The myth of the tyrannical dad and the reason why there are not that many stay-at-home-dads

We start with this BBC News Article:

We tend to picture them as tyrannical patriarchs whose children were seen and not heard and lived in fear of father's punishments. It is only in recent decades - or so we imagine - that dads have become approachable, caring and committed to the wellbeing of their children. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The testimonies of fathers, and of their sons and daughters during the first half of the 20th Century, reveal just how prevalent the loving and devoted dad was.
This is not to say that corporal punishment wasn't sometimes used, or that some fathers weren't cold and distant figures. But the popular myth of the tyrannical father has seriously distorted our view of the care and commitment shown by generations of fathers towards their children.[...]

The research of academic historian Dr Julie Marie Strange, of Manchester University, reveals how the temperance movement helped demonise and create a working class folk devil father that bore little resemblance to most, who only drank in moderation, worked hard and were devoted to their children.
If schoolteachers tried to cane children who were naughty, they would often find themselves confronted by angry fathers who strongly disapproved of any physical punishment of their children - especially their daughters. Social reformers often criticised working class fathers for being too spoiling and indulging their young ones.[...]

In Professor Joanna Bourke's study of 250 working class autobiographies written during the first decades of the century, she found that "for every one who said that father did not do childcare, 14 explicitly stated that he did."

I glanced over the first comment that is listed at the end of that article. The words "thoughts provoking" were used, to describe that dads in the past were not tyrannical monsters. That is quite sad.

We continue with stay-at-home-dads and some statistical tomfoolery:

When both parents are present in the household, the Census Bureau assumes for the purposes of its “Who’s Minding the Kids?” report, that the mother is the “designated parent.” And when the designated parent is working or at school, the bureau would like to know who’s providing child care.

If the answer is Daddy, as it was 26 percent of the time when these numbers were last released, in 2005, and 32 percent of the time in 2010, the Census Bureau calls that “care.” But if Mom is caring for a child while Dad’s at work, that’s not a “child care arrangement,” but something else. Parenting, presumably. [...]

[A]ccording to the U.S. Census Bureau you only count as [stay-at-home-dad] if you have gone 52 weeks of the previous year without making any income. In fact, just looking for job, even part-time or freelance work, means you’re no longer a “stay-at-home dad,” you’re just an unemployed member of the “work force” and acting as temporary “primary caregiver” in the meantime.

(If you ever wonder why the number of stay-at-home dads is seen as so low, this is why. By this self-reported definition, the Bureau reported only 174,000 stay-at-home fathers in the U.S., perpetuating the idea that dad-as-primary caregiver is a rare thing and making those who do it out to be some sort of aberration. Yet, by their own numbers, they also reported that fully one-third of fathers with working wives regularly acted as primary caregivers for their children. One third!)

It might be interesting to have the full citations of the Study for future references:

US Census: Who's Minding the Kids? Child Care Arrangements: Spring 2010

Among fathers with a wife in the workforce, 32 percent were a regular source of care for their children under age 15, up from 26 percent in 2002, the U.S. Census Bureau reported today. Among these fathers with preschool-age children, one in five fathers was the primary caregiver, meaning their child spent more time in their care than any other type of arrangement.

Women Charge Ahead At Work, While Men Lag Behind...

...is the slightly sensationalist title of this Huffington Post article. Some numbers:

In the CNN story, reporter Jessica Dickler writes that "a growing number of dads... are staying home with the kids." The story cites statistics from the Census showing that 32 percent of fathers with a wife in the workforce took care of their children at least one day a week in 2010, an increase from 26 percent in 2002. [...] BusinessWeek's story cited different statistics from the Census: Women hold more than half of all managerial and professional positions and 23 percent of wives now out-earn their husbands.

How pregnancy affects fathers

Some interesting datapoints:

Research shows that male marmosets and cotton-top tamarins—primates that, like humans, split child-rearing duties between the mother and father—gain as much as 20 percent of their body weight while waiting for the birth of their offspring. [...] The hypothesis about the marmosets and tamarins is that the pregnancy paunch prepares a dad for the extra energy he'll expend in helping to rear his baby.

In addition, dads-to-be have elevated levels of cortisol and prolactin, hormones that are also present in high levels among mothers who are attached and responsive to their children. A father's testosterone level also drops by about a third, on average, in the first three weeks after his child is born. These hormonal shifts, which are likely sparked by exposure to the pregnant woman's hormones (there is correlational evidence that dads who spend time with moms experience the changes), mirror those experienced by mothers and may similarly prepare men for parenthood. [...]

A 2006 study found enhancements in the prefrontal cortex of the father marmoset. After childbirth, the neurons in this region showed greater connectivity, suggesting that having young children could boost the part of the brain responsible for planning and memory, skills parents need when having kids gives them more to keep track of. The neurons also had more receptors for vasopressin, a hormone that has been shown to prompt animal fathers to bond with offspring. (Receiving an injection of vasopressin, for instance, prompts a male prairie vole to cuddle and groom a youngster.)

And as usual with topics about men:

And yet despite these findings, few scientists treat the physiology of fathers as a serious subject in its own right. [...] Between 2000 and 2006, the journal Hormones and Behavior published nearly three times as many studies of mothers as of fathers, and this year the count so far is 16 to three. A 2000 review framed research into physiological fatherhood as "an opportunity to better understand maternal behavior, by studying parental behavior in the absence of pregnancy and lactation." Interest in how men's bodies prepare themselves for fatherhood only seems to matter to the extent it sheds light on mothers. Meanwhile, the ways in which dads screw up their kids is a thriving area of research.

Son/Daughter Double Standard in Parenting

I do not usually post articles without data / scienc-y stuff, but well, this F&F article is pretty interesting:

[M]others and fathers both parent boys differently than they do girls. In short, girls tend to get more of their parent’s affection, attention and protection while boys tend to be taught to not need same and to “man up.” [...]

It is indeed a double standard and the idea that even boys who are young enough to just be starting school find themselves holding the short end of the maternal affection stick should give anyone pause. And if it’s true for boys of five or six, who’s to say it’s not true for even younger ones. Come to think of it, I reported not long ago on a study out of the University of Chicago that found that sons of single mothers receive less in the way of “parental investment” than their sisters do.

But what Dell’ Antonia is writing about isn’t just single mothers, but married ones as well. There seems to be a generalized concern that boys won’t grow up to be strong, autonomous men. Needless to say, the fear that they’ll be gay is part and parcel of that.

And it comes as no surprise that popular culture is there on the sidelines cheering every dysfunctional concept of masculinity.[...]

But the main point of Dell’ Antonio’s article [the original NYT article this is all about] is the hesitancy many mothers have about showing “too much” affection to their sons. They don’t have the same problems with their daughters because our culture tells us that love and tenderness toward girls and women is OK, but the same toward boys and men can be suspect.

Obviously the problem is less one of sexual politics than it is of how best to raise children. Whatever your take on gender equality, little boys need and deserve as much love as little girls do and it’s wrong of parents not to give it to them.

If parents hesitate to do that because they fear little Andy won’t grow up to be a manly man, they need to take a closer look at what being a man is all about. Here’s a hint: they won’t find it at the movies. The usual cast of tough-guy heroes and anti-heroes that Hollywood spews out are almost exclusively bad examples of masculinity. The simple fact is that 99.9% of men bear no resemblance to them and that’s usually a good thing.

If parents need to educate themselves about what it means to be a man, they need to broaden their scope considerably. They need to look around and remember that Jesus and the Buddha were men as well as Mozart, Darwin and Einstein. So were Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Plato and Confucius. The point being that men have always come in an astonishing array of types from the King to the Warrior to the Priest to the Poet. The failure of a boy to be Rambo may just mean his success at being Rilke.

Parents should not allow themselves to be deluded by a pop culture that blinds itself to the wonder of boys and men. Few parents will produce the next Bard of Avon, but each child needs his/her parent’s love. That should never be withheld because a boy seems to be insufficiently “manly.” “Man” has a million definitions, all of which are valid and many of which are wonderful. Parents who try to confine their male children into a pinched, narrow idea of manhood do themselves and their children a grave disservice. That goes double for parents who withhold their affection from boys out of strange concern that giving it is in some way detrimental to him.

I wanted to find some data on this and went to google scholar. One study I found was not that promising in terms of sample size:

Risk Factors for Violent Behavior in Elementary School Boys: Have You Hugged Your Child Today? - Jonathan L. Sheline, MD, MS, Betty J. Skipper, PhD - 1994

The parenting practices most strongly associated with violent behavior in our study were lack of affection shown by either parent, especially fathers, and use of spanking for discipline.

As said before small sample size. I however came also across this:

Handbook of Parenting Volume 1 - Children and Parenting - Chapter 7 - Parenting Girls and Boys - Campbell Leaper - 2002

First, mothers may be more verbally stimulating than fathers when interacting with their young children. The meta-analysis of Leaper et al. (1998) indicated that across studies mothers tend to
be more talkative with their children than are fathers. In this way, mothers and fathers may offer different role models to their children about the importance of verbal expression —which might both maintain and perpetuate the stereotype that women are more talk oriented than men. Second, the meta-analysis indicated that mothers tended to be more talkative with daughters than with sons. [...]

Besides the differential amounts of talkativeness that parents may demonstrate with daughters versus sons, there may be differences in parents ’ reactions to girls ’ and boys ’ communication initiatives. Fagot and Hagan (1991) found that, among parents of 18-month-old toddlers, sons received more negative comments in response to communication attempts than did daughters. Consequently, the authors suggested, boys may find it less enjoyable to initiate talk than do girls. [...]

More physical contact has been observed in mother– daughter than in mother –son pairs during the toddler years (Austin and Braeger, 1990; Clarke-Stewart and Hevey, 1981; Lamb, Frodi, Frodi,
and Hwang, 1982) and early childhood (Benenson, Morash, and Petrakos, 1998). Fathers may also be more likely to make physical contacts and maintain closer proximity with daughters than with
sons during the toddler years (Snow, Jacklin, and Maccoby, 1983) and possibly into adolescence and adulthood (Barber and Thomas, 1986; also see Barnard and Solchany, in Vol. 3 of this Handbook; Parke, in Vol. 3 of this Handbook).

In addition to physical touch, simply talking to a child may foster a sense of closeness. If so, mothers appear to engage in more talk with daughters than with sons—as seen in the meta-analysis
of Leaper et al. (1998). The effects were especially large from infancy through early childhood — which is notable because these are the years when children typically spend the most time with their mothers. To the extent that sons are engaging in fewer conversations with their mothers, they may develop a greater sense of separateness and independence. Once again, we must be cautious when interpreting the causal direction in the pattern of results.

A third way that parents may express affection is through the use of supportive statements. The meta-analysis of Leaper et al. (1998) uncovered some trends across studies. There was a small yet significant overall trend for mothers to use more supportive statements with daughters than with sons. The pattern of results is consistent with the relatively greater emphasis on affiliation associated with the socialization of girls compared with that of boys (e.g., Block, 1983; Leaper, 2000b; Leaper, Hauser, Kremen, Powers, Jacobson, Noam, Weiss-Perry, and Follansbee, 1989).
In sum, the research literature suggests that parents may express more physical and verbal affection with daughters than with sons. In these ways, parents may both initiate and encourage interpersonal closeness during girls ’ development. [...]

Whereas the evidence for parent-gender differences in emotion talk may be mixed, studies more reliably show that parents’ talk tends to be different with daughters and sons during early childhood.
First, parents tend to discuss more emotional experiences and use more frequent and varied emotional words and references with their daughters than with their sons (Adams et al., 1995; Dunn, Bretherton, and Munn, 1987; Eisenberg, 1999; Fivush, 1998; Flannagan and Perese, 1998). Thus, parents may give their daughters more opportunities to practice emotion talk than they give their sons (see Melzi and Fern ´andez, 2001, for a possible exception under different cultural conditions).

Second, in addition to differing in the amount of emotion talk, parents tend to vary in the type of emotional talk used with girls and boys. References to sadness or discussions of sad events are
more likely with daughters than with sons (Adams et al., 1995; Fivush et al., 2000). In contrast, parent–child conversations about anger are more likely with sons than daughters (Brody, 1999;
Fivush, 1991). Anger is a self-assertive emotion, and therefore its expression is congruent with the traditional masculine role. In contrast, sadness is a more passive and self-reflective state.

A third gender-related pattern seen in the literature is that parents may teach girls and boys to think differently about emotions. With daughters, parents may tend to emphasize the emotional situation and experience itself (Fivush, 1989); with sons, they tend to discuss the causes and consequences of the emotions (Cervantes and Callanan, 1998; Fivush, 1989). Parents may thereby strengthen the notion in their children that girls should be more emotionally sensitive and understanding, whereas boys should be in control of their emotions.

Is there any evidence that variations in parents ’ emotion talk with daughters and sons may affect their children ’s own emotional development? One study suggests that there may be a relation. Dunn, Brown, Slomkowski, Tesla, and Youngblade (1991) looked at mothers ’ conversations about feelings with their 2-year-old toddlers. They found that mothers tended to discuss and explain feelings more with their daughters than with sons at this age. Approximately half a year later, there was a correlation between mothers ’ earlier emotion talk and the older child ’s level of emotion understanding. Of course, it is possible that daughters were already more advanced in emotional development at the younger age and that this influenced the mothers ’ behavior. Nonetheless, the findings of Dunn and her colleagues suggest that parents ’ behavior may have an impact on the child. Three more studies provide some corroborating evidence for the potential influence of parents on the development of gender differences in emotion expression. First, Fuchs and Thelen (1988) examined school-age children’s expected outcomes from their parents for expressing particular emotions and their stated likelihood of expressing emotions. Boys were more likely than girls to expect negative reactions for expressing sadness, and negative expectancies were related to being less likely of expressing sadness. Thus, boys may have internalized from their parents a display rule about the expression of sadness.

A second source for inferring possible parental influences comes from Bronstein, Briones, Brooks, and Cowan (1996). They carried out a longitudinal study of emotional development in children
from fifth grade (11 years of age) into late adolescence. Overall, adolescent girls reported more support for emotional expression than did the adolescent boys. [...]

Finally, Brody (1997) offered evidence suggesting that nontraditional upbringings may influence girls ’ and boys ’ emotional development. She looked at the relation between fathers’ amount
of involvement with their children and the children ’s emotional expression. Fathers ’ involvement appeared to influence daughters and sons differently. Sons of highly involved fathers were more
likely to express nontraditional emotions such as fear and warmth. Daughters of highly involved fa-thers were less likely to express fear and sadness. Thus, it would seem that involved fathers fostered tenderness in sons and self-confidence in daughters. [...]

Gender-role options are more rigidly defined for boys than for girls during child-hood, as illustrated by the different connotations that the terms sissy and tomboy evoke (Martin, 1990).

That was a lot and that was a book full of studies which I skimmed through and copied interesting tidbits in. However, there seems to be a scientific basis for those claims, I have my data and can finally publish this post.....YEAAAAAAAH.

It’s not baby-sitting when Daddy does it.

Oh U.S. Census Bureau, you silly sometimes:

When both parents are present in the household, the Census Bureau assumes for the purposes of its “Who’s Minding the Kids?” report, that the mother is the “designated parent.” And when the designated parent is working or at school, the bureau would like to know who’s providing child care.

If the answer is Daddy, as it was 26 percent of the time when these numbers were last released, in 2005, and 32 percent of the time in 2010, the Census Bureau calls that “care.” But if Mom is caring for a child while Dad’s at work, that’s not a “child care arrangement,” but something else. Parenting, presumably.

“Regardless of how much families have changed over the last 50 years women are still primarily responsible for work in the home,” said Lynda Laughlin of the Census Bureau’s Fertility and Family Statistics Branch. “We try to look at child care as more of a form of work support.” A mother, said Ms. Laughlin, is “not only caring for the child only while Dad works. She’s probably caring for the child 24 hours and so Dad is able to go to work regardless.”

That bears repeating. If, every morning, I go off to work and my husband stays home with a child, that’s a “child care arrangement” in the eyes of this governmental institution. If the reverse is true, it’s not. I asked Ms. Laughlin if the Census Bureau collected data on the hours mothers spend offering “work support” to their husbands. “No,” she said. “We don’t report it in that direction.”

Some NOMAS citations

As recently seen on reddit, some citations from their site:

NOMAS joined an amicus curiae brief prepared by the California Women’s Law Center, Queens’ Bench Bar Association of the San Francisco Bay Area, California Alliance Against Domestic Violence and several other California organizations in support of the shelters that addresses why it is important for women’s physical and psychological well-being that they have available domestic violence shelters that do not permit adult men.

-from here

There is a disturbing national trend toward laws mandating joint custody [...] Furthermore, court mandated joint custody is not in the best interests of mothers.

-from here

How can a dad – unemployed or working outside the home – be a good father? Not by fighting for custody or demanding “shared parenting” after divorce or breakup. The best way a dad can be a good father is by providing support to the mother of his children, including both financial and emotional support. [...] If dad wants to make sure his children thrive he must do whatever he can to ensure that their mother is thriving. Stop fighting for “shared parenting” or sole custody if you are in court. [...] So dads, the message is clear. If you want your children to grow up to be happy and healthy adults, the best thing you can do for them is to make sure that their mother is comfortable, healthy, and happy.

-from here

After years of exploring a wide range of batterer program models, the National Council of NOMAS has given its full support to the New York Model for Batterer Programs (www.nymbp.org). This model was determined to be most in keeping with NOMAS principles and beliefs about sexism, domestic violence and batterer programs.

[From the nymbp site which can also be linked to several NOMAS / Pro-feminists]

Women can be mean, abusive and violent toward their intimate partners. The perspective we share on this issue, however, is systemic and not individual. History and culture point to the pervasiveness of men’s entitlements, across the globe, to control women’s lives. This is the backdrop in which domestic violence became a social norm. This is fully borne out by statistics, no matter what reporting flaws are conceded. Another point is that typically, male domestic violence offenders control, dominate and terrorize their partners. Also typically, women who abuse are defending, fighting back, retaliating and rarely causing fear or disturbing the flow of their partner’s lives. It is noteworthy that the systemic supports of men’s domestic abuse are exposed by the harsh differential in punishment women get when tried for similar crimes.

-from here and here

Talk about disconnect from reality... Also recently from Reddit (hattip to Kill_the_rich), apparently Barry Goldstein who is co-chair of the NOMAS Task Group on Child Custody lost his law degree for lying on a child custody case. Oh my.

More about fathers via F&F

Some interesting facts about fathers as seen on F&F:

- [T]he Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey that shows that, when paid and unpaid work are added together, men and women do essentially identical amounts. Men do more paid work, women do more domestic work including childcare. No one’s the slave, no one’s the master, and no one has his feet up while the other toils.

- [T]he recent Families and Work Institute survey showing that fathers have far more work-family conflict than mothers do and have for about 30 years.

- 44% — The percentage of working dads who are sole financial providers, up from 2010, according to a careerbuilder.com survey. More than one in five work more than 50 hours a week, and one in five bring home work at least three days a week.

- Three hours — The average time working dads spend with their children every workday, according to a survey by the Families and Work Institute.

- 80% — The percentage of dads who report that they change diapers as often as or more often than their wives when they’re home, in an Ipsos poll for Pampers. Pearlman complains about dads who refuse or don’t even know how. (The women polled say they change diapers more often but don’t say their husbands shirk diaper duty altogether.)

- 36% — The percentage of young children who had 15 or more outings with their father in the previous month, according to the census. Another 24% had eight to 14 outings; 37% had one to seven outings. Only a sliver had none, for any number of reasons. (These can be just with dad or with both mom and dad.) Pearlman describes dads who never take their kids out.

- From a Pew Research study: “Almost all fathers who live with their children take an active role in their day-to-day lives through activities such as sharing meals, helping with homework and playing.”

Clearing up my saved articles F&F edition

A collection of interesting studies found on F&F:

We start with "a paper presented by Dr. William Fabricius of Arizona State University entitled “The Bad News about Divorce and Children Is Worse than We Thought, but the Good News Is Better than We Thought.”:

His own research into a cohort of 1,030 high school students indicates that

the effect of divorce on the father-child relationship depends heavily on the amount of parenting time the child has with the father. At equal parenting time, the quality of the relationship was at its highest; at the lowest levels of parenting time with father (0% to 15%) the quality of the relationship was at its worst.

That is, the more time a child has with his/her father post divorce up to 50%, the better the relationship between the two. More time beyond 50% doesn’t seem to improve matters. The implications of that for public policy should be obvious.

The bad news is that a large percentage – almost 40% — of the students had these minimal levels of parenting time with their fathers when they were growing up, and had damaged relationships with their fathers as young adults.

So, the failure of courts to grant fathers greater custody and to enforce visitation has a direct and negative effect on children both during childhood and after.

[...]When we consider that almost 40% of the students had had minimal parenting time with their fathers, and on average as young adults had damaged relationships with their fathers, and when we link that with the lifetime health outcomes of young adults who had reported similarly distant relationships with their parents, we can see that the bad news looks worse than we thought it was.

Another study is cited about the link between absent fathers and longevity:

What is now called the Longevity Project by current researchers, began in 1921. It continued through the death of its founder, Lewis Terman, and the involvement of a couple of generations of follow-up researchers. It’s still going on. The purpose is to find what factors contribute to longevity and which ones do the opposite. [...] The early death of a parent had no measurable effect on children’s life spans or mortality risk, but the long-term health effects of broken families were often devastating. Parental divorce during childhood emerged as the single strongest predictor of early death in adulthood. The grown children of divorced parents died almost five years earlier, on average, than children from intact families.

There was an interesting follow up for the above study, we talk about equal parenting now:

There is now a strong consensus among the general public that equal parenting time is best for the child. Large majorities favor it in all the locales and among all the demographic
groups in the United States and Canada in which this question has been asked, and across several variations in question format.

For example, in a nationwide poll done at the insistence of the Canadian Parliament, 78% of those asked said they “strongly preferred” or “somewhat preferred” a presumption of equal parenting post-divorce. In Massachusetts in 2004, 85% of voters in a non-binding referendum voted in favor of a presumption of equally shared parenting in custody cases.

Those have been followed up by recent studies done by Fabricius and Dr. Sanford Braver. In 2010, Fabricius asked a cohort of people waiting to serve on juries in Tucson the same question that Bay State residents were asked in the non-binding referendum. Some 87% of Arizonans asked favored the presumption of equally shared parenting.

This year, Braver, Fabricius, et al went further and designed a study that confronted respondents with various hypothetical fact situations and asked them to, in effect, be the judge, i.e. to “issue a custody order” in each hypothetical case.

When parents in the cases were said to have done about equal amounts of childcare during the marriage, 69% of respondents said they should have equal parenting time post-divorce. When childcare was radically unequal, almost half of respondents still awarded equal parenting time.

[...]Interestingly, fathers were more likely to be punished for instigating conflict than were mothers. Only 4% of respondents awarded equal parenting time to instigating fathers while 21% gave equal time to mothers responsible for conflict.

And with the next article it turns out it was mostly all about one survey. Now Robert Franklin argues against the researchers claim that fathers don't bargain hard enough:

To examine whether the residential time of children was related to the type of decision, cases in which there were no risk factors for either parent were compared. For agreed cases, 64% of the mothers received the majority of time, and 22% of mothers and fathers received equal time (see Exhibit 6). For the few contested cases, 67% of mothers received the majority of time, but only 5% of mothers and fathers received equal time.

So according to the Washington State data, contesting matters tends to be a bad idea for fathers. Certainly, those data aren’t definitive. They don’t tell us who’s contesting what and again the sample size isn’t large because the vast majority of cases are agreed to by the parties.

But what the data suggest is that things go better for dads if they don’t contest the case. Stated another way, they stand a better chance with their ex than they do with the judge.

In agreed cases, mothers get majority time in 64% of cases while in contested cases they rate goes up to 67%. That’s not much, but if a dad is going for equal time, contesting the matter is a bad idea. His chances of winning equal custody drop from 22% to 5% if he contests the matter.

Fabricius might argue that the same holds true for mothers. After all, her chances of getting equal time drop the same as dad’s - from 22% to 5%.

But that argument ignores one large, if inconvenient, truth. When a father fails to get equal time, he likely gets less; when a mother does, she likely gets more. So the drop from 22% to 5% of equal custody for both men and women when cases are contested masks an important fact - it’s a win for her and a loss for him.

Another fact that suggests bias against fathers and the idea of equal parenting is the fact that, although the idea has been around for many years, no jurisdiction (with the partial and short-lived exception of Australia) has ever passed a law mandating a presumption of equally shared parenting.

Granted, judges aren’t state legislators and vice versa, but the fact that proposed statutes establishing the presumption invariably fail surely tells us something about how fathers are viewed. Combine that with Fabricius and Braver’s conclusion that there’s widespread public support for equal parenting and we’re left with an unavoidable question - “why don’t legislatures do the will of the people in the case of equal parenting?”

Pretty good stuff. F&F almost always delivers. As usual I suggest you read it all.

We continue with data on shared parenting:

[From CHILD CUSTODY, ACCESS AND PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITY: by Dr. Edward Kruk of the University of British Columbia]

A recent meta-analysis of the major North American studies comparing sole and joint physical custody arrangements has shown that children in joint custody arrangements fare significantly better on all adjustment measures than children who live in sole custody arrangements (Bauserman, 2002). Bauserman compared child adjustment in joint physical and joint legal custody settings with sole (maternal and paternal) custody settings, and also intact family settings, examined children’s general adjustment, family relationships, self-esteem, emotional and behavioral adjustment, divorce-specific adjustment, as well as the degree and nature of ongoing conflict between parents. On every measure of adjustment, children in joint physical custody arrangements were faring significantly better than children in sole custody arrangements: “Children in joint custody arrangements had fewer behavior and emotional problems, higher self-esteem, and better family relations and school performance than children in sole custody arrangements.” The positive outcomes of joint custody were also evident among high-conflict couples.

[...]Sole maternal custody often leads to parental alienation and father absence, and father absence is associated with negative child outcomes. Eighty five per cent of youth in prison are fatherless; 71 per cent of high school dropouts are fatherless; 90 per cent of runaway children are fatherless; and fatherless youth exhibit higher levels of depression and suicide, delinquency, promiscuity and teen pregnancy, behavioural problems and illicit and licit substance abuse (Statistics Canada, 2005; Crowder and Teachman, 2004; Ellis et al., 2003; Ringback Weitoft et al., 2003; Jeynes, 2001; Leonard et al., 2005; McCue Horwitz et al,, 2003; McMunn, 2001; Margolin and Craft, 1989; Blankenhorn, 1995; Popenoe, 1996; Vitz, 2000; Alexander, 2003). These studies also found that fatherless youth are more likely to be victims of exploitation and abuse, as father absence through divorce is strongly associated with diminished self-concepts in children (Parish, 1987).

[...]Children of divorce want equal time with their parents and consider shared parenting to be in their best interests. Seventy per cent of children of divorce believe that equal amounts of time with each parent is the best living arrangement for children, and children who have had equal time arrangements have the best relations with each of their parents after divorce (Fabricius, 2003).

[...]From the perspective of children, such de facto sole custody arrangements are woefully inadequate, often resulting in the loss of one of their primary caregivers. From the perspective of both international conventions (U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child) and reports such as that of the Special Joint House of Commons-Senate Committee on Child Custody and Access (1998), such arrangements undermine children’s fundamental need for both parents actively and responsibly involved in their lives.

More findings from the NSWC Study

I blogged about that before. Now F&F have some posts up with their analysis which is always worth reading it. Excerpts:

“Work-family conflict” is defined as how much each interferes with the other. The FWI compared mothers and fathers in dual-earner households in 1977 and 2008. The percentage of mothers reporting work-family conflict remained statistically the same (41% in 1977; 47% in 2008)over the 31 years while the percentage of fathers increased dramatically from 35% to 60%.

The authors sought to explain the change and the imbalance between mothers and fathers. What they found was what they call the “new male mystique.” That’s obviously a nod to Betty Friedan, but in this case the term means “traditional views about men’s role as breadwinners in combination with emerging gender role values that encourage men to participate in family life and a workplace that does not fully support these new roles have created pressure for men to, essentially, do it all in order to have it all.”

In other words, men still view themselves as primarily breadwinners, but have taken on the additional role of father as well. Those two things combined with employers who aren’t inclined to accommodate fathering activities make for conflict. How can a dad work and earn as much as he feels he needs to and still spend enough time with his kids?

[...]Increasing job demands, the blurring of boundaries between work and home life, declining job security and flat earnings have made it more challenging for men to live up to the new male mystique, thereby contributing to an increased probability of work-family conflict.

[...]Our data show that there is no statistically significant difference between men and women on these views—40% of men and 37% of women somewhat or strongly agree with traditional attitudes about gender role values.

[...]Fathers want to work fewer hours were asked in this study why they don’t reduce their work hours. We find:
• 47% say they need the money they earn by working long hours, whether or not their spouse earns more money than they do.
• 16% say they could not keep their jobs if they worked fewer hours.
• 14% say they need to work long hours to keep up with the demands of their job.

[..]So why is it that 60% of fathers but only 47% of mothers report significant levels of work-family conflict?

I think the answer is obvious - mothers work less than men when they work and are more likely than fathers to not do paid work. The authors are clear on their finding that it is specifically work, not family, that is the cause of work-family conflict. So it stands to reason that the parent who works less experiences less work-family conflict.

In fact, among fathers, those who work more have more conflict than those who work less, so it’s not surprising that the same is true of mothers.

Pretty interesting. The conclusion was spot on:

The lesson seems clear. We can try to wheedle employers into being more flexible, but that’s unlikely to make much of an impact on employer behavior. But what we can do, individual couple by individual couple, is to even out the work and the childcare between fathers and mothers. That way the work-family conflict will be evened out as well.

An example of female privilege or who has the upper hand in relationships?

Read this and tell me if you see anything wrong with it?

A few years ago she had a baby – a beautiful strong-minded little girl – and after much toss and turn – she decided that she was not going to return to work as a teacher. So now she is a stay at home mom. [...] This is like the best mom ever, a woman who studies and thinks out all her moves as a mom – what food her daughter should eat, what fabrics should be close to her skin, how much television is too much television – or is she better off with non at all? This woman who washes her own diapers because she’s worried about the earth and yes, she has a partner – who happens to be a man – who works day and night so that she can stay home and raise their daughter in the way she thinks is best. This is a job, and important one, is it not? It is also a job she loves and one that she feels has great meaning for her.

She decides that she stays at home and raises their daughter in a way she thinks is best. A job she loves and has great meaning for her and well, he works day and night to make that happen. Good for her it seems.

I am not saying anything about the relationship at question. I don't know how they came to the conclusion how to live their life. [EDIT: Feministcupcake made it clear in the comments that their friends have an egalitarian relationship] The way the author writes about her friend makes it seem as there is no "we" in this relationship. The role of the father is down-played (she raises their daughter in a way she thinks is best) and it seems he has no say in the matter at all (her decision) and just has to work to make it happen.

When it comes to relationships it seems women have the upper hand, or society expects women to have the upper hand or the final say. This goes beyond stereotypes of nagging women:

Of the 1,260 men and women whom Pew pollsters surveyed over the summer [in 2008], 43% responded that the woman makes most of the major decisions for the family, with 31% saying that the couple makes most decisions together. There was a small difference (within the margin of error) between the control exerted by wives who earn more than their husbands and those who earn less (46% versus 42%). But in both cases, women wielded sole decision-making power far more than men did, indicating that what "father knows best" is when to defer to mom.

Certainly that was what University of Iowa researchers found last year [2007] when they measured how couples negotiate conflict over household decisions. That study not only confirmed that men will usually go along with their wives but found that when couples do disagree, wives are far more persuasive than husbands in changing their spouses' minds.

[... T]he researchers saw that when spouses engaged in debate, the women gained more ground than their husbands did. "[The women] were communicating more powerful messages and men were responding to those messages by agreeing," Mr. Vogel stated in a press release.

The hypothesis that men hold more sway in relationships because they typically make more money didn't play out.

If a bigger paycheck did mean more power in any area of family decision making, the most likely one would be finances. But even there women are in charge, with more women than men in the Pew survey saying that they manage the couple's budget and wives in the Iowa study winning out over husbands in money disagreements. According to Pew, 45% of women said they hold the family purse strings compared to 37% of men.

This despite two-thirds of the couples reporting that the man had the higher income. In fact, in recent years a substantial amount of research has shown that wives lose some of their household decision-making power when they earn more than their husbands, possibly because by spending fewer hours in the home they forfeit claims to certain household "expertise."

[.. A]dvertisers have been tracking the buying habits of American families since the 1940s. What they have found is that women made more of the household purchasing decisions before the advent of the feminist movement and that they make more of the purchasing decisions now, regardless of how big or small their paychecks are. These marketing surveys have been remarkably consistent, and they haven't changed much in the past 60 years.

To be fair, many of the scholarly studies' conclusions include a "final say" contingency -- many husbands claim that they have veto power when they feel very strongly about an issue. But consumer research shows that with the exception of what car to buy and when to buy it, men rarely claim strong enough feelings to override their wives.

"Across all decision-making realms, it tilts to the woman," noted Rich Morin, the Pew study's lead author. "I was surprised by the percentage of men who made none of the decisions in any of the areas. A significant percentage were just bystanders."

[...] The general consensus of sociologists is that, whereas a woman's marital satisfaction is dependent on a combination of economic, emotional and psychological realities, a man's marital satisfaction is most determined by one factor: how happy his wife is. When she is happy, he is. Working within this framework, most husbands are unwilling to dig in their heels on any issue unless they have a tremendous incentive to do so.

Warren Farrell wrote about this, too. From "Women can´t hear what men don´t say" [p.21-22]:

Researchers find that when only one sex expresses argument-provoking feelings, it is likely to be the wife - by a ratio of almost six to one (85 percent vs 15 percent). When both sexes participate but one dominates, women are about twice as likely to dominate. Overall, women are more willing to initiate conflict, no willing to escalate conflict, better able to handle it when it occurs, and, when they have initiated it, are quicker to get over it.

These findings come from numerous sources. They are found among couples of high, medium, and low socio-economic status. They are found using a variety of methodologies: the couples at themselves acknowledge the gap, and, much more reliably, researchers who systematically observe couples verify the couple's own assessments.

Probably the most respected researcher in the field is John Gottman at the University of Washington. He records pulse rates, heart output, skin conductance, and other indicators of stress. Then he videotapes the couples to observe facial expressions and body language. He does not ask the couples to fight, since that would be artificial. Instead, he basically works with the couple and when a major air are of disagreement naturally even though this, he asks them to discuss it and attempts to resolve it. When a fight naturally occurs, the equipment is there to record it.

Gottman found that men are more intimidated by angry women than women are by angry men. Men are more stressed by marital arguments, while women are more comfortable with emotional confrontation and are better at it.

Even in the feminist movement, the medium is the message: feminists express anger even as the message is that women cannot express anger; men repress anger even as they are judged to be the sex that has no problem expressing it! We often hear we have a battle of the sexes when, in fact, we have a war in which only one side has shown up. (Men put their heads into the sand and hope the bullets will miss!)

Withdrawal is not the way men do battle with men. It is the way men do battle with women. Because the purpose of doing battle with men was to prepare men to protect women from conflict, not to be the source of conflict.

It is kind of funny when you realize that the titel of the first post I linked was "Social Justice is about everyone, isn’t it?". Yes, it is. One day this might include a more egalitarian view of relationships.

A short note on maternal gatekeeping...

Let us keep this scientific...

The study of 1,023 couples from 20 large cities in the USA found mothers were protective of their caregiving and educational engagement with the child but were less so for playtime activities that "were not considered threats to the mother's caregiving identity," the paper says.

Other gatekeeping research co-written by Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, an assistant professor of child development at Ohio State University in Columbus, is significant because it studied actual behaviors rather than just beliefs, and of the 97 couples participating, fathers were more involved in daily care of infants when they received active encouragement from the wife or partner. 

"This study provides perhaps the best evidence to date that the phenomenon of maternal gatekeeping exists and that, under some conditions, it may have the potential to affect fathering behavior," says the study, published last year in the Journal of Family Psychology.

Feminism blamed for ‘erosion of manhood’

Straight out of Manila onto your screen:

Feminism blamed for ‘erosion of manhood’

By Lito Zulueta
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 03:58:00 01/24/2009

MANILA, Philippines—A high-ranking Vatican official currently in Manila has warned of the erosion of manhood and the “crisis in fatherhood” that have resulted in millions of children worldwide without a father or enjoying emotionally healthy relations with one.

German Cardinal Paul Josef Cordes, president of the Pontifical Council “Cor Unum,” the Vatican dicastery (or administrative agency) on charity, aid and relief, blamed “gender mainstreaming” and “radical feminism” for attacking biological manhood and insisting that “sexual roles are learned.”

He said men are demeaned and what is held up as an ideal is a man who is feminized and emasculated, one who, in a European study, is held up to be “a sweeter man.”

“Is male identity then nothing other than a product of a special culture and the consequences of social circumstances?” Cordes asked in his speech, “Fatherhood-An Auxiliary Role?”, which was his doctorate address Friday after receiving an honorary doctorate in theology from the Pontifical University of Santo Tomas.

[...]

He said a Catholic Charities survey in the United States showed that 24 million children are living in homes without a father. He said “fatherless boys are twice as likely to be in prison; they are more likely to drop out or be expelled from school; they account for 63 percent of suicides, and 90 percent of those who run away from home.”

[...]

“A bill passed recently in Britain (‘Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill of 2008’) allows two lesbians or single mothers to conceive a child without a father; all that is needed is ‘supportive parents.’

Some newspapers hailed this as ‘the end of fatherhood.’”

He said a survey of German universities recently showed that while there were 98 university chairs “for deepening questions on womanhood,” only one existed for men.

“In Europe, psychologists and anthropologists have labored to diminish masculinity,” Cordes said. “New investigations such as that published by the Council of Europe in 1998 claim that the ‘new man’ is ‘sweeter.’

Men and fathers should be led to become more like women and mothers in their behavior and reactions. They also advocated ‘flexibility of the sexes’ in the education of children.

Cordes said the erosion of manhood and fatherhood has a negative impact on “boys’ self-understanding,” adding that even girls form their self-understanding by their relationship with fathers and men.

Fathers are “an anchor for us in cases of loss and danger,” said the German prelate. When children try to carve out their own autonomous existence from their parents, it is the father they look up to.

“From the presence of the male body, something is transmitted to the ‘I’ that makes the child blossom,” Cordes said. “Whoever as an individual has never been generated or raised in the way by his father or his fathers will have a limited self-esteem.”
- from here

Nurturing: No difference between mom and dad

Say this out loud:
"It is as cruel to take away a child from his mother than to take away a child from his father."
"There is no special mothers feeling for a kid."
"Mothers are not better at nurturing children"

Here is the proof:

Quote:

By Joel Leyden Israel News Agency Jerusalem ----June 3 ...... It was not easy writing the above headline. But when Psychology Today, one of the most respected lay journals on clinical psychology releases research illustrating that fathers are empowered biologically no differently than women when it comes to nurturing children, all keywords are needed. The Psychological Today story: The Making of a Modern Dad, by Douglas Carlton Abrams illustrates in vivid, scientific detail how fathers are no different in their biological programming than mothers when raising children. That divorced dads who "feel" a need to be with their children, is not only an emotional reaction but a biological one as well. This evidence hits hard at social workers, family court judges and elected legislators who abide by archaic research and outdated laws which state that it is in the best interest of the child to be with the divorced mother - not the divorced father. "Here is the first hard evidence that men are biologically prepared for fatherhood," says Psychology Today. "In fact, this is the first evidence that to nurture is part of man's nature." This medical evidence would explain why father's rights groups such as Fathers 4 Justice in England, the US, Italy and in Israel would risk getting arrested in their high profile protests to see their children with equal access. The research, which clearly illustrates how a father biologically responds to the birth of his children, also explains why thousands of men become clinically depressed when separated from their children to the point of actually committing suicide. Perhaps the 1979 Dustin Hoffman movie Kramer Vs. Kramer was society's first major wake up call that dads were no different in wanting to care and protect their children. Years passed since the making of that landmark film where hundreds of thousands of caring, loving and responsible dads were separated from their children by narcissistic mothers, social workers and family court judges. These city appointed social workers and family court judges who believed that it was best for the children to be with their mothers were totally unaware of the devastating effects of their actions. Rather than encouraging the dads to be dads, they alienated an entire generation of fathers who simply gave up in trying to fight the system. Perverted governmental systems which supported the few moms (most mothers encourage unlimited or equal contact) who used their small children as potent emotional weapons against their former husbands as the national and local governments practiced gender bias discrimination. "Here is the first hard evidence that men are biologically prepared for fatherhood," says Psychology Today. "In fact, this is the first evidence that to nurture is part of man's nature." The results of a survey based on pooled data from 80,000 adults suggest that parental divorce has an adverse effect on children's lives compared with those raised in intact two-parent families, adults who experienced a parental divorce had lower psychological well-being, more behavioral problems, less education, lower job status, a lower standard of living, lower marital satisfaction, a heightened risk of divorce, a heightened risk of being a single parent, and poorer physical health. The view that children adapt readily to divorce and show no lingering negative consequences is clearly inconsistent with the cumulative research in this area. Some studies show that children who experience the death of a parent exhibit problems similar to those of children who 'lose' a parent through divorce. These findings support the view that the absence of a parent for any reason is problematic for children. Each year, over 1 million American children suffer the divorce of their parents; moreover, half of the children born this year to parents who are married will see their parents divorce before they turn 18. Mounting evidence in social science journals demonstrates that the devastating physical, emotional, and financial effects that divorce is having on these children will last well into adulthood and affect future generations. Among these broad and damaging effects are the following. Children whose parents have divorced are increasingly the victims of abuse. They exhibit more health, behavioral, and emotional problems, are involved more frequently in crime and drug abuse, and have higher rates of suicide. Children of divorced parents perform more poorly in reading, spelling, and math. They also are more likely to repeat a grade and to have higher drop-out rates and lower rates of college graduation. Families with children that were not poor before the divorce see their income drop as much as 50 percent. Almost 50 percent of the parents with children that are going through a divorce move into poverty after the divorce. Religious worship, which has been linked to better health, longer marriages, and better family life, drops after the parents divorce. The divorce of parents, even if it is amicable, tears apart the fundamental unit of American society. Today, according to the US Federal Reserve Board's 1995 Survey of Consumer Finance, only 42 percent of children aged 14 to 18 live in a "first marriage" family--an intact two-parent married family. It should be no surprise to find that divorce is having such profound effects on society. Restoring the importance of marriage to society and the welfare of children will require politicians and civic leaders to make this one of their most important tasks. It also will require a modest commitment of resources to pro-marriage programs. A 2004 UK study confirmed that children who have contact with their fathers following a family break-up suffer fewer behavioral problems than those who don't have such contact. The researchers found that children who have a close relationship with their natural father after their parents divorce "are likely to be less disorderly, anxious or aggressive," according to a summary published in the Manchester News. They also found that children who had infrequent or no contact with their non-resident fathers "were more likely to externalise and internalise problems". Last year, The New York Times addressed father's and children's rights in it's Sunday Magazine cover story: The Rise of the Fathers' Custody Movement. The news story focused on the struggle of divorced dads in both the UK and the US to gain shared parenting, equal access and or joint custody with their children. Divorced fathers and their children in Israel presently suffer from gender bias discrimination by the Israel Knesset, family courts, the police and local child welfare departments. Blatant discrimination and the forced separation of father from child stems from an outdated law passed by the Israel Knesset in 1962. The Family Custodian Act of 1962 clearly states that all children under the age of six will automatically have custody under their mother, unless the mother is violent, drug abuser or negligent. Joint custody in Israel is rare. Most couples who divorce in Israel find it difficult to decide on anything together. Without the cooperation of both parents in Israel, their is no joint custody or shared parenting. Israel family courts will only accept joint custody arrangements when both sides agree. The father is cast away by the mother, the justice and child welfare systems in Israel as a second class citizen. The dad turns into a "cash machine" paying child support every month while being denied equal access to their children. As a result, children become alienated from their fathers suffering from Parental Child Alienation Syndrome, crying from the immediate and long term adverse behavioral effects of divorce and separation for years to come. The Israel Fathers Rights Association, Horut Shava, Fathers 4 Justice Israel and the Israel Fathers Advocacy Council with the aid of several leading and respected child psychologists are now preparing material and expert testimony for the Knesset to change a law from 1962 which has destroyed the basic civil rights of both divorced fathers and children. A final note from this writer before we review the findings of Psychology Today's latest research. I am at my computer writing this Internet news story about divorced fathers and their children. Your children and mine. I could be surfing Jdate or another online dating service. But I gather that my testosterone level is kind of low or simply that my biological love for my kids and seeing all parents with their children outweighs any other earthly concern. The following is from Psychology Today: When his wife gave birth, Hudnut arranged his practice so he could be home to take care of his son, Seamus, two days a week; he sees patients on the other three workdays. "It was a very natural transition," he reports. "I'm grateful to have the opportunity my father never had." Part of a new generation of men who are redefining fatherhood and masculinity, Hudnut, who is 33, is unwilling to accept the role of absentee provider that his father's generation assumed. With mothers often being the breadwinners of the family, many young fathers are deciding that a man's place can also be in the home—part-time or even full-time. According to census figures, one in four dads takes care of his preschooler during the time the mother is working. The number of children who are raised by a primary-care father is now more than 2million and counting. By all measures, fathers, even those who work full-time, are more involved in their children's lives than ever before. According to the Families and Work Institute in New York City, fathers now provide three-fourths of the child care mothers do, up from one-half 30 years ago. Is father nurture natural? Many men and women wonder if all of this father care is really natural. According to popular perceptions, men are supposedly driven by their hormones (primarily testosterone) to compete for status, to seek out sex and even to be violent—conditions hardly conducive to raising kids. A recent article in Reader's Digest, "Why Men Act As They Do," is subtitled "It's the Testosterone, Stupid." Calling the hormone "a metaphor for masculinity," the article concludes, "...testosterone correlates with risk: physical, criminal, and personal." Don't men's testosterone-induced chest-beating and risk-taking limit their ability to cradle and comfort their children? Two Canadian studies suggest that there is much more to masculinity than testosterone. While testosterone is certainly important in driving men to conceive a child, it takes an array of other hormones to turn men into fathers. And among the best fathers, it turns out, testosterone levels actually drop significantly after the birth of a child. If manhood includes fatherhood, which it does for a majority of men, then testosterone is hardly the ultimate measure of masculinity. In fact, the second of the two studies, which was recently published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, suggests that fathers have higher levels of estrogen the well-known female sex hormone - than other men. The research shows that men go through significant hormonal changes alongside their pregnant partners changes most likely initiated by their partner's pregnancy and ones that even cause some men to experience pregnancylike symptoms such as nausea and weight gain. It seems increasingly clear that just as nature prepares women to be committed moms, it prepares men to be devoted dads. "I have always suspected that fatherhood has biological effects in some, perhaps all, men," says biologist Sue Carter, distinguished professor at the University of Maryland. "Now here is the first hard evidence that men are biologically prepared for fatherhood." The studies have the potential to profoundly change our understanding of families, of fatherhood and of masculinity itself. Being a devoted parent is not only important but also natural for men. Indeed, there is evidence that men are biologically involved in their children's lives from the beginning. Do men's hormones change in preparation for fatherhood? Is biology destiny for dads? It's well known that hormonal changes caused by pregnancy encourage a mother to love and nurture her child. But it has long been assumed that a father's attachment to his child is the result of a more uncertain process, a purely optional emotional bonding that develops over time, often years. Male animals in some species undergo hormonal changes that prime them for parenting. But do human dads? The two studies, conducted at Memorial University and Queens University in Canada, suggest that human dads do. In the original study, published in Evolution and Human Behavior, psychologist Anne Storey and her colleagues took blood samples from 34 couples at different times during pregnancy and shortly after birth. The researchers chose to monitor three specific hormones because of their links to nurturing behavior in human mothers and in animal fathers. The first hormone, prolactin, gets its name from the role it plays in promoting lactation in women, but it also instigates parental behavior in a number of birds and mammals. Male doves who are given prolactin start brooding and feeding their young, Storey found that in human fathers, prolactin levels rise by approximately 20 percent during the three weeks before their partners give birth. The second hormone, cortisol, is well known as a stress hormone, but it is also a good indicator of a mother's attachment to her baby. New mothers who have high cortisol levels can detect their own infant by odor more easily than mothers with lower cortisol levels. The mothers also respond more sympathetically to their baby's cries and describe their relationship with their baby in more positive terms. Storey and her colleagues found that for expectant fathers, cortisol was twice as high in the three weeks before birth than earlier in the pregnancy. Biologist Katherine Wynne-Edwards, who conducted the research with Storey, explains that while cortisol is seen as the "fight or flight" hormone, it might more accurately be described as the "heads-up-eyes-forward-something-really-important-is-happening" hormone. It may help prepare parents for approaching birth. Cortisol levels normally increase in women as pregnancy advances; indeed, a cumulative rise in stress-hormone levels sets off labor and delivery. The third hormone, testosterone, is abundant in male animals during mating but decreases during nurturing. If bird fathers are given testosterone, they spend more time defending their territory and mating than taking care of existing offspring. Research has shown that human males experience a surge in testosterone when they win sporting events and other competitions. In Storey's study, testosterone levels plunged 33 percent in fathers during the first three weeks after birth. Levels then returned to normal by the time the babies were four to seven weeks old. However brief the dip in testosterone, it may have effects that endure for the life of the child. According to University of California at Riverside psychologist Ross Parke, it may "let the nurturing side of men come to center stage." The dip may set in motion the more-cooperative, less-competitive enterprise of parenting. By encouraging fathers to interact with their kids, this brief hormonal change might actually induce the bonding process. Estrogen and the daddy brain Wynne-Edwards and graduate student Sandra Berg designed another study to test Storey and Wynne-Edwards' earlier findings, They measured the hormone levels of the fathers over a longer period of time and incorporated into the study a control group of men who had never had children. The control group was matched by age, season and time of day tested—all of which can affect hormone levels. Finally, by using saliva samples instead of blood draws, they were able to test the fathers and the men in the control group much more frequently. In addition to confirming the earlier findings for testosterone reduction and cortisol change, the researchers also found that the fathers had elevated levels of estrogen. The increase started 30 days before birth and continued during all 12 weeks of testing after birth. Although estrogen is best known as a female sex hormone, it exists in small quantities in men, too. Animal studies show that estrogen can induce nurturing behavior in males. Acting in the brain as well as in other parts of the body, estrogen in men, and testosterone in women, makes humans extremely versatile behaviorally. "We spend an awful lot of time looking for differences between the sexes and trumpeting them when we find them," observes Wynne-Edwards, "but our brains are remarkably similar, built from the same DNA." In fact, going into the study, Wynne-Edwards predicted that the "daddy brain" would use the same nerve circuits, triggered by many of the same hormones, as the "mommy brain." "If Mother Nature wanted to turn on parental behavior in a male," she reasoned, "the easiest thing would be to turn on pathways already there for maternal behavior." The studies also found that a father's hormonal changes closely paralleled those of his pregnant partner. The intimacy effect The researchers believe that intimate contact and communication between partners may induce the hormonal changes that encourage a father to nurture his children. Storey explains, "My best guess is that women's hormone levels are timed to the birth—and men's hormone levels are tied to their partners." Exactly how this occurs is unknown. There may be actual physiological signals exchanged between partners in close contact, such as the transmission of pheromones. Similar to odors, pheromones are volatile chemical substances that animals constantly give off through their skin or sweat but that are undetectable. Pheromones can stimulate specific reactions—especially mating—in other animals. Think of a female dog in heat attracting all those barking mate dogs in the neighborhood. Classic studies show that menstruation is communicated, and synchronized, through pheromones among dorm mates in college. If women in dorms respond to one another's pheromones, then a man and a woman who share intimate space could certainly communicate chemical messages. These pheromones could biologically cue a man that his partner is pregnant and kick off the hormonal changes that prompt him to be a dad in deed as well as in seed. Pregnancy certainly could, in fact, be signaled. The level of intimacy within a couple seems to be a factor in how a mother's body chemically signals approaching birth to a father. All of the men tested were living with their pregnant partners. Emotional closeness may also generate hormonal changes, although this possibility was not examined in detail. Still, couples reported feeling closer to their partner if they were taking about the baby and sharing details about the pregnancy. Whether this is the cause or the result of hormonal changes remains unknown for now. But the intimacy effect and the subsequent hormonal shifts may also be the reason many men experience pregnancylike symptoms. Honey, we're pregnant When he is not taking care of Seamus, Hudnut treats both men and women in his practice. He recalls several patients who came to him complaining of such typical pregnancy symptoms as weight gain and nausea — all of whom were men. He remembers one second-time father who knew that his wife was pregnant even before she told him. He started having morning sickness, just as he had during her first pregnancy. Pregnancy symptoms in men are actually more common than most people believe. Two studies found that approximately 90 percent of men experience at least one pregnancy-related symptom, sometimes severe enough to prompt an expectant father to seek medical help. According to a study reported in Annals of External Medicine, more than 20 percent of men with pregnant wives sought care for symptoms related to pregnancy "that could not otherwise be objectively explained." Unfortunately, like pregnancy symptoms in women, there is little that can be done to make the symptoms go away—except wait. Pregnancy symptoms in men, however well documented, are generally dismissed as being all in the father-to-be's head. Now it seems they may also be in his hormones. Storey and her colleagues found that the men who experienced more pregnancy symptoms actually had higher levels of prolactin. They also had a greater reduction in testosterone after exposure to sounds of crying and other "infant cues" that simulated the experience of being with an actual baby. For men who feel nauseated or gain weight, no one yet knows for sure whether the changes in hormones are to blame. Surging hormones, however, have long been blamed for women's morning sickness and other pregnancy side effects. The fact that men also experience hormone changes suggests it is more than empathy that causes many of them to feel their partner's pain. Changed by a child While it now seems a father may accompany his wife on her hormonal roller coaster during pregnancy, interacting with the baby may keep his hormones spinning even after the birth. It's no secret that hormone levels can change in response to behavior. Sex, sports and work success can all send testosterone production spiraling upward. Might not nurturing a child -- or conversely, the sight, sound and smell of a newborn -- also change fathers' levels of testosterone? In the original study, the researchers asked couples to hold dolls that had been wrapped in receiving blankets worn by a newborn within the preceding 24 hours. (After their wives gave birth, fathers held their actual baby.) They listened to a six-minute tape of a real newborn crying and then watched a video of a baby struggling to breast-feed. The investigators took blood from the men and women before the test and 30 minutes later. What they found is startling: Men who expressed the greatest desire to comfort the crying baby had the highest prolactin levels and the greatest reduction in testosterone. And testosterone levels plummeted in those men who held the doll for the full half-hour. Even though scientists have long observed changes in animal and human behavior as a result of shifting hormone levels, they do not yet understand exactly how hormones accomplish such change. The hormone-behavior link remains one of the great mysteries of the brain. Perhaps hormones stimulate more neuron connections in the part of the brain responsible for nurturing. Or perhaps hormones encourage neurons in nurturing pathways to fire more quickly. Wynne-Edwards thinks hormones might turn a two-lane pathway in the father's brain into a four-lane superhighway. A neural road expansion might make fathers better able to recognize the smell or sound of their baby. It might even act on smell receptors in the nose to mitigate the smell of a baby's dirty diaper. Countless are the ways in which hormones could influence a father's brain to be more responsive to his baby. Home on the range Although testosterone may be the "primary" male sex hormone, research makes it clear that other hormones are also significant, especially during the transition into fatherhood Wynne-Edwards believes the research is "a validation of the experiences that men know they have had. It also goes a long way to bumping testosterone off its pedestal as the only hormone that is important to men." Parke believes that the research suggests something even more radical: "Men are much more androgynous than we think. We have the capability to be aggressive and nurturing. The traditional view of men as predominantly aggressive really sells men short and denies their capability to experience the range of human emotions. The research suggests that a man's hormones may play an important role in helping him experience this full range of emotions especially in becoming a loving and devoted dad. In fact, it offers the first evidence that to nurture is part of man's nature.

Now we have to get this in a lot of judges heads.