For more than a decade, my research lab at the University of Southern California has studied how fatherhood affects men’s brains, bodies, health and relationships. Although there’s plenty of evidence that fatherhood matters for kids and for moms, we’ve rarely put the spotlight on dads themselves.
We already know that the children of engaged fathers show advantages across a variety of domains, from their self-regulation abilities to their social skills and educational attainment. We also know that hands-on dads relieve stress on mothers, improve their partners’ relationship satisfaction and can even buffer the risk of postpartum depression in mothers.
But as I discovered when researching my new book, becoming a committed father also directly benefits men. Men who prioritise fatherhood may lose some sleep, gain some extra weight and enjoy less free time, but they can also discover a richer life with greater meaning, purpose and connection. And when it comes to brain health and mental fitness, becoming a father is one of the best things you can do.
MILLENNIAL DADS ARE HEEDING THE CALL
If you look at the data, men are not uniformly heeding the call of the manosphere to embrace hustle culture and eschew family life. Asked about their priorities for the future, Gen Z men ranked marriage and children higher than Gen Z women did.
Men’s child care time has quadrupled in the past few generations. Millennial dads are now spending about as much time with their kids as baby boomer moms once did. The parenting time for fathers has been trending upward for decades, but the pandemic was an inflection point that brought more dads into intensive daily contact with children, and the uptick in father engagement seems to have persisted.
Similarly to many contemporary trends, modern fatherhood shows a class-based divergence: Highly educated dads are investing more time and energy into parenthood, while non-college-educated fathers are spending slightly less time with kids than they did in 2003.
In 2003 college-educated fathers devoted over two more hours to child care per week than non-college-educated fathers (7.9 hours versus 6.2 hours), whereas in recent years, college-educated men have put about twice as much time into fatherhood as non-college-educated men (10.2 hours versus 5.9 hours).
This educational divide is especially pronounced when it comes to interactive activities, like reading to children, playing and talking. The widening gap in paternal engagement can compound existing class divides and give the most privileged children an even greater leg up in life.
This gap can also affect men’s health, because thriving family relationships promote men’s well-being. One of the world’s longest studies of adult life, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, supports this. Researchers found that at age 50, men’s satisfaction with their family and community relationships predicted their physical health several decades later even more strongly than their midlife cholesterol levels did.
Parenthood forces us to deepen relationships not just with our immediate family members but also with our extended family and the community around us. As sociologists say, weak ties – community ties beyond close friends and family, the kinds of ties you might form with your kids’ classmates’ parents – are fostered by repetition and proximity. Having kids can give you both. If they’re young, you might be on the playground or play-date circuit. If they’re older, school drop-offs and sports practices might throw you into daily contact with other families.
There are, of course, many ways to form community and build social skills without having children, but making common cause with fellow parents can accelerate connections. You’re all in the same boat, and you land in the same places at the same times enough to foster weak ties. Because men often struggle more to make friends in adulthood, these social connections may be especially meaningful for dads.
PARENTHOOD BETTER THAN BOTOX
When it comes to the brain, parenthood may be better than Botox for preserving our youth. Children inspire us to exercise our social brain, improve our connections with others and pursue healthier lifestyles. As anyone who has talked a three-year-old out of an epic tantrum knows, raising young children requires us to hone our negotiating skills and cultivate patience.
An emerging body of research is finding that fatherhood can protect men’s brains as they get older. The neuroscientist Ann-Marie de Lange and her fellow researchers used data from the U.K. Biobank, a repository of brain scans of thousands of participants across Britain, to test whether parents showed different trajectories of brain age in middle age and beyond. The brains of the participants with children looked younger – a relationship that emerged for both fathers and mothers.
A complementary study led by researchers at the University of Southern California also found younger-looking brains in men and women with children compared with those without. Men with two children had an estimated brain age that was 0.6 years younger than their childless peers had, and for men with three children, it was 0.7 years younger. That’s similar to the brain benefit associated with exercising 2.5 hours a week.
A study of the aging brain led by the neuroscientist Edwina Orchard focused on a different type of brain health marker, a resting-state scan. Researchers can identify patterns of correlated blood flow across different parts of the brain, giving us a sense of which regions talk to one another.
Her team found that participants with more children showed livelier patterns of brain connectivity, with more disparate regions of the brain in communication. In particular, more connections appeared in parts of the brain that integrate sensory and motor information and memory, perhaps reflecting the importance of these regions to the physical caregiving of children.
There’s growing evidence that fathers may get an even greater cognitive benefit from children than mothers do. Another UK Biobank study, reporting on participants ranging in age from their late 30s to their mid-70s, looked at men’s and women’s performance across five domains of cognition. Men with children showed a cognitive advantage over non-dads, scoring better on all five domains. Results for women were more mixed.
The greater cognitive advantage from fatherhood dovetails with evidence that fathers enjoy parenting more than mothers do and find it more satisfying. In part that’s because dads have traditionally gotten more leeway to do the fun parts of parenting, like playing with kids, while moms usually tackle the tedium of everyday child care.
But that is changing, too. Not only are men increasing their daily time with kids, but they’re also increasing their physical caretaking of children, including activities like feeding, bathing and dressing them. In a study from 1982, 43 per cent of British fathers had never changed a diaper. By 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 90 per cent of American fathers who lived with children under five helped with tasks like changing diapers at least several times a week.
As men take on more quotidian child care tasks, it’s possible that they will also shoulder more of the downsides of parenting. New fathers are more likely to report symptoms of depression and anxiety than men in the general population. They can experience some physical health fallout, too, like lost sleep and extra pounds. (Dad bod is real.) It can take time for men to reap the longer-term rewards of parenthood, but first they have to weather the hard parts.
PARENTHOOD FEELS MORE OPTIONAL
Some men are forgoing family life entirely. Parenthood, once the default choice for many young people, now feels more optional. The marriage rate has declined in the past few decades. In 1980 only 6 per cent of 40-year-olds in the United States had never been married; by 2021, this had risen to 25 per cent. Young couples are delaying parenthood in rising numbers or choosing not to become parents. The fertility rate in the United States has been declining over the past half-century and hit a record low last year.
In the hands of hustle culture and wellness influencers, the ideal male lifestyle depends on careful control. While focused on crafting the best possible self, these men may miss the mark on this goal, given the evidence of fatherhood’s benefits for longevity and brain health. You can perfect your body fat percentage and your productivity at work, but you can’t optimise your way into a caretaking bond with a young child.
In learning how to care for children, fathers develop their empathy, build their brains and cultivate skills that can enhance their organisations and communities. Ultimately, the traits of a good dad are also the traits of a good man: strength coupled with a willingness to look out for the young and vulnerable, to teach but also listen, to lead by example, to tackle daunting challenges and to persevere with grit.
When we celebrate these traits, not only do we build a healthier brain and a more satisfying old age, but we also elevate a positive, prosocial version of masculinity that provides an alternative to the lone wolf, the secular monk and the darker, crueler visions of manhood that the manosphere is serving our boys.
Darby Saxbe is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Southern California and the author of Dad Brain: The New Science Of Fatherhood And How It Shapes Men’s Lives.
The article originally appeared in The New York Times.
