Raging Hormones and Good Dads

Posted on 31. Aug, 2010 by Brian Reid.

One of the more impressive changes I’ve seen in dad research in the time I’ve been writing about this is the science base for the ways that fatherhood changes men, biologically. The first in-depth introduction I received was Kyle Pruett’s talk at the 2005 At-Home Dad Convention. In it, he gave some details on the way various hormone levels fluctuate throughout pregnancy and infancy.My eyes were open.

Two years later, Slate did a nice piece of dad hormones, and USA Today followed up around Father’s Day with this gem.

But that’s only the start. This month brings fresh evidence of the ways that dads change over the course of childrearing: oxytocin (the so-called cuddle hormone), which has been long known to shoot up in new moms, shoots up just as much in dads. (This had been discussed before, but never published in a scientific journal.)

The research was straightforward. Eighty couples were followed for 6 months, their oxytocin levels checked a few times during that span. Levels of the hormone were similar in both men and women. What’s confusing is that we don’t really know why men release more oxytocin during this time. (It’s more clear in women, where lactation plans a part.)

What’s really interesting, though, is the conditions under which dads produce the most oxytocin. From the press release:

Finally, the findings revealed that oxytocin levels were associated with parent-specific styles of interaction. Oxytocin was higher in mothers who provided more affectionate parenting, such as more gazing at the infant, expression of positive affect, and affectionate touch. In fathers, oxytocin was increased with more stimulatory contact, encouragement of exploration, and direction of infant attention to objects.

No idea what it means, but it sure sounds like another argument in favor of the “activation parenting” theory, which holds that a crucial part of child development is parents who allow their kids some leeway to explore.

All food for thought. Any long-form journalists want to tackle this?

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Imagine Watching “Mr. Mom” In Reverse …

Posted on 25. Aug, 2010 by Brian Reid.

… and you’d get something similar to what is apparently one of next Julie Roberts vehicles. Last month came the news that the guy behind Glee is at work on a romantic comedy that goes down like this:

In the romantic comedy, Julia will play a working woman married to a stay-at-home husband. She loses her job, their roles are reversed, and she has to adjust to motherhood.

I honestly have no idea how this works as a concept. I’ve long argued that the reason that fish-out-of-water plotlines about dads suddenly thrust into a caregiver role have gotten more and more stale since “Mr. Mom” came out in 1983 is because clueless dads are less and less plausible in an era where at-home dads are being called ho-hum part of the social fabric.

So as cool as a reverse “Mr. Mom” is on some level, I’m not sure a movie about a clueless mom is going to work all that well. In fact, it begs for a first act in which Julia is set up as a completely out-of-touch working mom, which is not a stereotype I’m a big fan of, either.

But if this moves forward, it should prompt some interesting social commentary. This will be well worth tracking.

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If You Read One At-Home Dad Piece This Year …

Posted on 24. Aug, 2010 by Brian Reid.

… read Salon’s “The shocking new normalcy of the stay-at-home dad,” by Aaron Traister.

Traister’s thesis is pretty simple: based on his experience in a blue-collar, old-school Philly neighborhood, at-home dads don’t shock or interest much of anyone. The lead anecdote is about a charming interaction with a representative character: a wizened old woman with a nasty racist streak who nonetheless had come to celebrate the new reality of the involved father.

Everywhere Traister looks, people are nonplussed about his at-home dadness. The other dads in his circle don’t feel isolated. His right-wing Texan in-laws are big fans. He says that “Ninety percent of the men’s rooms I visit have a changing table (the other 10 percent are usually in adult bookstores).” He celebrates the Swagger Wagon commercial, the commercial where a dad eats an Oreo over a webcam with his kid and the spooky Earl Woods Nike ads are all proof that active fatherhood is hip. (All of those examples are a bit of a stretch, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt on that.)

Here’s the thing: though Traister’s experiences match mine — I’ve never received the cold shoulder on the playground — I’m not sure I buy the argument. We’re not there yet. I still don’t see universal changing tables. I still meet dads who feel isolated. My new PTO has about two dozen officers and committee chairs, and only a single one is a guy (he is on the “safety committee”).

But the fact that Traister can make a compelling case for the fact that primary caretaker dads are ho-hum means that we are getting closer to gender equity. It’s good news for dads, like Traister, who are confident in what they’re doing: they’re going to be accepted almost anywhere. (One of the unexplored ideas in Traister’s story — which matches research findings by Texas’ Aaron Rochlen — is that dads who are comfortable with the at-home thing tend not to be isolated or negative about their position.)

So go read the piece. It might not reflect reality for most of us, but the fact that it’s not total fantasy is a huge step forward.

[NOTE: I should note that I'm saying these nice things despite the fact that Traister takes a good-natured dig at me and my obession, earlier this year, with diaper marketing. He may have a point.]

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The 14 Things Moms Should Know About At-Home Dads

Posted on 21. Aug, 2010 by Brian Reid.

You’ve all seen this kick-ass post from Chicago Pop over at Daddy Dialectic, right? Jeff nailed down 14 funny and true things that moms need to know to bust through whatever bizarre stereotypes might exist. So if you haven’t seen it yet, you really need to click over …

Here’s a sampling:

The Fourteen Points

#1. I don’t want to sleep with you. So can we please just chill about that.

…

#8. Every time your kid sees a SAHD with a stroller in the park, packing his kid’s lunch, handling visits to the doctor, picking him up from preschool, or hanging with their own mom on a playdate, she’s that much less likely to grow up believing that these things must always be women’s work.

#9. If I never see your husband doing any of the above-listed things on weekends, days-off, or after work, I start to think you’ve got a bum deal and maybe think they really are women’s work.

…

#14. I also really enjoy, and maybe even prefer, talking about things that have little to do with parenting.

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More on the Today Show and Marie Claire

Posted on 20. Aug, 2010 by Brian Reid.

Last week’s airing of the Today Show piece related to Marie Claire’s take on at-home-fathers-as-status-symbols gave dads some more to chew on, and there are a couple of follow-ups worth making.

First, Jason Sperber, the dad profiled by Today and by Marie Claire, wrote about his experiences on his blog. It’s worth the read. Part of what Jason talks about is the danger of being sucker-punched by the media. His experience with at-home fatherhood is pretty much glowing, from what I can tell, and yet the magazine chose to include some quotes from his wife that suggested something different. To her credit, the Marie Claire magazine reporter, Hilary Stout, apologized (in a fashion) and let Jason quote from that e-mail.

I can sympathize. A long time ago, a reporter for a national magazine played the same stunt on my wife and me. We gave, in total, nearly 3 hours of interviews, talking about how we made our decisions, how it benefited everyone in the family and the statements we wanted to make about gender roles and equity. And — out of that — were pulled two quotes that made both of us sound whiny. I was, to say the least, horrified. (And that’s why, all the years later, I’m not linking to it.)

The second bit of commentary related to Today was that, once, I ended up on set with Matt Lauer and that he mentioned to me (and rockstar academic Aaron Rochlen) that he hoped to be an at-home dad some day. Maybe all of this at-home dad stuff that has become so prominent on Today is just advanced research for Matt. I, for one, can’t wait to see him trade the wingtips for Chuck Taylors and make the annual pilgrimage to the At-Home Dad Convention.

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Of Mice and Men (Actually: Of Rats and Dads)

Posted on 19. Aug, 2010 by Brian Reid.

Earlier this week, Scientific American posted an absolute must-read on the way that the presence of a father changes the brain of his newborns and how — in turn — a new dad’s brain is fundamentally changed by the experience. There is a big caveat to note: the work referenced was in degu rats. But the results were interesting. When male rats were physically present — touching — their offspring, they grew new brain cells:

But the extra boost of brain cells only occurred if the mouse father stayed in the nest. In other words, if he was removed on the day of their birth, nothing happened. One new set of brain cells formed in the olfactory bulb, and were specifically tuned to the smells of his pups. Another set of neurons grew in the hippocampus, a crucial memory center in the brain, which helped to consolidate the smell of his pups into a long-term memory.

So while I certainly might have felt like a moron when I was first struggling to learn the ropes of parenting, there was actually a lot going on upstairs (if you can assume that my brain works like that of a degu rat). On the flip side, if the dad was removed from the kids, they had fewer brain connections than baby rats who got to hang with dad:

Specifically, the degu pups raised without fathers had fewer synapses in both the orbitofrontal cortex and the somatosensory cortex. Having fewer synapses can alter the way information is processed in the young animals, and would make these brain areas perform abnormally.

Of course, it’s great sport to over-extrapolate this kind of research into humans and, indeed, a number of valid criticisms are leveled in the comments to the SciAm piece. It’s not clear if human brains work the same way. It’s not clear if the family bond has anything to do with this (would non-paternal rats experience the same effect?). All of this, taken together, makes it tough to consider this a major piece of evidence suggesting that human kids are doomed without their biological father in the picture (even though the piece hints at that idea). It’s not that easy to tease apart biology, circumstance and social norms. As I’ve said before, if you have a kid in a loving and stable household, he or she will probably do well, regardless of who the other members of the household are (mom/dad/stepparent/uncle/aunt/older sibling/grandparent/etc./etc.).

That said, I’m still a sucker for evidence that suggests that having an involved dad (or father figure) does help around the margins. And this week, I got that, too. USA Today, reporting from the American Psychological Association meeting, reported that sons who had good relationships with their fathers when growing up ended up being better able to handle stress. (The article was not all that detailed, which makes me wonder if the same effect was seen with daughters … I assume not.) At any rate, if you’re a dad with a son and things are going well, you can add that to the things to feel good about.

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Can I Nominate NPM as a Convention Speaker for 2011?

Posted on 18. Aug, 2010 by Brian Reid.

Via celeb site PopEater.com comes the news that Neil Patrick Harris is a) preparing to have a baby with his partner and b) considering bailing on showbiz to an at-home dad. While this would probably not be good for the cause of humor and mirth, it would make NPH one heck of a high profile AHD.

With the caveat that I’m sure anyone can really trust celeb news, here is how it was positioned:

“Neil has been working his butt off since he was a little kid,” a friend of the actor tells me. “Everything was about his career until he met his soul-mate, David. Now, with twins due in October, Neil is thinking about taking a break. Moving from Hollywood to New York City to be a full-time daddy.”

Neil: if you’re reading … you might want to check out the kick-ass NYC Dads Group.

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Today Show/Marie Claire on Trophy Husbands

Posted on 15. Aug, 2010 by Brian Reid.

Let’s start with the good news: when the media talk about at-home parents, they often act as if there is no other parent in the household. Pieces about “opt-out” women jumping out of the workforce rarely not the partners still logging in hours at the office, and article about at-home dads usually note in passing that there is a mom out there doing the breadwinning.

So the Marie Claire piece on at-home dads and breadwinning moms (arrestingly MSNBC subtitle: “Is this the new status symbol for alpha women?”) gets props for at least framing at non-traditional family roles through the eyes of the woman, for a change. Except that the piece, once it gets going, doesn’t actually look at that hard at those alpha women, instead choosing to focus on what — to modern magazine editors — the great irony of an at-home dad.

It’s almost not worth summarizing the piece, which fails to look at all closely on what the impact of at-home dads are on the women in their lives. There are all kind of important questions that can be asked of those women, but I didn’t see that any of them actually got asked. (In fact, a better take on this was done, um, 8 years ago, when Fortune put “The New Trophy Husband” on its cover.)

(I also want to give props to the Today Show — which based a segment on the Marie Claire article — for featuring all-around good-guy at-home dad Jason Sperber in their piece — the video is below — even if the show failed to really unearth anything new. I’ve lost count, but I think this might be the fourth Today Show piece on at-home dads this year, and, taken together, they show a real inability to do much other than repeatedly scratch the same surface, again and again.)

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Modern Media Man Lineup

Posted on 13. Aug, 2010 by Brian Reid.

Man, it seems like conference week around here, with my At-Home Dad Convention post earlier and my aimed-at-BlogHer-marketers post over the weekend, so I should note that the Modern Media Man (M3) conference now has their agenda online.

It’s got one heck of a lineup of marketing gurus, especially online marketing gurus, if that’s your thing. There are some real luminaries of the blog world. And I’d be remiss in not noting that Cal Ripken will be there (as well as Roland Warren of the National Fatherhood Initiative).

The list of sponsors is growing, too. Should be an interesting confab, and though I won’t be there, I will be curious about the goings on. Twitter hashtag is #M3Summit, for those who want to track by Twitter.

[Registration runs $225, extra if you want to hang with Cal. It's happening Sept. 9-11 in Atlanta.]

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At-Home Dad Convention: Act Fast to Get Your Discount

Posted on 11. Aug, 2010 by Brian Reid.

Just a reminder: the early bird discount for the At-Home Dad Convention ends this weekend. Act now, and it’s 50 clams. The price jumps to $65 next week. (For some perspective, the early bird AHD rate is *10 times less* than the BlogHer blogger conference that just wrapped.)

If you’ve been before, you don’t need me to sell you on it. If you haven’t, it’s one hell of an inspirational weekend, and the guys are super. And I’ll be there, in the unlikely event that sways your decision.

Heck, I’ll do you one better: I’ll offer a money-back guarantee: if you show up and *don’t* have a good time, I’ll reimburse you for the registration fee. All you need to do is write a guest post for me on why you weren’t moved by the experience, and I’ll cut you a check.

[UPDATE: As a couple of commenters have noted, I failed to include a link or other information about the event. It's athomedadconvention.com, and it's being held in Omaha on Oct. 2.]

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