Darby Saxbe

And you do see that as dads are getting more access to federally funded paid paternity leave, they're getting more involved.

It's better for the couple relationship.

It's better for mom's health outcomes.

It's better for the kid's health outcomes.

And it's better for the father himself.

In the short term, right, you're losing gray matter volume.

Your hormones are changing.

It's this set of challenges.

In the long term, the evidence is that becoming a parent is neuroprotective.

So work on both fathers and mothers finds that if you look at how the brain is aging, you have markers of a younger looking brain when you have children.

And so these are big scan studies that look at thousands of people in later life.

And they find you can use like a computer machine learning algorithm to basically gauge the age of a brain.

And people's brains look younger relative to chronological age if they are parents.

And you see that for fathers as well as for mothers, which tells me it's not just a pregnancy hormone thing.

It's about caregiving.

It's about social integration.

And we also know from longitudinal work that the quality of a man's relationships is what's really important for his health and well-being in late life.

Yes.

Men are at risk for social isolation, which we know is a factor in all-cause mortality.

Yep.