Do Fathers Matter?: What Science Is Telling Us About the Parent We've Overlooked (20 page)

Carter and a colleague, William M. Kenkel, looked at hormonal changes in voles to see whether they could account for this mysterious phenomenon. They found that when males who’d never seen infants were exposed to one, their blood oxytocin levels increased within ten minutes. When these males were later handled by experimenters, they didn’t show the rise in stress hormones that usually occurs when they are picked up. While this is only a first step in understanding the changes that occur in voles, it shows that oxytocin is involved, as it is in the formation of pair bonds—meaning that mating and parental behavior are related. On top of this, Carter and Kenkel also found that when a father is in the presence of a baby, its heart rate jumps up. “These animals are in a high state of vigilance,” Carter says. “We suspect that a cocktail of oxytocin and vasopressin works together in male voles to permit both nurturance and defense of the offspring.”

What we’re really concerned about, however, is this: Does vole fathering have an effect on the pups? And if so, what can this tell us about human fathers? Hugh Broders of Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and his colleagues raised a group of voles in normal circumstances—with both parents participating in their care. And they raised another group in which fathers were removed and the pups were raised only by their mother. The mothers’ behavior didn’t change, but the effects on the pups were striking. The pups raised without a father displayed higher levels of anxiety, reduced activity in the cage, and lower levels of social behavior. Something important in their emotional and social makeup wasn’t right.

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Some research now being done on human fathers is complementing what’s being learned from other animals. In a paper in 2008, Hasse Walum of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and his colleagues looked at a particular vasopressin receptor gene, responsible for one of the molecules that vasopressin connects with in order to exert its effects. This receptor is known to have an important influence on mating in voles. A form of this gene exists in humans, but researchers didn’t know whether it also had an effect on human pair bonding. The researchers analyzed genetic data on their subjects, and also assessed the quality of their marriages using a standard questionnaire. They found that men who carry one particular form of this receptor gene—known as the “RS3 genotype”—are less likely to get married and more likely to have marital problems if they do. The gene even affects their wives, who tend to have a lower opinion of the quality of their marriage than women married to men with other forms of the receptor gene. They concluded that the human situation is related to that in voles: vasopressin helps to shape marital relationships.

In 2012, Walum and colleagues took the research a step further. This time, they looked at whether variations in an oxytocin receptor gene in women would have a similar effect on marital behavior. And it did: women carrying a particular version of the receptor gene had more marital problems, and their spouses also reported that they had poorer relationships. Interestingly, the gene variant was also associated with social problems in the women’s childhoods—problems similar to those seen in autism. Women who experienced social difficulties as children, such as trouble bonding with friends, were less able to form good marital bonds as adults. This, too, the researchers reported, parallels what has been found in voles.

This is precisely how research is supposed to work, and why research with animals is important. It allows scientists to make suppositions about the role of oxytocin and vasopressin in humans, and to develop hypotheses. In recent years, researchers have done many experiments involving humans and oxytocin, often simply giving people a sniff of oxytocin in various circumstances and watching to see what happens. They’ve found that it can reduce stress, encourage trust, make it easier to ignore angry faces, increase recognition of fear in faces, increase motivation, increase “envy and gloating over monetary gain or loss” of another participant, and even, in patients with autism spectrum disorder, boost social interaction with characters in a computer game.

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Oxytocin’s importance in father-child relationships—and whether administering it as a drug could change them—was the subject of a study by Dutch researchers. They enlisted seventeen fathers and their toddlers, and observed them in two separate play sessions of fifteen minutes each, within a week. The mean age of the fathers was thirty-eight, and their children ranged in age from a year and a half to five. In one session, each father was given a whiff of oxytocin; in the other, he was given a placebo. The hypothesis was that oxytocin would increase the responsiveness of fathers to their children—making the fathers more encouraging and stimulating—because oxytocin should enhance their sensitivity to the cues of their infants.

The hypothesis proved to be correct. Oxytocin-juiced fathers “stimulated their child’s exploration and autonomy in a more optimal way” than the same fathers when given a placebo. They also showed fewer negative responses, such as impatience, discontent, and rolling their eyes. The speculation is that oxytocin activates the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with rewards, and thus reinforces desirable behavior in the fathers. The researcher claimed that this was the first experimental evidence that oxytocin could increase responsiveness in fathers.

The Dutch study meshed nicely with one done by Ruth Feldman and her colleagues at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Feldman, you’ll recall, was the person interested in synchrony—the idea that parents match and encourage infants’ positive emotions when they are face-to-face. Feldman and her team looked at what happens to oxytocin in parents after they’ve had pleasant interactions with their children. They watched, took notes, and videotaped 112 mothers and fathers playing with their four- to six-month-old infants. The researchers took blood and saliva samples from the parents to measure oxytocin levels before the session, and took a saliva sample again fifteen minutes after the session.

Mothers and fathers had different reactions. Mothers who “provided high levels of affectionate contact” showed an increase in oxytocin after interacting with their infants. A similar rise was not seen in mothers expressing low levels of affection. For fathers, oxytocin rose not with affectionate contact, but with stimulation of the infants and play that involved exploration. Oxytocin, in other words, increased in men in response to typical father-child interaction: rough-and-tumble play. Biparental care is “not biologically necessary,” they wrote, but contact between fathers and infants was clearly linked to the biology of fathers, as indicated by the rise in oxytocin following play. They concluded that the findings “have important implications for social policy and emphasize the need to provide opportunities for daily contact between fathers and infants during the first months of fatherhood in order to trigger the biological basis of fathering.”

After observing the rise in oxytocin in fathers, Feldman and her colleagues decided to administer a dose of oxytocin to fathers to see how that would affect both the fathers and their infants, who would not be given oxytocin. They recruited thirty-five fathers with five-month-old infants, gave the fathers a dose of oxytocin or a placebo, and then assessed the results. The oxytocin dose boosted fathers’ engagement and bonding during play sessions. And while the infants were not given oxytocin, giving the drug to their fathers raised the infants’ oxytocin levels, their responsiveness, and their engagement with their fathers. The results showed that oxytocin administration to one partner can have effects on the other. The discovery underscores the importance of oxytocin in the transmission of social behavior from parents to children.

Besides revealing a vital biological connection between fathers and their children, the study also suggested a novel way of treating children with social disorders: treat their parents with oxytocin. Children who are born prematurely, or whose parents are depressed, for example, can miss some of the important early bonding experiences that lead to the development of appropriate social behavior. And the study had implications for children with autism. Giving oxytocin to the parents of those children might deepen the parent-child relationships that autism can disrupt. That change, in turn, could boost levels of oxytocin in the children—and their ability to interact socially with others.

Feldman and her group also discovered that the hormone prolactin has an important role to play for fathers and their children. As we saw earlier, prolactin, which is related to lactation in women, rises in fathers near the end of their partner’s pregnancy and after birth. In men, prolactin is related to the way fathers play and their encouragement of children’s desire to explore, itself a characteristic of father play. The researchers speculated that as fathers become more familiar with their infants over time, the prolactin and oxytocin systems create new connections between them. Both the emotional connection and the exploratory encouragement are key aspects of attachment between fathers and their children.

Feldman reflected on the importance of the work on oxytocin and relationships: “Our responsibility as caregivers, scientists, policy makers, mental health professionals, and concerned citizens is that every young child should be given the opportunity to learn how to love, and every young parent should receive the guidance to make it happen.” Compared to the language used in most scientific papers, that’s lyric poetry.

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It’s not surprising that parents are important in shaping their children’s behavior. But what about the flip side of that? Can children, including teenagers, shape their parents’ behavior? Researchers have turned up a variety of interesting answers to that question. One study of fathers and teenage children’s behavior asked not only how parenting influences risky sexual behavior but also how such behavior in turn influences parenting. In particular, how do fathers react when they find out their children are at risk?

Teenagers who engage regularly in activities with their families (such as eating meals together, participating in religious activities, or simply having fun with one another) were less likely to engage in risky sexual behaviors—sexual intercourse at an early age, frequent intercourse, having multiple partners, and being careless about birth control. The same was true for children whose fathers were more knowledgeable about their children’s friends and activities. This confirmed earlier research. The surprising new finding was this: some theories of the family predict that parents will react to their kids’ risky behavior by becoming less engaged and showing more hostility. But in this case, risky behavior led fathers to become more involved and more knowledgeable about their children’s activities. Mothers showed no significant reaction.

Another study on fathers and adolescents is one we can file in the category of “unfortunate things fathers contribute to their children.” Heather Sipsma and colleagues at the Yale School of Public Health were interested in the children of men who become fathers as teenagers. Teen parents usually have more limited education and financial resources than older parents, and teen parenthood can disrupt the normal psychological development of children. The children of teen parents are also at higher risk of abuse and neglect than children of older parents. Daughters of teen mothers are more likely than other girls to become teen mothers themselves. But Sipsma and her colleagues could find no information on whether the sons of teenage fathers were at increased risk of repeating their fathers’ history.

It’s important to know whether that’s the case because of the adverse consequences of teen fatherhood. It’s been associated with low socioeconomic status, reduced educational accomplishments, and delinquency. Sipsma and her colleagues found that the sons of teenage fathers were 1.8 times more likely to become adolescent fathers than were the sons of older fathers. They called it “an intergenerational cycle of risk” for young fatherhood—that is, teen fathers tended to pass it on to the next generation. The broader conclusion was that programs aimed at reducing teenage pregnancy should focus on fathers as well as mothers. Indeed, as Sipsma noted, men are an important but neglected group in reproductive health.

The way fathers treat their adolescents can have long-lasting consequences, stretching into adulthood. As parents of teenagers know, it’s often hard to know how to respond to the crises, struggles, school challenges, and social difficulties that are a normal part of the passage from childhood to adulthood. What we do
matters
—but it’s so often hard to know what we should do. One key feature of good parenting, however, is to create a situation in which teenagers feel they are accepted by their parents rather than rejected. That’s often easier to say than to do—especially when, say, they show up with a tattoo or call you from the principal’s office.

Ronald P. Rohner at the University of Connecticut has spent some years looking at the consequences for children who perceive themselves to be accepted by their parents, and comparing their outcomes with what happens to children and teenagers who feel they were rejected by their parents. He thinks that parental acceptance influences important aspects of personality. Children who are accepted by their parents are independent and emotionally stable; they are more apt to have strong self-esteem and a positive worldview. Those who feel they were rejected show the opposite—hostility, feelings of inadequacy, instability, and a negative worldview. Rohner analyzed data from thirty-six studies on parental acceptance and rejection and found that they supported his theory. Both maternal and paternal acceptance were associated with these positive personality characteristics: father’s love and acceptance are, in this regard, at least as important as that of mother. The influence of father’s rejection can be greater than that of mothers. That’s not necessarily good news for fathers—it increases the pressure on them to get it right. “The great emphasis on mothers and mothering in America has led to an inappropriate tendency to blame mothers for children’s behavior problems and maladjustment when, in fact, fathers are often more implicated than mothers in the development of problems such as these,” Rohner explained.