Do Fathers Matter?: What Science Is Telling Us About the Parent We've Overlooked (8 page)

Crespi also notes that recent findings fit his predictions. In people with schizophrenia, researchers have found reduced activity of three genes that are active when they come from fathers. According to Crespi, a reduction in expression of paternal genes should tip a person toward the schizophrenia-depression end of the spectrum. And that is what happens. Crespi believes that progress in understanding the connection between imprinting and mental illness is moving slowly because psychiatrists are generally not aware of the work of biologists studying imprinting, and vice versa.

This was an idea that occurred to me often while I was working on this book. Crespi is correct to say that psychiatrists and biologists don’t talk to one an other nearly enough. But it’s also true that psychologists don’t talk to neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists don’t talk to doctors, and epidemiologists don’t talk to sociologists. The story of fathers and their children draws on all these scientific fields, but there is little cross-pollination among them.

“One of the things that hasn’t been done in the field is to connect across levels,” Crespi said. “You want to connect from the genetic level to the brain-structure level to the psychiatric level.” His work with Badcock is a step in that direction: “It’s bringing together two very different areas—social evolution theory connecting with psychiatry. I think I’m at least getting people to think more about evolutionary biology in the study of autism and schizophrenia.” The field of psychiatry could use a good injection of evolutionary biology.

One of the reasons I find Haig’s and Crespi’s work so interesting is that it forces us to rethink what it means to be a human being. The traditional view was that an individual was “something that cannot be divided,” but now the individual
is
divided. “If our genes disagree amongst themselves, I think the self is the arbiter among all these competing agendas,” Haig told me. The body is not a machine. Instead, we’re each organized “more like a social entity, with internal politics and agents with competing agendas.” And this clashing of agendas inside us might even be something we can see. We hesitate over decisions. We decide whether to cooperate or compete, or waver between immediate gratification and long-term planning. Maybe what we’re seeing and feeling in these situations is the settling of scores among our competing genes.

*   *   *

Alexander Baker’s father Thomas, wrote to me after our visit. He was optimistic about new research that could point the way to a cure—or at least a partial cure—for Angelman syndrome. He was referring to work done by Benjamin Philpot and colleagues at the University of North Carolina. Researchers now know that Angelman syndrome is caused by the deletion or mutation of a maternal gene called
UBE3A
. As I’ve noted, the gene is expressed in the brain only if it’s inherited from the mother. Fathers pass along a copy of the gene, too, but it is silenced in the child’s brain. What if the father’s copy could be turned on? Would it do the job of the missing maternal gene, and restore Alexander and others to something much closer to a normal life?

Philpot screened various chemical compounds, using neurons from mice, and he found a dozen that could activate the dormant paternal
Ube3a
gene as a backup to replace the mutated maternal copy. He also determined how the compounds worked. Next, he injected them into live mice, and he found that the paternal gene was activated in parts of the brain and spinal cord. And it remained active in spinal cord neurons for twelve weeks after he stopped administering the drug. Scientists are often reluctant to draw too many conclusions from animal research, so I was surprised to see that Philpot himself was also optimistic about the potential of his research. Philpot cautioned that drugs such as the ones he studied can have harmful effects elsewhere in the genes or the body, and it will take a while to sort that out before human trials can begin. If the drugs also affect the genes related to Prader-Willi syndrome, they could flip a child with Angelman to Prader-Willi, not a good outcome.

Nevertheless, this is an exciting development. One of the drugs Philpot studies is already approved for a kind of meningitis, which is a huge advantage. When the FDA approves a drug, doctors are generally free to prescribe it however they wish. That means that Philpot’s drug can be legally prescribed to children with Angelman without years of studies to seek FDA approval. If Philpot is successful, the research could lead to similar treatments for other diseases of imprinting.

Nature has left us with these unusual genes that don’t have working backup copies. But the backup copies are still there, and if researchers can find a way to turn them on safely, many of these diseases could be alleviated, or possibly cured. The discovery of imprinting and the theories to explain it show that fathers’ genetic contributions to their children are far richer and more complex than we might have guessed. As we will see in the next chapter, the influence of fathers on their children continues during pregnancy. It’s a time when fathers and their fetuses seem to have no discernible tie, but remain closely connected.

THREE

Pregnancy
: Hormones, Depression, and the First Fight

If there was any point in a family’s life when we’d think fathers don’t matter much to children, it might be during pregnancy and infancy. It seems that biology has assigned the principal responsibilities to mothers during those months. But biology has a role for fathers to play during pregnancy, too. And it involves changes in their bodies, just as it does in those of their partners. The physical and psychological changes women undergo during pregnancy are paralleled by similar changes in their partners. And there is an important connection between fathers’ behavior during pregnancy and their later involvement with their children: what happens to a father before his child’s birth can affect the kind of father he will be for years to come.

*   *   *

Philip A. Cowan and his wife, Carolyn Pape Cowan, of the University of California, Berkeley, were among the first to study fathers during their partners’ pregnancy. The study was prompted, in large part, by their own experience. They married young—Carolyn was nineteen and about to start her first full-time job as a teacher. Philip was twenty-one and still in college. They had both worked while in school as teenagers, so they felt equipped to able to enter the adult world, including getting married.

Two years after they married, they began trying to start a family. Carolyn was ready, but she admits that she pushed Philip. Their first daughter, Joanna, was born healthy, and so were their next two, Dena and Jonathan, born two and four years later. This was in the early 1960s, when most women stayed home to take care of the kids. Carolyn quit her teaching job and became a full-time mother.

When their first child was two and a second was on the way, they moved from Canada to California, where Philip had a new job. The stress of the move, away from family and friends, was far greater than they had anticipated. With Philip working and Carolyn at home, they began to feel more distant from each other. Differences and conflicts over parenting were driving them apart. It was, you might say, their first fight—their first real fight, with potentially grave consequences.

“We hadn’t anticipated that having a baby could revive long-buried feelings of gratitude or disappointment about how loved we had felt as children, or realized that our disagreements about whether the baby needed to be picked up and comforted or left alone to ‘cry it out’ would actually have more to do with our own needs than they did with the baby’s,” they recalled in their book
When Partners Become Parents: The Big Life Change for Couples
. “Not only were we unprepared for these conflicts inside or between us but we found ourselves unable to talk about them productively once they surfaced,” they reported. Their ten-year marriage was suddenly and unexpectedly in trouble.

They weren’t the only ones struggling. Friends in similar circumstances were separating or divorcing all around them. Most of those couples had wanted to have children and had been excited at the prospect of starting a family. And yet the responsibilities of raising children, it seemed, were almost more than they could handle. “Almost all of us could trace the beginning of our difficulties back to those early years of becoming a family,” Carolyn and Philip wrote. The phenomenon has been found in all kinds of families in multiple studies across the country and around the world. The Cowans and their friends couldn’t understand it: What, they asked, is wrong with us?

As it happens, the Cowans had moved to California because Philip was offered a position as a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, where he ultimately became a professor of psychology. In the 1970s, prompted by curiosity and self-preservation, Philip began working with Carolyn, who had since become a psychologist, to prepare for what would be a fifteen-year study of ninety-six couples that would become a landmark in social science research—the Becoming a Family Project. Finally they would be able to investigate the reasons behind their own marital difficulties, as well as those of others.

The study included seventy-two couples expecting children and twenty-four similar couples without children. The Cowans followed them until the children reached their first year of elementary school. They also established couples groups, led by trained male-female teams, which met weekly for six months from before the babies’ births until after. In these groups, partners discussed issues about their own well-being and mental health, their relationship as a couple, their ideas about what kind of parents they wanted to be, their intentions about what to carry over and what to discard from the families they grew up in, and how to deal with work and other stresses in their lives outside the family.

Among many other findings, the study had a lot to say about what happens to fathers during pregnancy. In the data they collected from their Becoming a Family Project, the Cowans found that during their partners’ pregnancies, some men decided to grow beards, some lost weight, and some suddenly found themselves nursing injuries they hadn’t noticed before. These were mostly exterior manifestations of inner change, it turned out. “As much as we pushed … for detail, though, talk about physical symptoms usually ended quickly, while talk about psychological and relationship changes could have gone on long into the night,” they wrote.

In the lengthier conversations, some men reported internal emotional changes that could put their marriages at risk. These included difficulty talking with their wives about their emotions or their expectations of pregnancy and parenthood; changes in their sex lives; and unrealistic expectations about how they would share child care and housekeeping chores once the baby arrived. Most of the men in the Cowans’ study seemed to think that there were rules they should follow, and those often included not saying they were vulnerable at a time when their wives needed them to be strong. But that posed a problem. When men think they should keep their worries hidden, they stop talking to their wives about things that matter to them. That was leading to increased tension and distance between the partners.

Some of the couples in the study blamed each other for their distress. One father-to-be found himself working longer hours as the pregnancy progressed, just when his wife wanted his help setting up the baby’s room and otherwise preparing for the birth. She blamed him for making bad decisions in his business that now made the extra work necessary. Her criticism of his business decisions kept him at work even longer, because he wanted to show her that the business would succeed. He said that if she’d encouraged him in his work, he wouldn’t have felt he had to work late every night.

Many men in the Cowans’ study talked about doing things differently than their own fathers had. Most of them had grown up in traditional families in which the father was often away at work, and emotionally distant when he was home. “Almost every expectant father told us of his determination to have more of a presence with his sons and daughters than his father had with him,” the Cowans wrote. One expectant father told them that his father “always felt so distant. I still have trouble talking to him about anything that matters. My children are going to know me and be able to talk to me about whatever’s on their minds. They’re not going to have any doubt about how I feel about them.”

The Cowans’ study, which ran from 1979 to 1990, was done at a time when women were not as likely to be working outside the home as they are now. Many men put more effort into their work, they told the Cowans, in anticipation of the increased financial responsibility they would soon have taking care of their wives and children. The expectant mothers often saw it differently—as a form of withdrawal.

Twenty percent of the couples the Cowans followed were divorced by the time their children reached kindergarten. But that didn’t necessarily mean things were fine for the other 80 percent. Some of them had severe reservations about their marriages and were heading toward divorce. Philip worried about the conflict in those families and its effect on their children.

The Cowans did find some good news, and it had to do with fathers: the children of fathers who embraced and supported their partners’ pregnancy had an easier transition years later, when they went to kindergarten. Happier couples, it almost goes without saying, provide more nurturing, and children who receive more nurturing enter school feeling loved and supported. And that can help them beyond kindergarten as well.

The Cowans noted that in most of their families, fathers of babies and young children did less of the family work at home than mothers did. But the future, they wrote, lies with men who are taking a more significant role in running the household and raising the children. “If we listen carefully to what those men and their wives are telling us, we can see that these men tend to feel better about themselves and about their family relationships than men who are less involved in family work. What’s more, their wives feel significantly better too.”