Modern Wisdom｜The Painful Psychological Cost Of Becoming A Dad - Darby Saxbe

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Most people are familiar with mom brain, but you found that dad's brains go through a bunch of changes too.

Exactly.

Yeah, so I've been looking at new fathers in my lab over the last decade plus.

We've scanned men when they're midway through their partner's pregnancy and then again after they have their first child.

And we find that the brain, and I should caveat, this is not a bad thing, loses gray matter volume across that transition to fatherhood.

So the patterns look similar to those that have been observed in moms, and they seem to be of smaller magnitude.

They're more variable, and they're more tied to dad's parenting experience.

How does it differ from mom brain?

What are the biggest differences?

So new moms lose about 2.5% of their gray matter volume across the transition into first time motherhood.

And they lose volume in parts of the brain that are really linked to hormones.

So that includes not just the cortex, which if you think about sort of the outer layer of brain tissue that does a lot of our higher order thinking and reasoning, it also includes what's called the subcortex, which contains our amygdala, our ventral striatum, which processes reward, and a number of other structures that are linked with drive and gut feelings.

Dad's change mostly just in the cortex, which is that sort of executive functioning, thinking and reasoning part of the brain.

Moms show profound changes across the whole brain.

And dad's changes are, like I said, smaller in magnitude.

So dad's is about...

1% of their gray matter volume.

And my lab found that this was totally tied to dad's parenting time and investment.

So dads who felt more bonded with their babies before birth, they were more motivated to take time off after birth, they spent more day-to-day time with kids.

In the first few months, and they reported feeling more bonded and having more pleasure in interacting with their kids.

Those dads showed the biggest brain change.

How would you categorize the change in fatherhood over the last few generations?

There's been a dramatic change.

So by some estimates, dad's daily time in parenting has tripled or even quadrupled compared to the father knows best dads of the 50s and 60s.

So there's been a huge uptick.

And what's interesting is that there was an inflection point around the pandemic.

Where men who might have been commuting to an office and maybe missing a lot of the day-to-day stuff with their kids suddenly had the experience of being hands-on parents in a different way.

And a lot of people wondered whether that uptick would persist, and it has.

So millennial dads are spending more time with kids than any other generation of

US dads.

And there's evidence that Gen Z dads are spending even more time than millennial dads.

So there's been a pretty dramatic shift.

How does modern fathering differ from hunter-gatherer societies?

So it's interesting.

So in my book, I talk about a model of hunter-gatherer fatherhood, the ACA, which is a society in the Congo where men spend a lot of time within hand's reach of infants, and they're very involved in infant care.

And what's unique about the ACA

And this quality is shared by a number of other hunter-gatherer societies, is that they have a very egalitarian, flat social structure, and there's a lot of cooperative resource gathering.

So we know hunter-gatherer societies are the context in which we spent 95% of our human history.

So they tell us something about the environments within which we adapted, within which we evolved.

And we know that women contributed a ton of calories.

So when people say it's unnatural for women to work, in fact, women have been economically productive for most of our human history.

But in the ACA, the main form of resource gathering is joint cooperative net hunting.

So couples work together to gain resources for the society.

And as a result, really differentiated, specialized parenting roles don't make very much sense, right?

They would not be economically adaptive.

But you see other models.

Even within Africa, I talk about another society, the Kipsigas, which is a day's drive away, where there are strict prohibitions against men picking babies up in the first year after birth.

No way.

So you'd never see a man carrying a baby outside.

Prohibited.

Why?

So and this is something I talk about a lot in my book.

There's so much societal and cultural variability around fatherhood.

What is the resource gathering process of the second tribe?

Yeah.

So it's very different.

It's much more risky.

It's more hazardous.

It's slash and burn forestry.

And so it makes sense, just as in the Aka, it makes sense not to specialize too strictly.

Uh-huh.

It makes sense in the Kipsigas that dads are going to do most of the economic work and moms are going to do most of the caretaking.

And to be clear, dads are very involved with older kids.

They'll teach them how to hunt.

They'll teach them how to provision.

But they are not picking babies up.

Do you see parallels between modern society with more egalitarian access to work, more female breadwinners, and the ACCA?

Yeah.

I think there's some key distinctions, but there's more of a through line, I think, between that model of social organization and contemporary societies.

Right.

Because we have women in the workforce and our jobs no longer require upper body strength or high risk tolerance for the most part.

Right.

So.

Women have the opportunity to earn income.

And, you know, like I said, most of human history, we were either hunter-gatherers or small family farmers.

So women were contributing to economic productivity, even within those models.

But agricultural society is

Has different conditions and generally demands more specialization.

There's more stability that allows you to accumulate and store wealth.

You need armies to guard your wealth.

And you end up with a less flexible and less egalitarian social structure.

So gender roles get a little more entrenched.

I think what's interesting about contemporary society is that we are in flux between these different models of what we expect from men and women.

And men and women are changing at different rates.

Yeah, yeah, well, it makes sense that we'd need to be adaptable.

So I'm interested in the fact that you choose to do the first scan of the father's brain halfway through pregnancy.

Is there any reason to not, is there any concern that by doing it partway through pregnancy that some changes may have happened already?

Would a baseline be better?

I guess you're trying to get pregnant.

You've then decided to basically bet your study on a bunch of people who aren't yet parents.

But we promise we're really trying hard.

Yeah, I think if we'd had more time and more funding, we probably would have done a preconception scan.

And so there's a really good study that came out when I was halfway through data collection for my dad's study.

It focuses on mothers.

And they were recruited from a fertility clinic.

So they were trying to get pregnant.

About half of the mothers did, and about half of the mothers, or rather about half of the women remained non-mothers.

And they found that the brain changed even during pregnancy.

So we didn't have the opportunity to do that because I was recruiting couples who were already willing to come into the lab pregnant.

And I wanted mothers and fathers to participate together.

But I think we might have seen some different patterns if we'd started the study earlier.

What happens with fathers-to-be when their partners are pregnant?

So we see hormone changes.

We see new emotional worries and concerns.

We see couple relationship changes.

Even sleep disruption starts early, before the baby's born.

And we don't know exactly the time course of brain remodeling because like I said, my scan study started in mid-pregnancy.

We don't have other sources of information for the most part.

And so we're making our best guess.

My hunch is that what is reorganizing the brain more than anything else

Is parenting experience and the way in which that challenges the brain and the social demands that it places on the brain.

So my guess is that when we're looking at fathers, we're going to see most of the change happening after birth, but we don't know that for sure.

We need to replicate these studies and extend them.

Right.

Am I right in saying that there's research that shows how the relationship manages conflict impacts how painful the childbirth is?

Yes, my lab did that study.

Yeah, so we brought... Is that stressing you out?

It's just, it's kind of tenuous, right?

Like you've just explained that relationship stress happens, sleep disruption happens, and that feels like quite a high...

Bar, that's a, that's a, a, a big impact of pre child, uh, like regulation.

Yeah.

I mean, I think the bottom line is that kids are resilient.

Humans are resilient.

We have survived in all kinds of different conditions.

And that's kind of our superpower as humans is our adaptability.

But it's a relatively new phenomenon for men to be present at their baby's birth.

So birth is a very social process, and that's unique for humans.

So most animals can deliver an infant solo, no problem.

Birth is fairly straightforward.

We have these complicated, annoying human pelvises that reshaped when we started walking upright.

And we also have these babies with these gigantic social brains.

And so birth can be very cumbersome for women, and they often require assistance to steer a baby out of the birth canal.

So you see in most human births, they're

And in fact, one theory about why we evolved to live in societies is so that you would have people to assist in childbirth.

That's one reason that we humans aren't just kind of, you know, solo, you know, roamers, right?

Like we need to be embedded in society so that our babies will survive.

Yeah.

But the people helping with childbirth are almost always women through most of human history.

It's a midwife.

It's a grandmother.

It's sisters and community members.

So it was really only in the 19th century that childbirth became really medicalized.

And you have doctors in hospitals who are presiding over childbirth.

Even then, dads were kept out of the delivery room.

So it was in the 60s and 70s, really, that dads started to advocate to be present during their baby's birth.

Before that, moms were under heavy anesthesia and the standard father role was basically hang out, pass out cigars.

And get congratulated by your buddies, right?

So we've seen this big shift and there hasn't been a lot of research on how the couple affects the childbirth experience.

And also what is the emotional impact for both mom and dad when dad is present at birth?

We now expect dads to do a lot of the support

That might have been provided by intergenerational kin in previous eras.

And dads aren't necessarily trained for that.

Or primed for that.

And so there can be emotional fallout from witnessing a traumatic and stressful birth.

And like you mentioned the study from my lab, we found that when couples fought in more negative ways during pregnancy,

The birth was more medically complex and riskier, and both members of the couple appraised it as being more stressful.

That's likely just the impact of emotional stress on a mother's body.

Therefore, the downstream impact of that physiologically during childbirth is going to be negative.

Yeah, exactly.

So we know stress, tension, fear, pain, right?

So when you're delivering an infant, your body has to release and relax.

You have to allow the infant to move down through the birth canal.

If you're clenched up, stressed, and tense, it makes it harder and it's going to feel more painful and it's going to lead to more difficult birth outcomes.

What's been the impact of having men in the delivery room?

Do you think it's been a good idea?

I think it's been really good for some couples, and I think it's been challenging for others.

And it's become controversial, right?

So every sports season, there's a player that can't participate because he has to be present at his baby's birth.

And I think it's really valuable for moms who benefit from having a partner there to provide support, again, because we don't have these close intergenerational ties that maybe were normative a couple generations ago.

So I think having social support, continuous social support, is one of the best ways to have a positive birth experience.

However, I think when dads are unprepared, when they're terrified, and when they haven't figured out how to communicate effectively with moms, they can have a deleterious impact on the birth process.

What's Cuvade syndrome?

So that's male pregnancy, and it's a phenomenon by which males start to...

This is a real thing.

Well, it's a controversial thing.

I talk about it a little bit in the book.

I think it's more anecdotal than evidence-based, so...

The data on it, there have been a couple studies that have been done, but I don't fully trust the results.

We actually looked at it in my sample of dads.

We didn't find any associations between hormones and dad's self-reported pregnancy symptoms.

But it's basically like a sympathetic pregnancy.

And you see it in different cross-cultural models.

So

Men feeling like they're experiencing nausea, pregnancy patterns of weight gain, sympathetic labor pains.

And this study that was done in a UK hospital found that expectant dads reported a bunch of pregnancy-like symptoms during their partner's pregnancy.

Just empathizing.

Lady, you say that you need us to open up more.

I'm empathizing so much that I'm having period pains.

Well, a lot of these pains are stress related, right?

So if you think about things like gastrointestinal distress and, you know, difficulty sleeping, those are things that come when you're really stressed and anxious.

Basically pregnant.

So, yeah, exactly.

Needless to say, a lot of expectant moms are annoyed by this research because, you know, only one of you is actually puking because of the baby.

The other person might just be freaking out.

But I think it's interesting that we are so contagious and we soak up the emotional experiences of people around us.

What do you think couples should pay attention to as they're going through pregnancy then?

So I think they need to learn how to communicate effectively and listen to each other.

I think a lot of the time women hear each other's birth stories just like you're at a picnic and everybody's telling you the gnarly story of their third baby's birth that got really complicated.

Men don't necessarily get the opportunity to hear about different kinds of birth experiences or...

Watch media that portrays birth in realistic ways because our pop culture conceptions are sort of bananas.

So I think birth education that involves fathers can be really valuable to normalize what to expect.

What is the progress of labor going to be like and how can you effectively provide support and be a calming influence?

I've heard you say if you think that having a baby is going to fix your relationship, don't do it.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So the studies show a reliable drop in relationship satisfaction around the birth of a baby.

And it's unsurprising if you think about the challenges of adjusting to life with a new baby.

I used to joke that my husband and I went from good time pals to we're suddenly operating a small business with a very disappointed customer.

You have someone crying around the clock who is not pleased with anything you're doing to comfort them.

Your sleep is disrupted and you're suddenly worrying about money and your living arrangements and all of these new concerns that maybe you didn't have.

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Yeah, exactly.

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Okay, so why is it that becoming a father...

Isn't enough, it's becoming a caregiver that creates dad brain.

So why is it that you need to actually

Spend time parenting.

Yeah.

Because it takes practice and repetition to build the brain, just like anything you learn, whether you're learning an instrument or a new language or you're a London taxi driver navigating the city.

So I think with moms, you have this kind of high floor of investment primed and ready to go.

And partially that's because

It takes so much energy to incubate a pregnancy.

It's thousands of calories.

So moms have already devoted a lot of energetic resources to babies before they even arrive.

So if you think about you sort of have a caregiving dial that can be turned up or down.

Moms are turned all the way up by the time the baby arrives.

So the example I gave you of a village where dads don't pick up their babies in the first year, it'd be very hard to find a village like that made up of moms who had similar prohibitions, right?

Moms in many ways are biologically primed to care.

With dads, it's like the dial is set more in the middle and it can be turned up or down depending on culture and local contextual demands.

So I think what's really cool about dads is that they come equipped with the biology that makes them ready.

If needed.

Which is to say an adaptation that comes online when needed that can be very useful.

So you think about primates who run on four legs, but if they need to grab something, they can stand up and walk on two legs.

So you can grab more stuff if you have that ability.

If you can turn up the dial for fatherhood, you can enrich kids' lives and you can benefit them and provide them with better outcomes and better odds of survival.

Presumably paternity uncertainty has got a role to play here as well.

You don't want to be locked in hormonally, neurologically to raising a child that you're not sure is yours.

Exactly.

And one of the really unique things about humans is we conceal our ovulation.

So human males don't know for sure whether or not they've caused a pregnancy.

So it actually incentivizes human males to invest in courtship because you can't just helicopter in, have sex once, and know that you've made a baby.

You have to show up repeatedly if you want to be sure you have very good odds of success.

And so you're going to show up with gifts and you're going to get to know that person.

And so it's adaptive to pair bond, which is why humans have really high rates of pair bonding compared to other species.

So we do see that dad's predilection to caregiver, again, can turn that dial up or down depending on the stability of their relationship with the baby's mother.

Oh, so a less stable relationship with the mother would result in a different parenting style from the dad?

It could.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, it would motivate different reproductive strategy.

Are you familiar with the Westermark effect?

I don't think so.

It's how incest avoidance happens inside humans.

So what's fascinating about this is...

Because you don't have, there's no guarantees.

I suppose even like harem style gorillas and stuff don't know that the big silverback is the one that's had the kid and not some young upstart that's managed to sneak in or whatever.

But for the most part, that would be a little bit different.

What's fascinating is when you've got like ecologically informed people

Neurological and behavior change hormonal behavior change

It happens

There's this window between the age of like one and ten and if you see primarily your mother but also your father giving care to another infant yeah

You grow up with a sexual aversion to them.

And what was interesting, I think it's a...

Maybe an Indian culture that they, perhaps an Asian culture, like Far East Asian culture, where they used to find future wives for their baby sons

As infants and they'd raise them together.

So you would have, you know, a three-year-old and a three-year-old living together.

What they didn't realize is they were basically locking in this biological imprinting of that's my sister.

Right.

So highly maladaptive.

Yeah.

But you can see where the similarity lies here.

Totally.

The father's level of

Brain adaptation is based on the behavior of how much time he spends raising the child, doing nurturing, doing caregiving.

And that means that you can go both ways.

In the same way as you could have a twin that was born but raised separately, you would have no...

Imbued sexual aversion to them, there will be no incest discussed because the behavior that brings that in.

So really, mothers...

Are the only ones that have that locked-in contract, biological contract with the baby.

And everybody else, from brothers to sisters to aunts to uncles, they're all kind of just learning as they go.

Right.

So there's that natural variability that you see.

In the other parents, the people who are playing a role in parenting.

And we know that as humans, we evolved to be alloparents.

So we're what's called cooperative breeders, which is to say we participate in collective care of offspring, which is very adaptive because human babies are so uniquely difficult to raise.

We require so much intensive care.

And it's too much for any one person to provide all of the round-the-clock care.

So we help each other out with parenting and caregiving, but the extent to which dads play a role is something that varies based on societal context.

What are the behaviors that most create dad brain?

If I was to design a menu or a daily routine to maximize that 1% change, what would I be doing?

Yeah.

You'd be picking your baby up.

You'd be caring for them.

You'd probably be sharing a sleeping surface with them.

You'd be diapering them.

You'd be feeding them.

You'd be bathing them.

So you'd be doing the kind of intensive care that

That helps you really get to know a baby and attunes you more to their physiology and to their mind.

Mm-hmm.

And that's a part of the brain that activates when we think about other people's minds and their intentions.

It's what reads other people's emotions.

And you could think about it as the seat of our empathy.

And so that is a dynamic part of the brain in new dads and also in new moms in part because when you are having to care for an infant who cannot communicate effectively, right, because they can't talk, they just cry, you have to be able to read their emotions and you have to be able to problem solve to figure out what they need.

So you're getting a lot of exercise to that empathetic part of the brain.

The executive function has been tuned down.

So maybe your ability to come up with novel solutions might be less?

Well, no, because I actually think you have to problem solve quite a bit.

So your executive functioning is also going to tune.

Did you not say that some of the, oh, is it just moms that have got the executive function tuned down?

No.

Moms, both dads and moms.

So it's tuning up.

Well, it depends on whether you think of losing gray matter volume as a tune up or a tune down.

Right, right.

And the jury's a little out on that.

We see volume reduction, which we think is about pruning and becoming more efficient.

What's lost?

Well, our short-term memory for objects that aren't our baby.

So there's some evidence that working memory gets compromised, but we often use this deficit framing when we talk about mommy brain, like, oh, I forgot where I parked the car.

It actually looks like certain kinds of memory are enhanced.

And it's salience driven.

So it's memory for your baby's smells, objects that are pertinent to your baby.

You know, rodents have to figure out where they've stashed their babies, like in a nest full of bedding.

So one reason the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that

We think of as implicated in memory is also really sensitive to smell is you kind of have to smell your way to find the baby to retrieve your pup.

So the hippocampus is really plastic in new moms and new dads.

So it's like our memory is actually getting a different kind of workout, but we're maybe losing our sharpness in some domains and improving our functioning in others.

Better able to detect what does this small thing want?

What does it mean?

Where did I leave things that are associated with it?

Bottles and diapers and it itself and stuff like that.

But maybe less so

Where did I leave the car?

Where did I leave the keys?

What does the rest of my day look like outside of the baby orchestrating the operations of the rest of my life?

Exactly.

And it's also about value, right?

It's what domains are we motivated to optimize?

So a lot of people find, both moms and dads, that after they have kids, they care a little bit less about achieving at work, right?

Which is not to say that moms and dads are bad workers.

If anything, I actually think they make great contributions to organizations because of all the skills they develop.

Maybe a different domain to a non-parent.

Right.

But priorities shift.

And at least in the short term.

Although the good news is that it appears that having become a parent is neuroprotective in late life.

Dr. Anneke Vandenbroek

If you use a machine learning algorithm to try to figure out how old is the brain compared to its chronological age, people who've had more kids up to a certain point, it tops off at around three kids actually have brains that the machine learning algorithm codes as younger.

What's your proposed mechanism for that?

So I think it's about social integration.

So the fact that it shows up in dads as well as moms tells me it's not just pregnancy hormones.

It's not just birth experience.

It's not just breastfeeding.

I think it's about, and we know this in both men and women, that being more socially connected to other people is really important for health.

Even if that person is a mini version of you.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, even more so maybe because then you're especially attuned to them.

Right, it's good for longevity.

So the thing that's coming to mind here is I wonder whether you could replicate those neuroprotective results

By just having a really, really, really deep friendship with one person.

And I wonder whether you could create the same brain changes in reduction of salience networks outside of this one thing and increase of awareness, attention, etc., with...

Business or a dog like if you just dedicate because if these networks are as flexible as you say they are if they're as malleable as you say they are then it shouldn't just be a baby that's able to trigger this

Anything really vulnerable that you care for or develop empathy for.

So empathy, you might not develop that much empathy for your business.

Maybe not or for your friend.

I mean, I guess you can be very empathetic for your friend.

But if it was an animal that you're caring for.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think a lot of young people do adopt pets either in lieu of or in preparation for

Having babies and you are practicing a lot of those same kinds of skills.

Hmm.

Is it just

It's literally just the fact that salience outside that all of the mom brain stuff, all of the dad brain stuff, the things that they are reporting being confused by maybe being a little bit irritated by those are primarily stuff.

Anything that's not baby related is just a little bit less aware to me.

Yeah, although you might find, and this is true, I talked to somebody that took a parenting class and found that it ultimately made him a much better manager at work.

So I think there's sort of like this short-term maybe downgrading of everything except the baby.

And then there's a long-term building of new skills and stronger social networks.

Ideally, right, when things go right.

That's not true for everybody.

But I think these are transferable skills.

So if you think about becoming an empathetic parent as analogous to being a good friend or a good caretaker in other domains...

Transferable skills.

Yeah, like men who are coaches, who are teachers, who are guidance counselors, who are religious leaders.

You know, I talked to somebody for the book who said we often think about caregiving in very feminized ways, but the fireman who pulls a family out of a burning building is a caregiver.

Yeah.

Right.

The policeman who keeps the family safe is a caregiver.

Right.

We can broaden our understanding of care to include sort of traditional masculinity and celebrate how important that is for society.

So if a dad's brain literally doesn't change unless he's hands-on with caregiving, is it right to say, like, I love my kids, but I'm not a hands-on guy is more a biological confession than a personality trait?

I think it depends.

I think it depends on what the context is and what is adaptive for a particular family.

Because I think there are cultures in which having dads who aren't hands-on...

Makes sense for the local demands because you have other caregivers or because dads are needed to do some kind of very specialized labor.

I think in contemporary societies where we expect a fairly high level of involvement from most fathers, I would frame it as a missed opportunity.

Have you seen bob odenkirk talking about what it means to be a dad yeah it's so good he's the man play that clip for me jared i think it's i think it's so cool who are you jealous of

Anybody who's still got little kids at home growing up.

Yeah, there's no question I knew what I was doing when I had kids growing up.

I was being a dad.

I mean, that was my job.

And I didn't have to ask myself, what am I doing here?

What am I doing?

How can I be a part of this world?

How can I be meaningful today?

I didn't have to ask that question because the answer is pick up everything between here and the door.

That's right.

And make sure they get to school and have a laugh with them.

Life was, I understood.

My purpose.

Best answer.

Who are you jealous of?

I love that.

Yeah, and I think we do find that sense of meaning and purpose, which is so important for our well-being, our sense of connectedness, our sense of coherence.

Like he just talked about, like, feeling like you have a reason to

To do what you do every day and that life is happening according to plan.

That is so important for psychological health.

I'm so excited to become a father.

I can't wait for it.

So are you working on it?

Yeah, well, reliably, you can't do it on your own.

I've heard that.

I have tried.

But yeah, you need somebody else to be ready at the same time.

Yeah, that's the tricky part.

What do you make of the deadbeat dad narrative?

Yeah, so I think it is true in some cases, and it's unfair to dads in many other cases.

So in 1960, you had 88% of kids living with a father at home.

That dipped down in 2005 to 67% of kids.

And it's actually rebounded.

So today about 76% of kids in the U.S. are living with a father at home.

A father or the father?

Usually the father, but not always.

So sometimes there's complex fatherhood where dads are living with kids that weren't originally theirs.

But at least having a stepfather figure in the home.

So there's been this kind of U-shaped change in father presence.

But I think we often think about fatherhood as this binary, absent dad versus present dad.

And there are a lot of shades of gradation in between.

So many non-residential fathers are really involved in caregiving.

I talk about this in the book, but after my parents got divorced, we did joint custody.

So my brothers and I were alone with our dad every other week, and he went from fairly hands-off caregiver to suddenly the primary parent in charge of everything we needed.

And I watched how transformative that was for him.

So there are different ways again to turn that dial of fatherhood.

And I think when dads fully check out, like I said, it's a missed opportunity both for themselves and for their kid.

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And he said having that bond with his son was the single saving grace that actually helped him to reroute his life.

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Are you aware if there's a window similar to the Westermark effect of time after which an older male

Isn't able to attach to a younger child in the same way exists has um pretty sort of positive connotations for stepdads because it suggests that you can bond pretty much just as apart from the cognitive realization like this isn't mine

If you spend enough time with baby on chest, you're probably going to get locked in.

But especially with stepdads and maybe fathers that are absent or working or whatever, they might not be as available during those years.

And I have to assume like if I hang around with a 21 year old dude.

Lots and empathize and care for him i'm probably not going to see him as my son just like out of the gates

So it suggests to me that there's a kind of tail off in some way but i mean this is total bro science here

So yeah this this makes me feel that's the bro it's the bro science

But you understand what I mean.

Have you got any insight around whether that's true or not?

It's a really interesting question.

Sort of at what point do you maybe miss that opportunity to bond?

And I think what's key is that you have a front row seat to a child's development during some critical period.

However, I think we often overemphasize early infancy.

And there's this idea that if we miss the first hour after birth or the first...

Three days after birth or the first month that we've somehow missed our chance to bond.

And that's not really true, right?

We know that adoptive parents and step-parents can have profound connections with their kids.

I grew up with a stepdad who I met when I was nine, and he ended up being a really formative influence in my life.

And so I think it depends on when the dad comes into the picture and what kind of work and practice he's willing to put in to make that connection.

But I would say as long as there's any stretch of a child's youth that a dad is witnessing and participating in, he can play a role as a parent.

Yeah.

What about impacts on hormones in men?

Yeah.

So we see changes in testosterone around the birth of a new baby.

We don't know as much about how hormones change in adoptive or step parents because there just isn't a lot of research about this.

Most of the work is on early parenthood and most of it is focusing on biological parents.

So testosterone gets tuned down.

Does that increase with caregiving?

Yes.

In fact, does that happen without caregiving?

No.

So it's linked, as are the brain changes, to dad's participation in care.

So we see this not just in humans.

We see this in animal models as well.

You are probably familiar with the challenge hypothesis, the idea that we want high levels of testosterone under certain circumstances.

It's adaptive for testosterone to drop in other circumstances.

So birds are the classic example.

Testosterone levels rise at the start of breeding season.

When birds are competing for mates, they're looking to spread their seed.

They want as many opportunities as possible, so they need status to try to find a partner.

And then after mating has been accomplished,

It's immunologically costly to maintain perpetually high levels of T. Testosterone naturally decreases, and the reproductive strategy is shifting towards more nurturing.

So instead of maximizing our numbers of babies that we can produce, we want to maximize the odds that any given baby is going to survive.

And our hormones kind of follow suit.

And you see it in primates, you see it in rodents, as well as in humans, you see these natural shifts happening.

What, what are the behavior changes that happen in men based on their hormones?

So typically when testosterone decreases, it's serving a function whereby dads are getting more invested in the partner relationship.

They are more interested, more motivated to maintain a stable pair bond.

They're less aggressive.

A lot of the work in rodents has looked at territorial aggression.

When you see a new pup in the nest, do you want to kill them or do you want to care for them?

Testosterone levels can modulate where you end up along that continuum.

So we want, in general, if anyone is spending a lot of time with infants, to be less motivated to kill and more motivated to care.

Risk-taking behavior as well.

Goes down.

And you see that, you know, you see actually in some ways health improvements.

We can talk about dad bod at some point, I'm sure.

But you see some health improvements in terms of less risky driving, less likely to get into fights, lower levels of substance use.

Being more conscientious about doctor checkups.

So all of those behaviors that keep us alive and ready to provide for our offspring.

Blame it on the testosterone.

Shift.

Sure.

Blame it on the testosterone.

Yeah.

Looking at studies of men crossing the road and the distance from them to the nearest car in the presence of women or without the presence of women

Yeah dude if there's a woman there it's like three times closer

Oh my god dude look at how hard i am

Harder than this car um but yeah that doesn't end well a lot of the times

Typically in a fight between you and a car you usually lose yeah however

The thing that's interesting there, we know that testosterone can change.

If we had a ton of weapons on this table, like axes and spears and guns and stuff, and me and the guys walked around and picked them up and played with them, our testosterone would go up.

Yeah, and I would be terrified.

That happens after.

The way that we close the show out is by wielding weapons inside of this room.

Yeah, remind me to get out of here first.

We're live-action role-playing.

It's the Middle Ages.

So that's...

Sense the fact that we can be so reactive as men

Yeah we talk about how hormonal women are right and yes but reliably men much more unreliable

Yes uh similarly a lot of hormonal changes but they don't happen on the same sort of lunar schedule

Um but what that must mean i i don't know whether this will be the primary drive because a lot of it's like

There's a girl there and I'm just going to show how hard I am and how masculine and the risk-taking.

Yeah.

But also there'll probably be a bit of an increase in testosterone and that might push it a little bit more.

Yeah.

And the same thing will be presumably happening here as well, that there's a relational component.

There's this sort of top-down baby, must be here for baby, must not drive recklessly, text whilst driving, etc.

But also there is this sort of bottom-up environment that's being created, which encourages us to behave in that way too.

Exactly.

Biology and culture work together, as they do in so many ways in parenthood.

And yeah, I think it's really interesting the extent to which our culture is kind of in flux between different models of fatherhood.

Mm-hmm.

And so, you know, are we low T dads or high T dads?

But there's plenty of work suggesting that, you know, in athletic competition, in other opportunities for men to raise their status, you see changes in testosterone.

So testosterone, you know, I think...

We can talk about testosterone supplementation and what that means for men who want to be dads.

I think to me what is adaptive about testosterone, as with any other hormone, is that it's responsive to context.

And we want to be flexible because we want to have a biology that sets us up to achieve our goals.

You're saying that if you were to be taking testosterone enhancement whilst becoming a father, you think that you're able to outwit biology's well-proven environment that it's trying to create inside of you, and you're just plowing through it by injecting yourself with tea?

I think that's the fear.

That's the risk.

And anecdotally, I hear from moms who say, yeah, my husband's been taking tea and he has no patience with the baby.

Who knows?

We need better, more rigorous studies to see if that's actually true.

Yeah, but he's jacked.

Exactly.

So there's a trade-off.

The baby's growing up with a jacked dad.

Come on.

Well, and in some

Context, that could be really good.

Like if you have to fight your way out of a cage to get a leg of lamb for your kid, then you probably want high testosterone in early parenthood.

But that might not serve the style of fatherhood that is more desired.

Presumably as well, if that environment was the one that you were in, your body would detect it and go, hey, there's some more testosterone for you.

As opposed to you going, no, shut up.

A thousand nanograms per deciliter is absolutely fine.

Yeah, well, in risky environments.

Believing that you know better than your body does.

Yeah, when we're in a risky or competitive environment, men want higher testosterone that's going to serve their goals.

It's not always going to serve their goals when they're in a parenting environment.

And so, you know, I think the thing about supplementation is we sort of have this idea that

Manliness is about maintaining perpetually high T. I think actually positive masculinity is more about adaptability, being flexible and showing up in the way that you need to for changing situations.

Well, what a horrendous own goal it would be.

If you decided to keep your testosterone high in an attempt to show your masculinity and in the process ended your lineage.

Yeah.

Like well done dude.

Yeah.

Like you blew through all of the warning signs that you should have been tuned down from.

Yeah.

So yeah I guess testosterone drops when men become engaged fathers.

Yeah.

So some men will hear that and think okay so fatherhood makes you less of a man.

Right.

Do you think that the fear of losing masculinity by caregiving is actually driving avoidant fatherhood in some ways, maybe?

This was something I worried about when writing this book and trying to summarize the science around fatherhood is that the subtitle I joked for a while would be,

Fatherhood gives you a smaller brain makes you sleepier sadder fatter and have lower testosterone

But it's really good jared it'll give you so that i don't think that would that wouldn't sell very many books yeah

And we've talked about some of the benefits of fatherhood, like an increased sense of meaning and purpose and neuroprotection in late life.

I would argue that being a good dad is one of the most manly things you can do.

You're literally rearing the next generation.

You're guiding them.

You're protecting them.

You're inspiring them.

You're teaching them.

So when you think about what is masculinity for?

I would argue that in some ways it's for your ability to be a good dad.

So I think we confuse like just having a certain hormone level equals masculinity.

And I would counter argue it's more about what is your social role and how are you showing up to do the things that are needed of you.

And what is your definition of success?

Exactly.

Especially, this is a more...

I'm going to put...

It's a more controversial area to talk about.

But if you were to say for women...

What is your definition of success?

I think mumbrain is seen as quite a big loss by a lot of women.

While I'm executively less competent, my ability to remember, maybe I was an assistant or a teacher or someone who worked in marketing or whatever, and I can't

Hold on to the ideas in the way that I used to.

And you say, well, that looks like a massive loss in all of the ways that society says that a woman should be successful.

Apart from the one that's most important, which is being a good mom.

And it's all about definition of success.

And if you're in a meritocratic capitalist world that says your ability to produce economically and to rise up through the ladder of status and prestige and socioeconomic hierarchy, that's your primary goal.

That's exactly what you bring to the world.

Yeah, that looks like a loss.

Apart from the fact that your kid is happier and you're more in tune with them and more in love with them.

And so, again, it's the same thing as the dad masculinity conversation.

I just think it's a bit more of a minefield.

No, I think you're right.

I think we undervalue care.

And we don't prioritize it as a public social good, which it certainly is.

And I think as a result, we have this whole discourse around bouncing back after baby.

How quickly can you get your pre-baby body back?

How quickly can you get your pre-baby brain back?

And in fact, it's supposed to be transformative.

You have a whole new role to play.

And I think we want to celebrate that.

It's a weird kind of denial of the...

Preciousness of parenthood

Yeah it's a real middle finger to that to go

I had this inconvenience for a while

I was kind of afflicted with motherhood or fatherhood and my goal is to get back to what I was before as opposed to become something new

Yeah, exactly.

And I will say as a parent of teens, I don't want to go back to my pre-baby self because I was clueless.

I think you learn a lot and figure a lot of things out.

I can use that as my excuse.

As a parent.

As a non-parent, my cluelessness is exclusively because of my lack of child.

That's right.

Does the dad brain and the mom brain, does that happen again and again?

Does it re-kickstart?

How do multiple children play into this?

So there's some really interesting new research about this.

And I should preface by saying the research literature is really scant.

Part of why I wrote the book is because I want more studies to get funded and more studies to get done in both dads and moms.

So there's one study that I know of that looks at what happens to the brain when you have a second kid.

It was done in moms.

It was done in the Netherlands.

And what happens is the brain shrinks again, but it actually shrinks in some different ways and in some different places.

So there's some rebound.

So we actually think maternal brain change, and I'm guessing paternal brain change too when we have more

Longitudinal data points is actually U-shaped.

So you lose volume and then you regain some volume.

It would be adaptive.

Which is adaptive, exactly.

Because you don't necessarily want to end up with a much smaller brain after having had many more kids.

So you get some rebound, but then- 10 kids and you can't function, the kids are looking after you.

Yeah, you're walking around like the guy in Beetlejuice with the tiny shrunken head, right?

Yeah, you don't want that to happen.

But you end up actually where you lose gray matter volume with a second pregnancy is actually in areas that are tied more to pregnancy.

Deploying, let's see, what's a good way to say this, like managing multiple inputs.

So those are areas that if you streamline and tune them, they're actually salient for taking care of multiple kids.

So it's kind of like task switching and being oriented cognitively to variable demands.

Those are the places where you see that sharpening of functioning in second time moms.

You know what I'd love to see?

I'd love to see a comparison between that and mothers who have twins or triplets.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Wouldn't that be so cool?

Yes.

And the studies, unfortunately, exclude twin and triplet moms because they're going to add too much complexity.

But if you did a study specifically on them.

It's a really interesting paradigm, right?

Because you kind of get double the dose of parenting experience and you get more parenting hormones too.

Do you have more time on skin?

I mean, both dad and mom will be really at the upper limit of that 1 to 2.5% range.

Yeah.

But also I wonder if you basically speed run level one and go straight to level two as mum, where you've got the multitasking, like baby juggling skill.

Yeah.

Um,

You might advance to that second time brain a little faster.

Yes, so interesting.

And my guess is also with twins and triplets, dad gets more involved.

So again, you're talking about tuning the dial up that turns fatherhood behavior on.

When you have multiples, you need dad more because you need more help to parents.

Yeah, you basically had a baby with leverage.

You invested at like two or three X starting capital in the beginning.

I read about the daughter effect.

Is that real?

Say what you mean by it.

When fathers have daughters, their behavior changes in unique ways that wouldn't have done with a son.

Yeah.

So I'm glad you asked that because my lab literally just wrote a paper over the weekend.

We do these paper in a day retreats where we all get together and we write chunks of a paper together.

And we looked at how men's

Behavior and well-being and hormones change when they have either a son or a daughter.

So we found that when men have daughters, and this is from our longitudinal sample, they show more of a drop in testosterone across the transition to that parenthood.

And they also spend less time caring for their babies and

And they report more parenting stress and worse bonding.

So it's kind of bad news for girls, actually.

And we need to figure out what modulates that and, you know, how to offset it.

But it suggests that when men are expecting girls, they might be in need of some additional support.

Coaching and preparation to figure out how they can show up as effective parents.

Does the sex of the baby change how the brain adapts in the other direction then?

So we don't know because there haven't been enough studies of this.

I've looked at this a little bit in our data.

Should be pretty easy to do, right?

Was it boy, was it girl?

Compare groups.

But you're cutting your sample in half.

So if you already have an underpowered sample, then you're losing your ability to pick up on it.

Put the hat on and just throw some hypotheses up.

I know of a little bit of work suggesting that it shifts certain brain responses.

Like I think there was a study, actually it was done at Emory in Atlanta that found that

And the brain was more primed to happy facial expressions from girls and distressed expressions from boys.

And so there were some different patterns of brain responses.

But the literature is tiny.

We don't know a lot about those kind of sex specific effects in the brain.

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Do we think the, uh, increase reduction of testosterone

Around girls is because rough and tumble play more protection needed for child.

But it's interesting, right?

Because you would also assume that the small boy would become physically vulnerable

Stronger sooner as well.

So more protection from the outside world might require more testosterone, but less risk taking and less aggression toward the inside world requires less testosterone.

So there's a strange balance that's going on.

Do you understand that?

Yeah, I think that's an interesting hunch.

I mean, I think our time course was just from mid-pregnancy to the first six months.

So we didn't really have enough, you know, the babies aren't even really... You need more money.

Someone needs to give you a ton of money.

Thank you.

From your lips to God's ears, right?

Give us more grants.

We'll study this long.

We're actually doing a seven-year follow-up right now.

So we'll see what happens when the kids are hitting first and second grade.

We're collecting that data as we speak.

But our hunch is exactly what you said first, which is that we think that dads might behaviorally be interacting with new babies differently depending on whether they're a boy or a girl.

And there's evidence that even before babies are born, if you ask parents, what are the

They are shaped by knowing the sex of the baby.

So new parents tend to describe a baby girl as being more delicate, more vulnerable.

Sweet.

Yeah, sweet, soft.

They might describe a baby boy as rambunctious or mischievous or tough and strong.

And so it may be that dads are getting more active and are playing with girls in a way that's more about cuddling and nurturing and are playing with boys in a way that's more about playing and activating.

And we know that, in fact, dads do have these kind of signature styles of playing with kids.

They do tend to engage in more of what's called proprioceptive touch.

Just like picking babies up, moving them around in space, like really active, exploratory kind of boundary-pushing play.

And it may just be that dads are doing more of that when they've got a baby boy, and that is why their testosterone isn't falling in exactly the same way.

Also that the behavior of the boys and the girls will be, the boy is more likely to want to play with trucks, linear objects, et cetera.

And the girl is more likely to want to do the caregiving stuff.

Although, again, these are six-month-old babies, so they can't even pick up a truck.

That's true.

Let alone, you know.

I was thinking more about when you get to sort of two, three, four.

I had Joyce Benenson on the show.

It was just the best.

And she was saying she looked at the playground of kindergartners, like three, four years old, and, you know…

There's not been a massive amount of time to socialize you into your gender role already.

And all of the girls were playing a game where they had to keep something alive.

And all of the boys were playing a game where they had to fight something in a war.

You know what I mean?

Fighting something in a war is also keeping something alive.

That's true.

That is true.

But I would say, like, I would actually push back on that a little bit and say there is a role for socialization even in very young kids.

So in the book, I talked about an experiment that was done by the BBC where they brought

A bunch of toddlers into a playroom and they got these adult volunteers and they switched the toddlers' names and outfits.

So they had a little girl, they put her in boy clothes and gave her a boy's name.

They were trying to trick these playmate, these adult playmate volunteers.

So they took a little boy, put him in a dress, gave him a girl's name.

And they found that the volunteers played totally differently with the, I think these were two-year-olds, depending on the name and the outfit.

And they sort of appraised the play differently.

Yeah.

You know, they taped these sessions and with the boy who's dressed as a little girl, oh, you know, she loves the pink dolly.

And with the girl who's dressed as a little boy, you know, he wants to push the truck.

So I do think we have this way of sort of sorting boys and girls.

And so it's, you know, like with everything, it's a mix of biology and culture.

There's some biological propensity there, but we amplify it through our culture and through the way we socialize.

And I think that leads to more divergent outcomes.

That's like the Dartmouth scar study, but done on kids.

Yeah, totally.

Kind of hilarious.

Yeah.

What was the housework and cortisol research?

So this was work I did in my graduate training.

This was part of my dissertation.

So we looked at dual income couples who were followed around their homes for a week.

This was like a week in the life study of these middle class couples in L.A. And we recorded how much time they were spending in

Common household activities.

So we looked at housework time, leisure time, childcare time, other kinds of activities.

I found that housework is bad for your health, which I think anyone could have told you.

So the more time you spend doing housework,

On

You know as part of a typical week the less cortisol recovery you have at the end of the day

So we looked at the magnitude of cortisol change from the afternoon into the evening and you want this drop in cortisol levels at the end of the day

So cortisol has a diurnal rhythm has kind of a circadian pattern

You want to start high

And you want to end low.

And when people were doing more housework in the evenings, they had less of that nadir that they were hitting at bedtime.

And we also found that when you entered moms and dads' time use together in the same model,

So moms benefited in terms of their cortisol when dads were doing more housework and dads benefited when they had more leisure time and their partners had less leisure time.

So kind of a mixed bag of results where it's sort of, you know,

If you're a mom, you want your partner to be helping with housework.

And if you're a dad, you want to be sitting back and relaxing while your partner is taking care of business.

It's a bit zero sum.

Yeah.

It's sort of depressing.

Yeah, it is.

What's stress contagion?

So stress contagion is when couples influence each other's hormone levels.

So I found that you see linked cortisol levels in cohabitating couples.

And I've looked at this in moms and dads.

I've also looked at this in non-parent male and female couples.

So when one person has higher cortisol, their partner has higher than usual cortisol as well.

And it seems like when the relationship quality is compromised, when you have more conflict, you have more tightly linked patterns of cortisol.

So people are actually increasing each other's stress rather than helping to balance or modulate it.

How do you fix that?

You help people communicate better and fight more effectively so that they can calm each other down rather than amp each other up.

I think when you're frustrated and stressed and you have a partner who's exacerbating that, it's very hard to recover.

If you have a partner who can help to talk you down and sort of balance out your stress

Irritated state with a calm state, then you can better recover in terms of your biology.

What are the downsides of fatherhood for men?

Well, we talked about already weight gain.

We talked about testosterone changes.

There are also increased vulnerability to mood disorders.

So the prevalence of depression in new dads is about twice that of the general population.

There's a lot of controversy about whether we call it postpartum depression in dads.

A lot of-

Observed this.

In your opinion, do dads get postpartum depression?

So in the book, I say I think perinatal depression is a better word.

That just means around the birth of a baby.

But to me, it's semantic.

It doesn't matter that much whether we call it postpartum or perinatal.

I think some people really are attached to the idea of postpartum really means having given birth.

That's not really what the term means.

It just means occurring after the birth of a baby.

And the fact is that a lot of the risk factors for depression are shared by new moms and new dads.

You've got stress.

You've got disrupted sleep.

You've got relationship conflict.

You've got new responsibilities, identity crisis.

Hormone changes, brain changes.

So even though you're not the person that's physically delivered an infant, you are still experiencing a lot of the same overlapping risks.

What does postpartum mean?

So it just means after the birth of a baby.

The time period- Not after your birth of a baby.

Yeah, it doesn't necessarily mean- So it is a gender neutral term.

Yeah, it's a gender neutral term.

It doesn't necessarily mean that you birthed the baby.

It just means the time period that falls after the birth of a baby.

That said, I don't want to antagonize the moms who keep coming into my Instagram comments to get mad at me for talking about postpartum depression.

What are they mad about?

Are they mad about the fact that this is our term?

Like we want it to be, it needs to be like paternal postpartum depression or so it needs some sort of a qualifier on it.

It sounds to me like, and I saw a bunch of comments on Instagram talking about the same thing.

It's not about, this is a term that we care about it.

My best reading of it, right?

And this is me trying to steel man it as best I can.

Yeah.

The process of childbirth for a woman is so arduous and traumatic and scary that any man who appears to be flippant or dismissive or to kind of

Liken the challenge that he goes through to the one that the mum goes through, that is seen as being very callous and it doesn't fully appreciate or understand the sacrifice of a mum.

I think that's the best reading of it.

Yeah, I think that's a good reading.

I think another piece of that- That's me with my peaceful hat on.

Yes, where's your peaceful hat?

You're missing that prop.

You need a new prop.

I would say that a lot of women legitimately feel like they've had to work very hard to get postpartum depression recognized

There's inadequate funding.

There's inadequate attention paid to reproductive health and mood disorders in moms.

And so if they're fighting to get...

Access to treatment and to get education about their mental health, they feel like how can dads just sort of show up and make it all about them?

That seems very unfair.

And I'm totally sympathetic to that argument.

I mean, I talked to a

Psychotherapist who works with new dads for my book who's done a lot of advocacy for postpartum mental health in men.

And she says a lot of the women's health advocates are just like, can't we have this one thing?

Can't we have...

Right.

But I mean, that my peaceful hat got taken off now.

That is fucking stupid.

But because what you're saying is, can we not not support men because we want women to have most of the attention?

You go, well, hang on a second.

Are you most concerned about owning this area of cognitive real estate like it's some sort of cultural appropriation by men?

Or do you care about the outcome of the kid and of the mum?

Because if you don't treat the mental health of the father, how do you think the mum's going to feel?

And how do you think the child's going to grow up?

So what you're saying is you would rather be intellectually superior...

But in the real world have negative side effects.

Like that is the outcome.

Whether that's what they know or what they mean doesn't matter.

Like it's not my job to sugarcoat the fact that you trying to own some area of cognitive real estate is having a negative impact on men

That should be enough.

But also on mum, if the men thing wasn't enough, and if that's not enough on baby too.

So like not recognizing, and if you did this in reverse, right?

And this is true for a very, very, very long time.

There was all research was done on men.

It was just the male body standard inside of the medical industry.

Yeah.

No one said, well, this is cancer.

That's men's thing.

You go, no, this is not a fucking gendered issue.

So, I mean, I've got I got a video to show you a video from The Times that you've probably seen that I think is very interesting.

And the video is interesting and the comments are way more interesting.

Yeah.

So it's this one.

It's this one on TikTok, Jared.

I had postnatal depression.

Yes, dads can get it too.

In 2021, when my daughter Aurelia was about a month old, my wife turned to me in bed one morning and she asked,

How much do you love her?

I froze, I kind of gritted my teeth and said, yeah, I really love her, but inside I knew it wasn't there yet.

I struggled to bond with my baby, felt disconnected and had growing shame that I was not being the natural father I thought I would be.

About six months into fatherhood, I opened up to my wife.

I wanted to be a rock to Chessie who had had a complicated pregnancy.

Eventually I got therapy, but postnatal depression was never raised.

It wasn't until Aurelia was a year old that I came across an article about men's PND, that everything started to make sense.

About 10% of new dads will experience depressive symptoms during the perinatal period,

And first year of a child's life.

For me and my wife, it was a eureka moment.

Men are not routinely screened for PND.

So many cases go undiagnosed.

I think the system is not changing quickly enough to offer support and spot the signs of depression in dads.

My bond with Aurelia is now incredible.

And with new understanding and support, I hope I won't suffer from PND again, but I think new dads should know they might not have that emotional bond straight away.

All right.

Let me pause it there, Jared.

I love that.

Just press on the comments on the right-hand side for me.

Oh, no, I don't think I want to see the comments.

Matt, please, I already had a long day.

How do I make this about myself?

Thank you for telling us that's Tom Scarborough.

Oh, Matt, it's not the same thing.

This isn't depression.

It's discomfort and uncertainty.

Postpartum depression is linked to the dramatic hormonal changes that happen after childbirth.

Such as sudden drops in estrogen and progesterone.

Not sure how this affects the father.

Time of irritation, 1.41 PM.

Playing on my device.

Yes, however, calling it postnatal depression isn't the right phase.

I think he ultimately just didn't like all the attention in the relationship shifting to the baby.

Please, I'm already annoyed today.

How can I make this about me too?

I feel left out.

Is there poo in my AirPods?

Oh my gosh.

Like,

Yeah, I've been fighting in the comment sections like these for a while now.

And, you know, people really come out of the woodwork to be frustrated with this kind of material.

And I think there's a gatekeeping around perinatal depression that is unfortunate because mental health is a family system.

You need the best possible team around a baby.

And the best predictor actually of mom's mental health is the support that she gets from her partner.

So if dad is not well, dad is not showing up mom's mental health either.

I think the idea that this is a fixed pie or that it's a zero sum game, like there's a

They need to be directed solely to mom, I think is really limited.

We need to be thinking about how do moms work together with dads to make sure that the baby is getting well cared for and that everybody's mental health needs are getting met.

Having a zero sum view of empathy is like one of the dumbest, especially with something like this.

It's just a guy going, I went through this really hard thing.

And people going, no, you didn't.

No, you didn't.

Or I went through something that was way worse than that.

Yeah, why are we gaslighting dads and why are we pitting dads against moms?

And my response to that is, if we want to have a society where men are stepping up as parents and they're fully participating in caretaking...

They're waking up with the baby, they're doing the hard parts of care, we need to recognize that that's going to have mental health consequences.

It's going to be taxing.

It's going to be isolating.

It's going to be draining.

And if we really want men to participate, we have to respect that their mental health matters too.

We can't guard it as though it's the sole domain of new moms because we want dads to act more like primary caregivers, but we're not willing to accept that they're going to have vulnerability tied to that.

Bingo.

Yeah.

Saying the same thing in two different, saying different things in the same breath, which is we want dads to be fully involved, but we don't believe that they can have the negative outcomes that other people who've been fully involved for all of history have.

Right.

What's the rate of postnatal depression in women?

It's a little higher in new moms than it is in new dads.

I think it ranges across studies, but like 19 to 21%.

It's about double.

It's about 10%.

Which is nearly the same as the change in brain.

1% to two, two and a half.

And I think important context is that women have about twice the rate of anxiety and depression in the general population.

It's a base rate.

Wow, that's a spicy realization.

It could just be an increase in whatever your predisposition was and that dads are actually getting it at the same rate as mums.

And now that we've got more involved caregiving, which is the primary enforcement mechanism for the change, I'm going to guess postpartum depression in fathers is mediated by the amount of caregiving that they do.

Right.

And that's the other thing.

So you're telling me like that's brutal that any dad that's listening to this now knows the more that I care for my baby, the higher my likelihood of getting postnatal depression is.

Well, let's keep in mind it's still a low rate.

And a lot of people experience baby blues that don't.

Turn into full blown debilitating depression, right?

There's a continuum.

So you can have depressive symptoms without necessarily becoming somebody who's incapacitated by depression.

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Why... Is there an adaptive explanation for postpartum depression in women?

So I actually think probably not.

I think it's more of a sign of an evolutionary cultural mismatch, which is this...

Going back to this idea that we as humans are cooperative breeders and we evolved to have a lot of support around caregiving.

So we evolved to trade off care, to share care with people in the community, with our kin.

I think we now place a lot of pressure on individual parents and on the individual nuclear family to serve the roles that dozens of people used to serve when there was a lot more proximity and people helped

Each other out a lot more with care.

So we isolate new parents.

We don't value their work.

We've already talked about the incentives of a very late capitalist society where we want people to be

Ambitious drivers, and we want them to move on quickly from this interruption of birth.

And so we're not providing the support.

In this country, we don't have universal paid maternity leave or paternity leave.

So

A lot of women go back to work probably before they feel like they're ready.

A lot of men do too.

We don't give adequate time and protection.

And we create an uphill battle where parents feel isolated and drained.

So is there any evidence of postpartum in hunter-gatherer societies?

Not that I know of, but I'm also not sure how well it's been tracked or measured.

Yeah, okay.

I'm trying to see if this mismatch hypothesis can just be split-tested across civilizations.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a really, really interesting question, and depression in general hasn't been observed as much in those populations.

So it's a really interesting question.

But, you know, in hunter gatherer societies, when a woman becomes a mother, she becomes, if anything, more socially integrated into the life of the community.

In contemporary society, when a woman becomes a mother, she often becomes more isolated.

We have all of these public spaces that don't bring the baby to...

A wedding.

Don't bring the baby to a restaurant.

Don't bring the baby to a cafe.

People don't want it.

Yeah, to work, right?

Like a hunter-gatherer mom can actually still go to work.

She can still be wearing the baby.

She can function economically.

Swaddle up, grab some berries.

Yeah.

Had a good day in the office.

She can occupy a high-status social role.

Yeah.

And she can be, you know, fully integrated into the community.

That's interesting.

So what is rewarded socioeconomically at the moment, specifically for women, is not baby accommodating.

We have this kind of sharp divide between work and home, which I think is a legacy of the Industrial Revolution, right?

Before that, work generally happened at home.

Dads were around a lot.

Moms were around a lot.

Kids were raised as workers.

They were contributing to the family business, the family economy.

Jared, if you brought your kid in here and they were able to write good copy, if your eight month old was able to write good YouTube copy, I'd be down, but I would be, I would be absolutely fine.

I mean, you're allowed to come as long as you contribute, but yeah.

Yeah.

He's trying.

Yeah.

Good way to hone those skills.

What I'm interested, what do you think is the best advice for dads, like trying to be great father, great husband, still take care of themselves while supporting a mom who's going through postpartum?

Give yourself grace.

Don't expect that it will be easy.

Forewarned is forearmed.

So know that this is going to rock your world and it's going to be transformative, but it's supposed to be transformative.

And I would say steer away from the myth that dads don't have any innate wiring to know how to take care of a baby.

I think we have this idea that moms are just born knowing what to do when a baby arrives and men are going to be helpless and useless.

Does that help moms postpartum?

I don't think so because I will say when I had my kids, I was like, what am I supposed to do with these people?

You know, you have to learn and you figure it out and it's about your motivation and your willingness to practice.

More than it's about just having some inborn reflex that's telling you how to care for a child.

And dads have that capacity to care and to build those empathetic, responsive, caregiving brains.

I've got two potential hypotheses in my mind.

First one is like postpartum contagion.

I have to assume that if the mom is dealing with it, it's more likely that the dad's going to deal with it.

But I wonder if level of paternal child caring decreases the likelihood of...

Female postpartum depression.

Yeah.

Do we know, do we know what levels of household setup can increase or decrease the likelihood?

So there is some research on this and it corroborates both of your hunches.

Dude, don't test me.

Don't test me on this shit.

So you can keep the pro science hat off.

Yeah, you don't need it.

Yeah, good.

Good instincts.

There's research that depressive symptoms are correlated within moms and dads.

So if mom is more depressed, dad's more likely to be depressed.

If dad's depressed, mom's more likely to be depressed.

And if one partner is well and can support the other partner, that's also a huge resilience factor.

That's a buffer.

So they track together.

And there's also evidence that when dads are more involved moms benefit.

So one really cool study tested a paternity leave reform program in Sweden where they were expanding flexibility of paternity leave for dads.

They found that if you look at babies born right before and right after that policy intervention, you actually see lower rates of anti-anxiety medication.

Prescriptions were filled less often by the new moms.

So if dads have more access to leave...

Moms actually show this population level mental health benefit.

And my lab has done similar work.

And we found that if you look at prenatal to postpartum trajectories of depressive symptoms, when dads get access to paid paternity leave, moms are less likely to get depressed after the birth of a baby.

So it seems like for postpartum depression, maybe for dads as well as moms, one of the key drivers is social integration, level of social integration.

Does that mean that if you're struggling with postpartum depression, you should try and like

Turn on the socialization taps a little bit, do mummy, daddy daycare meetup things.

Yeah.

That seems like an intervention that might work.

Exactly.

And that goes back to the evolutionary mismatch idea, right?

We're supposed to be embedded in social networks that help us care for our kids.

We're not supposed to do it alone.

Is postpartum basically like

Fuck, this is a lot and I'm overwhelmed.

Yeah.

I mean, that's part of it.

Yeah.

Compounded with sleep loss, identity challenges, relationship strain, money and life worries, and your brain and hormones getting totally disrupted.

Does that mean?

Does that mean that there is a socioeconomic predictor for postpartum depression

Because people who are more wealthy are more likely to have childcare, which means that they have more assistance, less pressure, and better sleep?

Yes.

Dude.

Yes.

So there is a socioeconomic link between postpartum depression risk.

And part of it is, you know, there are moms in the U.S. who go back to work less than two weeks after the birth of a baby.

So if you're a shift worker, if you're a gig worker, if you're at Walmart, you are probably not getting time to rest, recover, and bond.

And that's really stressful and really taxing to your ability to adjust to parenthood.

So that's part of it.

It's also like, what are the community resources that are available to you?

Can you afford support and childcare?

But some of the best interventions for postpartum depression are around shoring up your social support networks.

So helping get people to be more proactive about asking for help, helping to invest in your relationships.

And you can even do preventive intervention before a baby's born to say,

And we actually do this.

My lab leads psychoeducation workshops with a big hospital system that serves low-income new parents.

We say we have them make a social support map.

So we say, who are you going to be able to ask for help in different domains after the baby comes?

Maybe your older brother isn't going to be that helpful when it comes to taking the baby for a nap, but he can help with your lawn care.

You know, so how do you plug different people in your life into different roles to make sure that your social support needs are met?

And we try to coach people to be more assertive about asking for help because I think we're conditioned in our society to be very reluctant.

Independence, agency, sovereignty.

Individualism.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I learned from Louise Perry that in...

Uh like renaissance england there was a period called lying in laying in yeah where for two weeks the mother didn't move after childbirth waited on hand and foot yeah anything that was needed

All she did was hold baby and and like

Feed baby and everything else done right the whole family comes in and and desists and you just you know you physically traumatic things happen to you like it just seems

It seems very contrary to this like hyper speed

Productivity engine thing and it's kind of strange right because my original background was as a productivity dork which I still have vestiges of and the way that I started the show was

Trying to learn life hacks and memorization tools and how to have a great to-do list manager and stuff like that, because that was what I thought was real important to me.

And I think I always just assumed that at some point you become an adult and you sort of grow out of that.

But that really is one of the drugs of...

The 21st century, this hyper-optimized efficiency culture, get more out.

And there's no reason, it was kind of naive of me to think that, oh, well, just when you become a parent, you forget about that or you realize that other things are more important like my parents did.

My parents were never afflicted with productivity culture beforehand.

Right.

So,

That's interesting.

And then this other story that it really gets me.

And I mentioned to you, I just finished this silent meditation retreat, so my heart is particularly tender.

But I went to a meetup when I first moved to Austin about four years ago.

And it was a bunch of business owners, millionaires and decamillionaires, like a couple of centamillionaires in there.

And everyone was a founder.

I was by far the poorest person in the room.

And they were all talking about...

What they were doing with their businesses and plans.

And I know a guy that can get you in at Target and so on and so forth.

And I was like sat kind of silently, the white belt at the back of the class.

And it was a circle thing.

And then someone dinged the glass and said, well, we'll have a little brainstorming session.

If you've got a problem that you're dealing with at the moment, put your hand in the air.

There's a lot of competent people in the room.

We'll see if we can help you.

And I'm thinking some guy's going to go, I've got a massive problem with the IRS.

I'm like trying to get my offshore accounts working, but the Cayman Islands don't like me.

Some other stuff.

This guy just went his hand straight in the air.

He said, my wife's six months pregnant and I don't feel anything.

And I'm scared that I'm going to be a bad dad.

And that I'm not going to love the baby.

And she keeps asking me about how I feel and there's nothing there.

And I feel so guilty and ashamed about the fact that I really want this and I love my wife and I want to be a good dad and I'm terrified that I'm going to be, I'm terrified I'm going to be a bad dad.

I'm terrified I'm not going to be able to support her.

I've got guilt and shame around.

I've got this secret.

I feel like I'm keeping a secret from her.

Yeah.

The room was like, it wasn't what we were expecting.

One of the guys over the far side straight away went, dude, don't worry about it.

It happened to me.

It happens every single, another dad was like, every single time, always happens.

Wait six months.

It'll all be fixed.

Like wait six months, lie with it on your chest for a while.

It gave all of the dad hacks, I guess.

I just remember thinking like, fuck, like this guy's in a room.

Surrounded by really impressive business people.

And he was one too, and he was competent, all the rest of it.

And he could have asked anything that he wanted about his business, but the most salient thing in his entire life was the fact that he was watching his wife

Go through the hormonal changes that make a mother, right?

Pregnancy doesn't just make a baby.

It also makes a mother.

Yeah.

But pregnancy doesn't make a father in the same way.

Right.

I,

It makes them in some negative ways, the lack of sleep and the stress, you know, you've got the Pouvet syndrome or whatever it's called.

But it doesn't prepare you in that way.

And then when you layer on top our ability to judge our own competence in these things, we think, well, what are you judging on?

Judging how good of a dad I think I might be.

Maybe I wasn't cut out for this.

I wasn't a dad before.

And I bet if you were to look at, what could we call this?

Like a potential parent guilt.

If you were to look at potential parent guilt or potential paternal guilt, might be better.

I bet that it doesn't happen on second kid.

Hmm.

Yeah, I think this is a common thing that I hear from expectant dads, that they're terrified, that they're not going to know what to do, that they're not going to be good at it.

And I think we expect men to be highly competent, you know, women too, but we really socialize men to be good at things.

Mm-hmm.

And it's hard to be really good at taking care of a baby in the abstract because it's all about what does your particular baby need and how do you get to know your baby.

And that's individual and it depends on your time and your motivation and your practice.

But I think that idea that men are sort of flailing around really uncertain.

I talked to a guy whose whole career is talking to startup entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

And he says a very similar story as yours.

He's talked to men who are great at all kinds of, you know, conquering the business world.

And yet when you get them onto the subject of their kids, they're all totally worried that they don't know what they're doing, right?

It's a domain where...

We don't have that same sense of skill and power and it's harder to optimize.

And I would say, you know, you mentioned this kind of self optimization culture and productivity.

And it's interesting if you watch the kind of like get ready with me videos or here are all the, you know, here's my regimen.

Here are all the things I do to completely, you know, biohack my way to success.

Frequently, they're of someone who's alone and they take a lot of time and they take a lot of solitary activity.

And they're not necessarily about being connected.

They're not about giving to other people.

They're not about caring for someone who's vulnerable.

And I would say when you think about what makes life worth living, a lot of it is about our relationship health.

That's what the best studies of longevity have told us.

That's what work on men has told us, that when men are socially isolated in late life, that's a real risk factor for early mortality.

So how can men get more connected?

Well, part of it is by devoting yourself to learning how to care for other people.

And so, again, going back to this idea of how do we reframe masculinity in more pro-social ways, it's mainly to take care of vulnerable people.

Well, I hope that when baby life does begin for me, that everybody is ready for me to shove it down their throat for ages.

It's just going to be an endless, like a sickening barrage of fatherhood content.

It's going to be fantastic.

You're going to be the new Dr. Becky.

That's yeah yeah yeah we'll see about that um what do you think is the worst advice that new dads get

Well, we already talked about, you know, you can fix your relationship by having a baby.

So definitely that's very bad advice.

It's the worst advice that potential dads could get.

I think other bad advice is just, you know, dads don't know what they're doing, so keep your distance.

And I think there are...

These preconceptions around, should we invest in paternity leave for new dads?

Well, dads are useless in the early months.

They've got nothing to contribute.

And I think that is bad advice because as with moms, dads are capable of learning and their neurobiology is going to come along for the ride as they learn how to take care of kids.

I think the other thing is we sometimes privilege early infancy as the sort of only time for dads to shine.

And I talked to Richard Reeves, who's written a lot about healthy masculinity.

He said

He thinks that men should be able to take paternity leave up to their kid's 14th or maybe even 18th birthday.

Yeah, well, there's some roles, especially for dads with girls around puberty that are more important.

Yeah.

Than perhaps an early life.

Yeah.

And he told me he was a stay-at-home dad to his sons for a period when they were school age.

And that was a great experience.

And he loves taking his kids on trips and excursions.

And so I think there's a lot of value that dads can add

Different stages along the lifespan.

And I think when we decide that men don't know what they're doing and we kind of opt them out of a key parenting role, we're losing that opportunity and we're not giving them the windows in which to build their competence.

I love it.

Darby Saxby, ladies and gentlemen, you're great.

I love your work.

I think it's fantastic.

It's brave to do this stuff and to talk about it.

And I think the world's a better place for having you in it.

So I appreciate you.

Thank you.

A real pleasure talking to you.

All right.

Goodbye, everybody.

Yes, you did it.

Yay, fun.

That was great.

[父职的神经重塑：从大脑灰质减少到睾酮调节的进化适应]-[The Painful Psychological Cost Of Becoming A Dad - Darby Saxbe - #1129]

📋 Summary

父职的神经重塑：从大脑灰质减少到睾酮调节的进化适应

大脑的可塑性与育儿投入

激素调节与进化策略

心理健康与社会支持的错位

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[父职的神经重塑：从大脑灰质减少到睾酮调节的进化适应]-[The Painful Psychological Cost Of Becoming A Dad - Darby Saxbe - #1129]

📋 Summary

父职的神经重塑：从大脑灰质减少到睾酮调节的进化适应

大脑的可塑性与育儿投入

激素调节与进化策略

心理健康与社会支持的错位

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