosterone levels. In many animals, including humans, testosterone levels are low following the arrival of a newborn. But it’s unclear what that means. It could be that fatherhood leads to a drop in testosterone. Or alternatively, the explanation might be that men with lower testosterone levels are the ones that choose to become fathers. Which comes first, the baby or the plummeting testosterone?

To find out, Lee T. Gettler and Christopher W. Kuzawa of Northwestern University looked at 624 men in Cebu, the oldest city in the Philippines, where fathers are commonly involved in day-to-day care of their children. The researchers collected saliva samples to measure testosterone when the men were twenty-one years old and again when they were twenty-six.

Gettler and Kuzawa predicted that men with higher testosterone would have greater success at finding a mate and becoming a father. They expected that these men would show the greatest decrease in testosterone when they became fathers, and that those who spent more time taking care of their children would have lower levels of testosterone. In other words, marrying, having children, and taking care of them would all lower a man’s testosterone—and the effect would be greatest in those who had the highest testosterone to start with. And that’s what they found. (Even sleeping with children can affect testosterone levels in fathers. An extraordinarily high 92 percent of 362 Philippine fathers in Cebu reported “cosleeping” in the same bed as their children. They showed a significant decline in testosterone compared to fathers who slept in a different room.)

The modulation of testosterone that comes with partnering and fatherhood might also be good for men’s health. Fathers who are involved with their children have a reduced risk of illness and mortality that might be explained by their lower testosterone levels. High testosterone may increase the risk of prostate cancer and unhealthy cholesterol levels. And it’s been linked to risk-taking that can affect men’s health, such as drug and alcohol use and promiscuity. Despite these well-known consequences of high testosterone, drug makers are promoting testosterone creams and gels that can boost testosterone levels. Fathers who have close relationships with their children, and whose testosterone has fallen as a result, are now a profit center for the pharmaceutical industry. Ironically, the use of topical testosterone can be dangerous to children who come into contact with it. The cream or gel, on a father’s hands or on his body, can cause enlargement of children’s sex organs, premature development of pubic hair, and aggressive behavior. Fathers might be wiser to enjoy their children and let their testosterone levels fall where they may.

But it’s not that simple. In a small, early effort to explore the biology behind father-infant attachments, Karen M. Grewen of the University of North Carolina and her then-student Patty X. Kuo videotaped ten men while they were spending time with their infants, and took testosterone samples at the same time. They also put the men in brain scanners while they watched video of their own or other children. The scans showed greater prefrontal and subcortical activity in men watching videotapes of any infant compared to video of a doll. Video images of their own children produced greater activity than images of just any child. And testosterone levels correlated with brain activity: happy infants’ faces produced activity in the left caudate, a “reward” region of fathers’ brains, and fathers who responded strongly in this region to the sight of their own infants also experienced a rise in testosterone.

It’s a bit of a paradox. Low testosterone seems to be connected with good fathering, but testosterone might rise in response to signals such as crying and could be linked to a father’s protective response toward his infant. Attachment is clearly part of a complicated system; there is no simple link between the way testosterone varies and the kind of fathers men turn out to be. But brain activity, hormones, and behavior are all closely linked. And fathering clearly is a deeply ingrained behavior.

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One night when one of my younger children was old enough to sit up but still a baby, he awoke in the middle of the night crying. My wife fed him, and we tried to console him. He finally settled down, but then we had another problem. It was three or four in the morning, as I recall, but on his internal clock, it was high noon. He was ready to play.

It’s a scenario many parents are familiar with, and it always seems to happen the night before an important meeting or a deadline. I had the feeling I hadn’t quite been doing my share on the night shift, so I volunteered to stay up with him. And I remembered doing this with my older children. You stay up and read stories or tickle or wrestle, all the time looking for the droopy eyes that mean you might be able to get him to slip off to sleep—and salvage something of your own night.

This is the kind of thing I remember about having an infant in the house. These sleepless nights seem as though they will never end, until, without warning, they do. The kids grow up and find other ways to console themselves in the middle of the night. So I decided I would enjoy our time on the night shift together. The research on the connections between fathers and infants is catching up with the experiences many of us have had with our own children. It’s nice to know that these feelings of attachment, for so long denied by orthodox psychologists, are not some delusion, but are supported by the facts.

I don’t remember what happened at work the day after that sleepless night—whether I was tired or missed a meeting. But I remember the hours with my son.

SIX

Children
: Language, Learning, and
Batman

From World War II through the 1960s, the few experts who thought about fathers believed that their main contribution was to be role models for gender-appropriate behavior by their sons. They were supposed to teach their sons what it meant to be a man, as they usually put it. A few researchers thought it might be nice to measure that effect to see whether there was truly a correlation between masculinity in fathers and masculinity in their sons. (Masculinity refers to what we traditionally think of as male characteristics: toughness, power, status, sturdiness in a crisis, a willingness to take risks and to ignore what others think.) The link should have been easy to find, but it wasn’t. There was no consistent connection between a father’s masculinity and his son’s. This posed a challenge to the conventional wisdom. If fathers weren’t helping to make boys into men, then what role did they have?

The problem was that nobody had asked
why
boys might want to be like their fathers. Presumably they would want to emulate their fathers only if they liked and respected them and had warm relationships with them. When researchers decided to look for that, in the 1960s, they discovered that the relationship between father and son was crucially important. When a father had a warm relationship with his son, that son would grow up to be more like his father than sons who were not close to their fathers. A father’s own masculinity was irrelevant; his warmth and closeness with his son was the key factor.

This was one of the first indications that fathers have a particularly strong influence on children’s social development. Interactions between fathers and their sons and daughters that are playful, affectionate, and engaging predict later popularity in school and among peers, perhaps by teaching children to read emotional expressions on their fathers’ faces, and later on those of their peer group. Harsh discipline by fathers, on the other hand, has been linked to later behavior problems in their kids.

These early discoveries prompted careful examination of fathers and their influence on their toddlers and school-age children. And one of the areas in which researchers looked for the influence of fathers was in the development of language. I’ve always thought that watching children learn to talk is one of the highlights of parenting. It’s a hallmark of their lives during their first few years. They learn to make their wishes known—often
emphatically
known. What begins in infancy with gestures and sounds develops into competence with language by around age three. Fathers are proving to be an important part of this process, as Lynne Vernon-Feagans of the University of North Carolina and her colleague Nadya Pancsofar at the College of New Jersey are finding out.