Dad brains: How fatherhood rewires the male mind

Saw this earlier today, I think it’s very flawed and ideological, unfortunately other posts mentioning this got flagged.

First there’s the idea that “nurturing” is somehow what kids need and better for them automatically, that whatever a stereotypical man does with kids is bad for them, and we need to be rewired by pheromones or whatever to be more sensitive. And as a corollary the idea that a high-T man somehow is a worse caregiver, and that it needs to be reigned in by some adaptation. The whole thing is definitely framed for a certain world view, it’s definitely not the only interpretation.

> And the men that had spent longer looking after babies showed the largest drops in testosterone. Those that shared a bed with their infants also had lower levels.

Dad here. Maybe…it’s the lack of sleep? Involved fathers tend to have less sleep.

As a father of 3 daughters now approaching 50 with my oldest now 24 … I will say that I believe some of this is true. Perhaps it is just the life altering effect of raising children or maybe is biological as well. You can definitely pickup on whether another male is a father or not.

Mom brain is also a thing. Large scale, consistent, structural changes in the postpartum brain that is uncorrelated with PPD. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhab463

I find it very odd that the rest of the comments are sort of... not agreeing with the findings in the article.

I became a father recently (:D) and it's been an emotional rollercoaster for me. I had been frantically Googling my "symptoms" and asking around what's wrong with me, because it seems I've been quite sensitive since the birth of my baby.

One way to explain this is the Gordon Ramsay meme (https://imgflip.com/memetemplate/211147137/Oh-dear-dear-gorg..., LHS = my reaction to my baby, RHS = my reaction to other kids before my baby was born).

I think the article is spot on — the more time you spend with your baby and care for them, the more oxytocin you get and the more your testosterone drops (I cried when my baby first spoke — cooed, really — to me, for example, and that's just one instance).

Edit: I want to take this opportunity to say — fuck companies that don't give paternity leave. This is fucking hard to do alone, so be nice to your employees and offer paternity benefits. I'm in India, where paternity leave isn't required, so I was told to fuck off when I asked for time off.

    By the time Gettler looked into this field, it was already an established fact that fathers had lower testosterone that [sic] men without kids.

I swear my hearing got more sensitive with kids. Also, some commercials hit differently.

It makes sense as a layman - less testosterone means less fighting, aggressive behavior, chasing other mates, etc. Ensures more success for your offspring.

It's the equivalent of castrating yourself! Never!

The only problems is that if the boys are falling for it you cannot save them so you need new boys to hangout with but it's not the same because you don't go back to where you were both kids

you have to control for the stress, lack of sleep etc.

do partners who purchase a puppy also have lower T in the following months if they are primary caregivers?

I wouldn’t trust these sourced studies - smells exactly like replication crisis findings.

Malcom Gladwell meticulously sourced the researchers when he was writing his books. He got everything right. It was all the researchers who lied.

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> that men have all the necessary biological wiring to be "every bit as protective and nurturing as the most committed mother

This seems like an overstatement - man can't give birth to babies (which involves transfer of the mothers biome to the baby) or feed babies (which typically involves lactation).