Dr. Darby Saxbe

Yes.

right after birth.

And that's compounded by the fact that for a lot of men, their primary social support relationship is with their partner.

All of a sudden she's totally preoccupied, right?

Because she's got this baby to care for.

And so the couple relationship can also struggle.

And so men can find themselves kind of a little bit adrift.

And exactly what you told me, I heard from other dads that they really felt like once there was more they could do and they could get to know their children better, it started to get a lot more fun.

And so I think that's another message to dads in this book is, you know, don't worry if it feels challenging, like anything that's worth doing.

could be hard but requires practice, requires time, you can build that confidence.

But you may find that your best window for fatherhood is when your kids are teenagers and you have a totally different kind of relationship with them.

Yeah, this is a really interesting new line of research that's been coming out of one of the biggest sources of data is the UK Biobank studies.

And so this is a big repository of scans, tens of thousands of neuroimaging scans from

adults in their 50s and 60s and beyond, so kind of mid to late life.

And what they found is that parity, so whether or not you're a parent and then the number of children that you have, it's linked with markers of sort of a more youthful brain.

So if you use a brain aging algorithm to try to figure out how old the brain looks and then compare it to a participant's chronological age, you can kind of measure the brain age gap

And it looks like the more children you have, the more you look younger than your chronological age when it comes to the appearance of the brain in brain scans.

And

That's really interesting, I think, because as we just talked about, some of my work shows some kind of risk factors in the early postpartum window.

But ultimately, over the long term, there seem to be this benefits.