Do Fathers Matter?: What Science Is Telling Us About the Parent We've Overlooked (14 page)

Although we might try to fight the stereotypes, we commonly expect that men are going to be more likely than women to stray from a marriage or to commit indiscretions, even if the marriage endures. As Barash and Lipton point out, a wandering male cannot justify his infidelity by blaming it on his genes; we
are
able to rise above our evolutionary constraints. At the same time, it’s not reasonable to expect couples to remain faithful simply because we demand it; they can’t completely escape their biology, as our experience—and indeed, all of human history—tells us. Couples don’t file for divorce on the grounds that their prehuman ancestors made them do it. They blame their marital dissolution on infidelity or cruelty or desertion. But their ancestors
do
have something to do with it.

*   *   *

Monkeys are more at the mercy of their evolutionary heritage than humans. Still, in the right circumstances they, too, can transcend their genetic predisposition. Experiments have shown that even in species in which fathers have little or nothing to do with their young, males can be coaxed to rise to the challenge of fatherhood. Stephen J. Suomi of the National Institutes of Health has spent his career working with rhesus monkeys. “They are probably one of the worst species to study the effects of fathers,” Suomi says. “The females won’t let them get near their kids. They chase them away.” When rhesus males reach adolescence, they leave the troop they were born in and search for a new one. Then they must compete with the males in the new troop to reproduce. That’s the basic social structure. It’s easy to see what he means when he says fatherhood isn’t important to rhesus monkeys.

But even these monkeys can be good fathers when the opportunity arises. To make the point, Suomi points to a forty-year-old study by William K. Redican at the California Primate Research Center of the University of California, Davis. Redican removed infant rhesus monkeys from their mothers and left them with their fathers. Because fathers can’t nurse, Redican hand-fed the infants. He collected data on the fathers and infants for seven months, in the absence of mothers and peers. When they were no longer being chased away by the mothers, the males became remarkably good fathers. They did almost everything the females would do with two exceptions. One, of course, was that the fathers couldn’t nurse the infants. The other was that they played with the kids much more than females do. “Mothers don’t do much of that,” Suomi says.

Redican described the discovery in even more extravagant terms. “One of the most striking aspects of the male-infant interactions thus far has been the remarkable amount of play that has emerged,” he wrote. “The frequency and intensity of this play far exceeded our expectations.” Male infants played with their fathers more than female infants. And even the style of play was interesting. “After an interval of intense clasping and play-biting, the infant typically began struggling to break away,” Redican wrote. It would then run to a far corner of the cage, sometimes making play faces at its father or swatting at him. “Typically the infant then jumped back toward the male, often at his face, and clasping and play-biting resumed.” These experiments, along with the many other animal studies, reinforce the notion that biology prepares animals for fatherhood—even when fathers are typically not allowed to act on that impulse, as is the case with the rhesus monkeys. But Redican was impressed by the fathers’ flexibility under the artificial circumstances. “We are again reminded of the folly and perhaps arrogance of making sweeping statements about the limits of an animal’s behavioral repertoire,” Redican concluded.

It’s a lesson we might take to heart as we consider human parenting. As with Redican’s rhesus fathers, human fathers also demonstrate enormous flexibility. When little help is around, fathers pitch in and take on a much larger share of the work. But what’s important to us—what we see in animals and in men—is that males can engage deeply with their offspring. The depth of that engagement can be measured by what happens when it is interrupted. And one way that can happen is when men succumb to postpartum depression, which can pull them away from their emotional connections to their children. Postpartum depression in mothers is something we know about. What’s new is the recognition that fathers, too, can suffer from postpartum depression.

This is more common in men that we’ve recognized. In the postpartum period, one in ten new fathers suffers from moderate to severe depression, a striking increase over the 3 to 5 percent of men in the general population who are depressed. These fathers (like mothers with depression) are less likely than others to read, tell stories, or sing songs to their infants. But according to one study, the infants of depressed fathers, in particular, have a much smaller vocabulary at age two than other children. This link has not been found with depressed mothers. And male postpartum depression has been linked to conduct problems or hyperactivity in their children three years later. Children of fathers who have major depression can be eight times as likely as others to have behavior problems, and thirty-six times as likely as other kids to have difficulties dealing with their peers. What happens to fathers can happen to their children, too.

*   *   *

Lambert’s mice, the emperor penguins, and seahorses have each crafted a unique approach to fatherhood. Each of them teaches us something about being a parent, and about our own peculiarities. Most important, studies of animals, monogamy, and depression all demonstrate the close connection between fathers and their children. Of course, carrying our kids around on our backs all day would probably ruin our knees. And our flexible version of monogamy is likely to persist. But we have made progress. Fathers are no longer confined to the waiting room with Ricky Ricardo, and we should be grateful for that. Changes in the workplace mean many fathers now have more opportunity to become involved with their children than they had before, and we should be grateful for that as well. We can’t blame our ancestors for our failings, but we might want to thank them for what they’ve given us: fathers’ involvement with their children is an indispensable feature of human existence. And as we will see in the next chapter, preparation that begins before conception, fathers’ involvement during pregnancy, and their presence in the delivery room all put fathers in a good position to engage with their infants.

FIVE

Infants: Sculpting Fathers’ Brains

I’ve noted many times—and it will come up again—how often fathers are missing from research on children’s development. We see this in laboratories, in discussions about child rearing and parenting, and in the attitudes of the people who stock pediatricians’ waiting rooms exclusively with women’s magazines. (If you’re looking for
Sports Illustrated
, you can find it in the urologist’s office.) So I don’t want to be accused of the reverse—leaving mothers out of the conversation. And they are relevant here, as we discuss the arrival of a new family member and the beginning of parenthood.

Fathers don’t parent alone. Even if they are single fathers, their parenting is shaped by the temperament and reactions of their child and by whether they have one child, two, or a dozen. In two-parent families, the relationship parents have with each other has a lot to do with their relationships with their children. Indeed, many researchers would argue that there is a fundamental error in thinking about fathering or mothering as activities that involve two people—the parent and the child. The reality is that the entire family functions as a unit, and it’s difficult to conclude too much from the study of one parent and one child in isolation.

For years, researchers studied parenting in terms of what they called these “dyadic” relationships. And most often the crucial dyad was believed to be the mother and child, leaving the father out altogether. One of the thinkers who began to change that was Salvador Minuchin, whose book
Families and Family Therapy
, published in 1974, was one of the first to propose looking at the family as an intricate system, in which each part affects all the others. Examining the carburetor, the exhaust pipes, or the engine block tells us little about what makes a car go, unless we consider all of them together, along with the transmission, the driveshaft, and all the rest. The same kind of thing, Minuchin argued, is true of families. He cared little, for example, about the specifics of who did the diapering, who washed the dishes, and who handled the discipline in a family. What was crucial was that the family system
worked
—and that the parents had forged an alliance with each other.

That’s not to say that working out the details of family duties isn’t important; it is. But what’s of primary importance is that parents have a plan, with shared goals and a division of chores that suits them. Whether two parents divide the responsibility for changing diapers fifty-fifty isn’t important in itself, unless one parent feels unfairly burdened and becomes frustrated and angry. What’s important in that case is that they haven’t agreed on a plan—not just that somebody is getting stuck with too many diapers.

Another way to think of the family “system” comes from the late psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, whose book
The Ecology of Human Development
suggests that families should be thought of as little ecosystems, in which the parts are as interdependent as the insects, plants, fish, trees, and birds in and around a pond. Bronfenbrenner’s book, like Minuchin’s, was published in the 1970s, around the time that Michael Lamb was beginning his research on fathers, inaugurating the boom in father research that was to come over the next few decades.

The family system, however, does not always run smoothly. Before couples become parents, they can’t always anticipate how different the situation will be once their child arrives. In their studies of new parents, Philip and Carolyn Cowan, the researchers whose own marriage was threatened by the arrival of children, asked expectant fathers and mothers to think about various roles in their lives—worker, friend, mother, daughter, father, and so on—and to mark them on a pie chart according to which felt most important, not how much time each one demanded. Mothers marked far larger portions for motherhood than fathers did for fatherhood. In late pregnancy, mothers already said, on average, that motherhood made up 10 percent of their lives—twice as much as what fathers said about fatherhood.

This was in the 1980s, and parents might fill out those pie charts a bit differently now. But what is interesting about this is not so much what the pie charts said, but how they changed after the birth of a child. Once the couples had become parents, both mothers and fathers, when asked to fill out another pie chart, increased the portion devoted to parenthood, although fathers’ wedges were still less than one-third as large as those of their partners. Oddly, however, men who gave fatherhood larger pieces of pie had higher self-esteem when their babies were six months old—while women who gave motherhood larger shares of their lives tended to have lower self-esteem. “It looks like new fathers who feel good about themselves are able to devote more energy to their parent identity without giving up other central aspects of their psychological lives,” the Cowans concluded. “And what they get back from this relationship helps them to keep their self-esteem on a positive track.”

Women did not get the same bounce. When the babies of the couples in the study were six months old, women gave work an 18 percent share of their pies. Men gave it 28 percent. Even for women who worked full-time, “mother” took up 50 percent more of the pie than “worker.” Fathers’ pie charts were dramatically different. Their estimate of the portion of their lives devoted to work didn’t change, and fatherhood always took up a smaller share of their pies than work. Being a good father clearly had rewards for men that were different from what women got from being good mothers.

Interestingly, the share of the pies allocated to “partner” dropped for both men and women, as you might expect—from 34 percent during pregnancy for women to 22 percent when their children were six months old; and from 35 percent to 30 percent for men. But significantly, the parents with the highest estimates of their partnering share had the highest self-esteem and the lowest parental stress.

*   *   *

The Cowans were among the first to pay so much attention to fathers. They were still operating in the shadow of John Bowlby’s attachment theory, which we’ve already encountered. Bowlby thought fathers weren’t capable of the kind of attachment that mothers and infants experienced with one another. Nobody, including Bowlby, had found evidence that fathers were unimportant during infancy. The problem was that nobody had done the research to find out.

One of the first to question attachment theory and its dismissal of fathers was Milton Kotelchuck, a Harvard psychologist. “What hard evidence is there to support the notion that children relate uniquely to their mothers?” Kotelchuck asked in the 1970s. It was a radical question at a time when most psychiatrists and psychologists still clung to the idea that fathers didn’t matter, or didn’t matter much.

Kotelchuck did four studies using what’s called the strange situation experiment—a psychological tool devised by Mary Ainsworth to assess attachment. It’s ordinarily done by observing a child, its mother, and a stranger interacting as the adults enter and leave a room. In a typical setup, the child refuses to be comforted by a stranger when the mother leaves, but stops crying almost immediately when the mother returns—demonstrating the child’s attachment to the mother. Kotelchuck simply added a father to the cast of characters entering and leaving. He then recorded what happened with different combinations of adults in the room. Babies consistently stayed close to their parents, initiated interaction with them, smiled and vocalized to both mother and father—and stayed away from the strangers. The infants didn’t protest the departure of a strange female, but they did protest the departure of each parent. “Both the mother and father served extensively as bases of security and interaction for the child,” Kotelchuck wrote.