Do Fathers Matter?: What Science Is Telling Us About the Parent We've Overlooked (15 page)

But there were differences. About half of the infants showed a preference for mother over father. Another quarter of them showed a preference for their fathers, and most of the rest showed equal preference for both. The findings were the same whether the infants were girls or boys.

When Kotelchuck interviewed the parents after the sessions, he asked how they shared child care at home. He was surprised to discover that only 25 percent of these middle-class Boston fathers had regular daily responsibility for their kids. Nearly half had never changed a diaper. There was a telling link between the experimental data and the information on home care, however: those infants who didn’t seem to relate to their fathers in the strange situation experiment came from the families reporting the least amount of child care delivered by the father.

When Michael Lamb began his research just after Kotelchuck’s, he used a different strategy. He ditched the strange situation experiment and looked at how infants behaved in their homes when they were distressed and wanted to be held. As most parents know, infants don’t generally like to be held or comforted by others—even friends—when people they’re attached to are around. Lamb chose ten infant girls and ten boys and observed them in their homes, with both parents present, when the children were seven months old and then again at eight months. Each observation lasted about two hours.

He found that fathers and mothers both played with the infants about the same amount of time, but infants responded more positively to the fathers. And fathers tended to be more physical and idiosyncratic with their games. Mothers held infants much more than fathers did, but fathers were more likely to play with children when they picked them up. Infants clearly recognized the difference—even though the difference between the children’s reactions to their mothers and to their fathers was not anywhere near as stark as attachment theory would have predicted.

More recent studies have broadened understanding of the close links between fathers and infants first found by Lamb. Fathers, like mothers, quickly recognize the unique qualities of their own children by touch, even when they can’t see or smell them. Men who were exposed to their newborn children for only sixty minutes were able to recognize their own infants merely by touching their hands. Mothers, who had spent more time with the babies before testing, were also able to recognize their newborns by their faces, but both mothers and fathers did best by touching the newborns’ hands.

Lamb and his successors were finally demonstrating in the lab what many of us instinctively know: that fathers often show the same elation as mothers when their children are born and the same anxiety about leaving them, and are similarly nurturing and attentive. Fathers also pick up on cues that their infants are hungry, and they engage in baby talk, speaking slowly and repeating themselves.

But fathers, as we’ve seen, do differ from mothers in some respects. For one thing, they have a unique response to their babies’ cries. This is being investigated by James E. Swain, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of Michigan. He began his research with mothers, putting them in fMRI machines (short for functional magnetic resonance imaging) to scan their brains and find out what happened when they heard infants cry. The fMRI scanners are capable of picking up activity in different regions of the brain. Swain wanted to know if the brain’s response to an infant’s cry differed from its response to a similarly unpleasant sound that didn’t come from an infant, and whether a mother’s response to her own child’s cry differed from the response to an unrelated child’s cry. This was one way to measure the mother’s empathy for her child—especially important with infants, who have important needs that they make clear mostly by nonverbal communication.

He began by scanning the brains of first-time mothers while they listened to thirty seconds of their own infants’ crying, compared to thirty seconds of other sounds with similar patterns and intensity. And the scans were done on the mothers twice—first at two to four weeks after their children were born, and again at twelve to sixteen weeks postpartum. Then he repeated the scans with fathers.

Swain found substantial differences in the way parents’ brains responded to their own infants’ cries versus those of other infants. Many parents say they can walk into a day care center with dozens of children and pick out their own baby’s cry. The work provided some scientific validation for that claim. While mothers showed greater activation in some brain regions than fathers, both showed positive responses to their own babies.

I met Swain at his office in Ann Arbor, on the University of Michigan’s corporate-style North Campus. Swain, who said he is not a father but has recently married “and might become one,” has long been interested in human growth and development, and how animals, including humans, develop from their earliest moments. Such things can be tricky to study, particularly because it’s often hard to know whether children’s behavior is the result of their genes, their environment, or both.

Swain recalled an earlier case in which researchers had been fooled. They were doing studies of rats that showed that mothers who frequently licked their pups gave birth to pups who grew up to do the same to their offspring. Likewise, mothers who were “low lickers” passed that quality on to their offspring. “Everyone guessed it was genetic,” Swain said. The story was almost too good to be true. These findings were appearing at a time when researchers were discarding Freud’s notion that infant and childhood relationships were overwhelmingly responsible for the kinds of adults that children turned out to be. Now it looked as if genes were the prime influence on developing animals, including children.

But that explanation quickly evaporated when researchers tried a different experiment: “They switched the pups,” Swain said. Offspring of high lickers were given to low-licking mothers, and vice versa. It was immediately clear that genetics was
not
responsible for the difference. “The environment predicted their behavior, not the background genetics,” Swain said. The offspring acquired the behavior of their adoptive parents, not their biological parents. And there was more. “Through some magical process, the licking and grooming alters the expression of cortisol receptors in the hippocampus. The genes that regulate the expression of these stress receptors are altered, so those pups that were licked a lot are less sensitive to stress.” Licking was capable of actually changing the pups’ brains. This was an important reminder that genetics is only part of what makes a good father.

After he finished medical school, Swain moved to Yale to study with James F. Leckman, an authority on obsessive-compulsive disorder. Leckman was pursuing the idea that parenting could be thought of as a particular kind of obsessive-compulsive behavior. People with obsessive-compulsive disorder sometimes wash their hands endlessly or check the door dozens of times to be sure it’s locked, along with other repetitive behaviors. I asked Swain whether a similar thing was happening to me when I would sometimes check my sleeping infants every ten minutes to make sure they were breathing. He told me that a little parental obsession and compulsion in the days and weeks after a child’s birth could actually boost a child’s chances of survival. So I wasn’t crazy (well, not entirely), and my personal obsessions were, at least partly, a good thing. I stopped obsessing over my obsession. I hope I can one day do the same with respect to the viselike grip I apply to my children’s arms when we’re crossing the street.

Leckman took this idea of parenting as obsession seriously enough to do a study of obsessions in parents. He and his colleagues recruited forty-one couples and interviewed them before the birth of their children, two weeks after the births, and again at three months. They were asked about such things as their thoughts about the baby’s well-being and growth; the number of times they checked on the baby, changed diapers, and comforted him or her; their thoughts about the baby’s future and about being a parent; the number of times they played with or talked to the baby; and their worries, anxiety, and their partner’s health.

It will come as little surprise that parents were indeed preoccupied by their children. Mothers reported thinking about the baby an average of fourteen hours per day and fathers seven hours per day. This preoccupation, as the researchers had predicted, peaked about two weeks after birth and subsided by three months after their children’s births. The effect was strongest in mothers—but significant in fathers as well. Fathers showed a more striking increase in preoccupation from the eighth month of pregnancy to the time of birth. The birth of a child is “associated with an altered mental state for both parents … a time of heightened sensitivity and preoccupation. It is a time of increased responsibility, and a time when things need to be as perfect as possible.” Before birth, “parents routinely experience intrusive thoughts and images of physical malformations, mental retardation, and possible health problems … After birth this landscape of worry shifts to frightening images and thoughts of dropping the infant, the infant being attacked by pets or stray animals, the infant being injured or sickened because of the parents’ inability to recognize a problem or because of their negligence.”

I’m afraid I didn’t need Leckman’s research to be persuaded that these “intrusive thoughts” can be a problem. I experience them often, and I can report that they can be disturbing and unpleasant. But I take comfort from his idea that this behavior evolved to ensure children’s survival. During our history as a species, deaths of infants and children were far more common than they are now. It’s only in the past few centuries that health care, food safety, and changes in our living arrangements have combined to push infant mortality rates below 1 percent. The intrusive thoughts that some of us experience might now have outlived their usefulness, but they were important once. And they might be still. Anxiety in new parents and obsessive-compulsive disorder do indeed resemble each other. The difference is that symptoms that can be devastating to a person with obsessive-compulsive disorder can be useful—up to a point—when caring for a new infant. I’ve often joked with my wife that our anxiety about the kids is a special kind of temporary insanity. Or perhaps not so temporary. Three of my children are grown, and while I’m now less likely to wake up at 3:00 a.m. worrying about them, I can’t say my anxiety has completely disappeared.

Leckman’s work with parental obsessions led to Swain’s research, first on mothers and then on fathers. Some of his experiments produced interesting and controversial findings. One study found that breast-feeding mothers showed greater brain response to their babies’ cries, compared to the mothers who fed their children formula. Another concluded that birth by cesarean section also affected the way a mother responded to her infant. Mothers who delivered vaginally “were significantly more responsive” to their own babies’ cry than mothers who had had cesarean sections.

On the paternal side of the equation, Swain is particularly interested in possible changes in fathers’ brains that might reflect sensitive behavior toward infants in the period from two weeks until about four months after birth. Such changes had been shown in mothers, but nobody had looked at fathers. Swain recruited sixteen fathers and assessed their relationship to their infants with a questionnaire that asked how they thought about their infants and how preoccupied they were with them. Swain also observed the fathers with their infants.

When he scanned their brains, he found significant changes during those first four months that paralleled those seen in mothers, including increased activity in the prefrontal cortex in response to looking at pictures of their infants or hearing their cries. It’s a striking finding: fathers’ brains are being sculpted and shaped by their experience of their children. And these are not random brain changes; the areas that increased in activity seemed to be associated with fathers’ motivations and moods, and their involvement with their babies.

Swain is now trying to identify the brain’s wiring diagram for these changes. “We’re interested in basic cry-response circuitry as well as what changes over time,” Swain said. “We’re still trying to pull down what is common and what is different about mothers and fathers. There are two areas that come up as common, and they both have their interesting aspects. The insula is a big way station for emotional information, and it looks like there is a direct relationship between own- versus other-baby cry and levels of parental caring thoughts, for both mothers
and
fathers.”

Beginning right after birth, mothers show activity in deeper brain structures related to pain and emotion. While fathers show similar activity in the cortex, they don’t show this other activity when tested at two to four weeks after their infant’s birth. “It might explain why it’s easier for the father to roll over when the baby cries at night,” Swain said. And it might also explain why mothers are at so much greater risk for postpartum depression, compared to fathers. But at three to four months after birth, when fathers were tested again, their brains “are lighting up in their auditory cortex and these deeper brain areas, but in a complicated pattern. It’s not the same as mothers.” Fathers are clearly wired to respond to their children; their brains are engaged.

Another way of looking for connections between parents and their infants is through the study of a phenomenon known as synchrony. It refers to mothers’ ability to match and encourage infants’ positive emotions when the two are face-to-face. If baby is happy, mother is happy, and vice versa. The psychologist Ruth Feldman at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, a former colleague of Swain’s at Yale, says it is well recognized that mothers can cycle through a range of behaviors with their infants, falling into rhythm with the baby’s nursing, crying, or kicking. “Such rhythms are intimately familiar to mothers, who were thus considered biologically equipped to match microlevel shifts in infant affect,” Feldman says. But it wasn’t known whether fathers were capable of entering this face-to-face “dance” with their infants, despite its obvious importance. Feldman decided to find out.