Do Fathers Matter?: What Science Is Telling Us About the Parent We've Overlooked (13 page)

This might seem like a poor outcome for a father who has starved himself during the harshest weather to protect his offspring, even if he has succeeded in reproducing. But as Kelly Lambert argues, it’s the brain, or the behavior,
in context
that matters. Penguin fathers endure the Antarctic winter because they have no choice; their behavior has evolved to help their offspring survive in a tough neighborhood. That survival is their reward.

The seahorse takes a far more bizarre route to good fatherhood. A favorite in aquariums, and the animal kingdom’s poster child for exemplary fatherhood, it is an extreme example of how far fatherhood can go: in seahorses, it is the male that gets pregnant. The female faces him, and they bend their tails back. She then inserts her ovipositor (it looks like a penis) into the male’s open pouch and releases a long, sticky string of eggs—hundreds of them. The male seals the pouch shut.

The seahorse was once thought to be the only animal in which the male became pregnant, but more recently scientists have discovered that the same is true of the male pipefish, a seahorse relative. In a particularly nasty example of parental favoritism, the pregnant pipefish father doles out nutrients to the offspring he’s carrying based on what he “thinks” of their mother. A father who has mated with a particularly attractive female, whatever that means to a pipefish (apparently, the bigger the better) will devote more resources to his offspring, and more of them will survive, than if he had mated with a female less likely to produce quality stock.

In some species of poison frogs, the females lay eggs and the fathers carry them on their backs to a watery hollow, where they drop them into the water. Some of these pools are smaller than a shot glass. The male monitors the tadpoles that emerge—sometimes helping them break the egg sac. He monitors the food supply and will call the female if the tadpoles need to be fed. The female returns and lays a specialized kind of egg that is eaten by the tadpoles. Males of other frog species pick the eggs up and hold them in their mouths, where the tadpoles develop, finding food in the father’s mouth. When they’ve developed into tiny frogs, they hop out. The male midwife toad carries strings of eggs attached to his legs, and when they hatch, he drops the tadpoles into ponds. Male bullfrogs will chase away snakes ten times their size to protect their young.

No discussion of animal fathers would be complete without a nod to marmosets and tamarins, among the world’s smallest—and most captivating—monkeys. They live in the tropics of the Western Hemisphere, they are monogamous, and they almost always have twins—twice a year. At birth, the babies weigh as much as a fifth of their mother’s body weight. And she will soon be pregnant with another pair, so after the babies are born, the fathers cart them around. It’s hard work, and the dads lose up to a tenth of their body weight doing it.

Charles T. Snowdon of the University of Wisconsin has shown that most cotton-top tamarin fathers start carrying infants the day they are born. Interestingly, the fathers got help from the infants’ older brothers, and by the time the infants were four weeks old, their brothers spent more time carrying them than their fathers did. Mothers did little to help, but they were capable of shifting gears when circumstances demanded it. In families in which fathers were absent, mothers took over, with help from older siblings, especially brothers. In a separate study, Snowdon also showed that in a frightening situation, when a lab worker wearing a white coat and an animal mask approached the cage, the infants ran to the adult who had carried and fed them the most—either the father or their oldest brother. And as we’ve seen with humans, marmoset and tamarin fathers experience couvade—they gain weight during their mates’ pregnancies, presumably bulking up to prepare for carrying around those expected kids.

*   *   *

These animal fathers have the good fortune to be present at the births of their offspring, as human fathers often are, too. But allowing men into delivery rooms, which we now take for granted, is a relatively new phenomenon, going back only a generation or so. Many women find it comforting to have their husbands with them during labor and delivery, and men who participate in birth are more likely to participate in the care of their infants. It seems to be a winning proposition all around. It also allows parents to share one of the most intense emotional experiences they will ever have. I can’t imagine how I would feel if I’d missed it.

Men who had once been in their own homes for the births of their children were exiled when childbirth moved out of the home and into hospitals, a movement that accelerated in the 1930s. By the 1960s, 99 percent of white children and 85 percent of nonwhite children were born in hospitals. This was supposed to lead to safer childbirth and healthier children. Fathers were left pacing in waiting rooms while their wives and a phalanx of professionals attended the birth and kept the father out.

Followers of
I Love Lucy
reruns will remember the episodes dealing with Lucille Ball’s pregnancy in the early 1950s, when pregnancy was rarely shown in television sitcoms. The seven episodes that dealt with Lucy’s pregnancy weren’t limited to the drama and comedy of the expectant mother. Her husband Ricky’s reactions were featured in the episodes, too. Ricky thinks he’s suffering labor pains in one episode—perhaps the first televised depiction of couvade—and to make him feel better, Lucy and her neighbors Fred and Ethel throw him a “daddy shower.” When it’s time to race to the hospital to have the baby, however, Ricky is stopped in the waiting room, where he signs papers, pays the bill, and paces.

By the 1960s, men wanted in. Many hospitals argued that they didn’t have room for men in the labor room. “At first,” the historian Judith Walzer Leavitt writes, quoting the pioneering birth activist Elly Rakowitz, “no one wanted to take the responsibility of allowing fathers to be present in labor rooms. Doctors would say it was up to the hospitals; hospitals would pass the buck back to the doctors.” If men did get permission to be present for labor, it was only “
if
the obstetrical floor isn’t busy, and
if
there is no laboring woman in the other bed in the room, and
if
prenatal classes had been attended … if, if, if.”

Men began to earn their place in the labor room, but they were still excluded from the delivery of their children. I was surprised to find out what some fathers went through to attend the births of their children. One father, a bus driver in Portland, Oregon who refused to remain in the waiting room, went to court in the 1960s to establish his right to be present at his child’s birth. When he made his argument in the courtroom, he got a standing ovation. By 1975, men had made some progress, with about three-quarters of hospitals allowing them into the delivery room—except in the South, where barely more than a quarter did so.

Many obstetricians still frowned on the practice, worrying that laymen might challenge their medical decisions without understanding the reasons for them. One said a man wouldn’t let him use forceps and threatened to kill him if his wife and the baby were not okay. Another physician berated a nurse, telling her that “one of your G.D. [goddamn] fathers was at a delivery this morning and he wouldn’t let me give Pitocin.” The physician called the police and had the man removed. Despite doctors’ discomfort, by the end of the 1970s most restrictions had been relaxed, and organizations of obstetricians, nurses, nurse-midwives, and hospitals were promoting the practice of letting men in.

Not all fathers were in favor of this development. Some said they were shocked at the appearance of their newborns, pickled in their juices and specked with blood. One said his baby looked “like a newborn rat.” Very quickly, however, researchers noticed and began to chart a fascinating and unexpected side effect of fathers’ presence in the delivery room: women reported that they felt less pain, and they needed less pain medication. Women were less likely to cry—and fathers were
more
likely to cry.

One nurse said she thought that was because fathers were taking over the job of worrying about whether the baby has the right number of fingers and toes, an examination I’m proud to say I performed on each of my children within seconds of their birth. I let the doctors worry about Apgar scores; I had my own checklist. Beyond that, it’s now clear that fathers’ presence matters. Those who are present for their children’s birth are more attached to their children, and they later become more involved in taking care of their infants, a development that seems likely to benefit not only the father but also the mother and, most important, the child. Letting fathers into the delivery room pays off in ways no one anticipated.

The last remaining roadblock for fathers around the end of the 1970s was getting permission to be present in the operating room for a cesarean section. Some fathers, newly admitted to delivery rooms in that decade, found themselves spending hours in the labor room with their wives, only to be suddenly excluded from the birth when the obstetrician had to perform a C-section. Women argued for men to be allowed into the operating room. As late as 1980, most hospitals were still barring fathers from the OR.

My first child was born in 1981. When the obstetrician called for an emergency C-section, a nurse helped me awkwardly step into a surgical gown and slip on a mask. I was walked carefully to a stool behind a partial curtain, so I couldn’t see the actual birth. When the time came, I cheated. I stood up and peeked over the curtain to watch the obstetrician pull our son out through the incision, crying, wrinkled, and waxy. I had no idea until I began the research for this book that if he’d been born only two or three years earlier, I probably would have missed that. I’ve now been in the operating room for five C-sections. I’ve looked over the curtain every time, and if it weren’t for the lack of a medical license, I might be ready to try doing one myself.

*   *   *

I’ve seen so many births because I had three children, now grown, with my first wife, and two with my second. Those of us who have been married more than once might pose a challenge to an important observation by anthropologists: Humans are predominantly monogamous. But our version of monogamy is flexible. One anthropologist puts it this way: The human mating system “combines short-term and long-term mating bonds, and both types may be overt (known to all group members), or covert (unknown to a majority of group members and disapproved of).” There is an awful lot of joy and heartache hidden in that bloodless description. But whatever we call it, this is the mating system we’ve got. And, again, exploring how animals deal with the questions of monogamy and good fathering can help us understand something about ourselves; it forces us to acknowledge that we cannot entirely escape our biology.

Birds, including many species besides the emperor penguin, are the best-known example of monogamy among animals and of good fathering. An estimated 92 percent of bird species are monogamous, and nearly the same percentage care for their young, as the husband-and-wife team of David P. Barash, a psychologist, and Judith Eve Lipton, a psychiatrist, report in their book
Strange Bedfellows: The Surprising Connection Between Sex, Evolution and Monogamy
.

But birds might not be quite as monogamous as they seem. Some exercise a bit of the flexibility that humans are known for. An early clue to feathered infidelity arose during the 1970s, when blackbirds were given vasectomies to try to control the population. Yet females mated with vasectomized males laid eggs that hatched. Either the vasectomized blackbirds had grounds to sue for malpractice or something was fishy in birdland. The problem only got worse when modern genetic techniques came along and paternity testing entered the nest. Swans have long been mythologized as a graceful example of harmony and monogamy. That myth toppled when a genetic study of the Australian black swan found that one in six of the young is fathered by a swan other than the father in the nest. It turns out, according to Barash and Lipton, that anywhere between 10 and 40 percent of birds’ offspring were the product of liaisons with partners other than the one at the nest.

The attentive behavior of many bird fathers likely dates back to the dinosaurs, birds’ ancestors. Several species of dinosaurs, including the oviraptor, a birdlike creature that lived about 75 million years ago, have been found on top of clutches of fossilized eggs. But were these mothers or fathers? Researchers who carefully examined the bones, looking for maternal and reproductive features, believe that these were males—birds’ ancestral fathers. Birds learned to be fathers before they learned how to fly.

One reason that mothers contribute as much as they do to their offspring is that they know with certainty that the chicks in the nest or the children in the high chair are theirs. They saw and felt the biological connection with their children at birth. For fathers, there is always some doubt. So they have to calculate the odds. If they’re pretty sure the kids are theirs, then it makes evolutionary sense to raise them and keep those genes going. If there is some doubt, it might make sense for a male to seek another female and try again, with perhaps a better chance that he’ll be raising his own kids, not somebody else’s.

Swans might be fooled about who the fathers are, but it’s harder to fool humans. Men who suspect that the child they’re caring for is not theirs are increasingly seeking paternity tests. And according to one report, 30 percent of them are finding out that their suspicions were correct. This is unlikely to be true for the population overall; these were men who already had suspicions. But it’s an impressively large number. Nobody can say for sure how many children in the United States are being raised by men who
think
they are the child’s father. We might expect that few fathers would volunteer to participate in a study to determine that.

A woman can have only one child a year, but a man can, theoretically, have an almost limitless number—one a year with each female he is able to mate with. This pattern holds in those animals, including humans, in which males are typically larger than females. In these species, males tend to compete for multiple female partners, they tend to be more aggressive, and they have less invested in their children than females do. In humans, the differences between males and females are not as great as they are, say, in elephant seals—whose males keep harems. Most human males don’t. In a few bird species, the opposite is true: females have multiple male partners. Humans are closer to the middle of this spectrum. Males are more likely than females to seek out multiple partners, compete with one another, and make a smaller investment in their children. And that’s reflected in our conceptions of men and women.