RebelDad

Blinding Me with Science, Dad-Style

Posted on 15. Jun, 2010 by Brian Reid in research

Fair warning: over the next week, there are going to be tons and tons of dad-related stories, as newspapers and magazines rush to fill the slow-news days of early summer with Father’s Day pieces. Most of them will be fairly unoriginal, and I can no longer wade through them all the way I used to do.

There is at least one notable exception, and that USA Today’s take on dads and hormones. It goes over the growing body of research that shows that a father’s hormones go nutty after (and just prior) to the birth of a kid, in much the same way we’ve long known that women respond to motherhood. The piece is largely based off of a book I haven’t read (yet) called The Male Brain by Louann Brizendine. I can’t speak to the overall conclusions of the book, but what USA Today plucks out matches well with my understanding of the subject. (Much of what I learned about the topic comes from Yale’s Kyle Pruett, who talked at length about the topic at an At-Home Dad Convention a few years back. I’m amazed that I still have the audio.)

Here are some of the nuggets:

Levels of a stress hormone called cortisol — the same ancient chemical that instructs men to fight or take flight — tend to spike about four to six weeks after men learn they’re going to be fathers, subsiding as the mother’s pregnancy progresses, Brizendine says.

…

About three weeks before the baby arrives, levels of testosterone — sometimes called the “male hormone,” associated with competitiveness, aggression and sex drive — fall by roughly a third, Brizendine says.

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Tests show that men actually get better at hearing a baby’s cry — zeroing in on the sound and responding to it — as the due date of their own child approaches.

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At the same time that testosterone is falling, a man’s supply of prolactin — a hormone that helps mothers make milk — rises more than 20%, Brizendine says.

…

Male hormones begin to readjust when the baby is 6 weeks old, returning to pre-fatherhood levels by about the time the baby is walking, Brizendine says.

It’s fair to note that there are a lot of caveats, and no one has a really good idea of what all those chemical changes mean, so going overboard with interpretations isn’t wise. But it is another reminder that our very biology is somehow intimately related to the act of being a father. It’s yet another piece of evidence supporting my general worldview: that there is no reason to think parenthood isn’t as central to fathers as it is to mothers.

In addition to being a good piece about the science, reporter Liz Szabo talks to some of my favorite at-home dads, including Nebraska’s Phil Andrews, who has been a driving force behind the convention, and Lance Somerfield from NYC.