How parenthood changes men

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Having become a father, a man is no longer the same as before - various changes in the brain and hormones help him to take care of the child no worse than the mother.

The appearance of a child changes a lot, not only in our daily life, but also in physiology, right down to the functioning of the brain. However, for a long time, scientists were only concerned with changes in the mother's body. After all, it is a woman who bears, gives birth and feeds a child, and hormones with psychology should change much more strongly for her than for men. Few thought about how fatherhood affects men.

Meanwhile, no one will deny that the father's contribution to the development of the child is quite large. Among animals, such examples are few, but they do exist - in 6% of mammalian species, males play an important role in raising offspring, and in these cases they sometimes behave exactly like females, with the exception, of course, of feeding the cubs. Obviously, in the body of such caring males, a special parental regime is provided, including the nervous system. And then the next question arises - is there such a setting in the brains of men? After all, not everything can be explained only by socio-cultural influence, and if the male brain was not predisposed to caring for children, men would hardly care for them that much.

This question can be posed in another way: what changes occur in the brain of men under the influence of paternity? Most studies suggest that the male and female nervous systems respond to the arrival of a child in approximately the same way, in both cases, similar structures and neural circuits are turned on to take care of him. Moreover, even hormonal changes in the father's body are similar to those that occur in the mother's - in fact, hormones are directly related to psychological and neurological changes. These changes can be divided into several types.

First, the arrival of a child and the need to take care of him literally reshapes the male brain in the likeness of the female. At the same time, in men and women, similar structures are turned on, which are responsible for social interactions and for emotions. Such a parental network, as recently shown by researchers from Bar-Ilan University, is activated in men the more the more they take care of the child.

But this is about large-scale changes in the level of activity of entire areas of the brain. If we go down to the level of individual neurons, then the effect of paternity can be found here as well. Experiments on vole mice have shown that offspring stimulates the appearance of new neurons in the male hippocampus. The hippocampus serves as one of the main centers of memory and orientation in space, and, apparently, it needs new neurons to cope with the flow of information associated with cubs, who need to bring food and who need to be protected from enemies. In addition, new neurons appeared in the olfactory department of males, probably to make it easier for them to recognize their offspring by smell. In humans, the sense of smell does not play such a big role, but it is possible that similar changes occur in the hippocampus in male fathers.

It's also worth mentioning a recent discovery by Harvard researchers who found that male rats have specialized neurons in their brains that are designed to regulate paternal behavior. These neural circuits begin to wake up after mating and reach the peak of their activity just during the period of caring for the cubs. There is a similar system of cells in the brain of females, although it differs in a number of signs from the male - after all, the parental behavior of females and males is different.

Changes of a different kind relate to hormones. Although men cannot access pregnancy, childbirth, or breastfeeding, hormonal changes under the influence of paternity still occur in them. Observations of animals and humans have shown that fathers have increased levels of estrogen, oxytocin, prolactin and glucocorticoids. Here I would especially like to note prolactin, which is necessary for women to produce milk, and, it would seem, men do not need it at all. On the other hand, prolactin receptors are found not only in the mammary glands, but in almost all organs of the body, so that its role may well turn out to be broader than we think.

Hormonal changes in men occur not simply because of the awareness of their own paternity, but in contact with the mother and child. There are hormones, the level of which falls at the same time - these, as you might guess, include testosterone. It is usually associated with increased aggressiveness, competition and other unpleasant behavioral features from the social point of view, so it is quite logical that its level in fathers should go down - just so as not to frighten children. But even with testosterone, the picture is not so simple: it is known that in male rodents during the period of paternity, the level of the male hormone rises. This can be explained by the fact that the male must protect his offspring, and testosterone aggressiveness comes in handy here. It's fair to say that the link between testosterone and aggressive behavior is not as straightforward as we used to think. More recently, researchers at Erasmus University of Rotterdam found that testosterone's effects depend on the social context: if social status can be raised without a fight, testosterone will help build trust and strengthen social contacts in the group.

As for the link between testosterone and parenthood, researchers have yet to figure out how testosterone levels depend on a particular type of parenting behavior. In general, the hormonal picture in the male body changes to the female side - just like in the case of the brain.

Among hormones, there is one whose effect on social behavior is considered separately, namely oxytocin. Previously, it was believed that it is more or less important only for women, as it promotes childbirth, and then helps to establish and strengthen psychological closeness between mother and child. However, it later became clear that its influence on social ties is not limited only to the mother-child relationship, and that it has an equally strong effect on male psychology. In particular, this is manifested in male fathers, in whom the level of oxytocin rises if he devotes a lot of time to the child. The opposite situation is also possible: as experiments by researchers from Bar-Ilan University have shown, a dose of oxytocin makes men pay more attention to their children, play and communicate with them. Children respond in kind - their level of this hormone also rises and, as a result, social activity increases. Can you turn negligent fathers into good fathers with the help of oxytocin? The authors of the work themselves do not recommend using it for such purposes: the effects of oxytocin are varied and complex, and it may happen that some additional changes in behavior provoked by oxytocin override all parental benefits.

However, some may argue that all these changes do not necessarily make men good fathers, and paternal behavior cannot be compared with the female maternal instinct. However, in reality, the paternal instinct may not be weaker than the maternal instinct. An excellent illustration was provided a year ago by researchers at the French National Center for Scientific Research, comparing how fathers and mothers respond to the cry of a baby. Psychologists were especially interested in whether fathers can distinguish the voice of their child - and it turned out that men are in no way inferior to women in this. That is, among several screaming babies, the father, like the mother, recognizes his child with 90 percent accuracy. In other words, paternity changes men's perception, and here, most likely, again, it cannot do without neurohormonal rearrangements.

One way or another, now we can confidently assert that the appearance of a child for men, so to speak, does not go for nothing - their psychology and physiology adapt to the parental role. Therefore, do not underestimate the influence of fathers on the upbringing of children: changes in male psychology help them to get in close contact with their child. And therefore, the results of psychologists from the University of Connecticut, who found that the lack of paternal love, the child experiences even more difficult than maternal inattention, do not seem so surprising.