Dr. Darby Saxbe

So we want a biology that is sort of linked with our life circumstances and demands.

Yeah, we still don't know very much about same-sex couples because most of the studies have focused on heterosexual couples with limited sample sizes.

I felt like I wanted to be able to fully do justice to...

same-sex parents, which would really require having, I think, a whole study where they're adequately sampled and you can look at their variability.

There is one study of same-sex parents that was done in Ruth Feldman's lab in Israel.

And in the heterosexual parents, she looked at primary caregiver mothers and secondary caregiver fathers.

And what she found is really interesting, which is that the primary caregiver gay male dads had brains that looked a lot like the primary caregiver moms, which to me shows you just how much the male brain can adapt to parenthood, right?

There's no mom brain that only is owned by women.

It's a parenting brain that develops when somebody is in a primary caregiving role.

Yeah, I mean, I hope that fathers who are listening don't say, oh, wow, okay, I need to get out of this parenting relationship.

It's not serving me well.

You know, quite the contrary.

And in fact, some of the newest research suggests that parenting experience is actually really neuroprotective for the brain in late life.

So we can hopefully come back to that.

But the question of whether it's preordained is interesting because our...

cultural expectations for fathers change so much across history and across societies.

So I talked to an anthropologist who's looked a lot at hunter gatherer societies.

And in those societies, you actually have more egalitarian gender roles a lot of the time, because

women are bringing in essential calories through foraging.

And so you have fathers who are very involved and hands-on and active in care.