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Chapter 1: How does becoming a dad change your brain?
Welcome to Chasing Life. You know, I have taken on a lot of different roles in my life. I've been a son, I've been a husband, a neurosurgeon, a journalist. But you know, when I really think about it, I think being a dad to my three daughters is the most important role in my life. No question about it.
Because I think no matter how busy things have become at times, that is the role that I always come back to. That's the role that seems to anchor everything else in my life. And my girls have gotten older now. Two of them are out of the house. I got one more who's starting her senior year now in high school.
Chapter 2: What hormonal changes occur in new fathers?
They've started to move on with their life. And as a result, I think it's really made me reflect on fatherhood in a new way. I think when you're in it, life is just so procedural. You're getting through one day to the next, sometimes just one hour to the next. But at this stage of life, you get a chance to reflect. And I've been thinking a lot more about how being a dad has changed me.
How am I different? not only emotionally, but maybe even ways that I'm not even fully aware of. And my guest today has been thinking about this for a long time as well, has been studying this for years. Dr. Darby Saxby is a psychologist at USC who has been researching what happens to men as they become dads.
Chapter 3: How does fatherhood impact mental health and relationships?
How do their brains change? How do their hormones change? What happens to their mental health and to their other relationships? She is the author of a new book. It's called, appropriately, Dad Brain, the new science of fatherhood and how it shapes men's lives. So today, Dad Brain, what is really happening to men when they become fathers? And what might we all learn from this?
I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, and this is Chasing Life. I think sometimes the sentiment is moms are the natural parents and that dads are sort of catching up to moms in some way when it comes to parenting. I mean, I have three daughters, so maybe it's not a surprise that they tend to go to their mother for a lot of things, more things than they come to me for.
Chapter 4: What is the significance of the 'Dad Brain' concept?
I'm usually reserved for like the big sort of crisis sort of situations. But the idea that moms are natural parents, dads are catching up, how much of that is supported by science?
Yeah, I mean, honestly, that was one of the big reasons I wanted to write this book is because I think we do have these really powerful narratives that women are wired to mother that they're sort of built to instinctively know what to do with a young child. And dads are just clueless, right? They're just not sort of equipped in the same way.
And what I wanted to show and what the science is telling us is that we can all adapt to our circumstances and our demands. And so men are built with the brain architecture that can adapt to parenthood. And I think of caring and parenting not just as traits that you're born either being good at or not, but as skills that you can hone through time and repetition and practice.
And so women are really socialized to expect to occupy a primary parenting role.
Chapter 5: How do societal narratives affect perceptions of fatherhood?
And we don't necessarily raise our boys with that objective in mind. But there are men who can become really sensitive and really capable fathers. there are also men who might be absent from their kids' lives, right? So there's a big breadth of what fatherhood looks like. But I think when men choose to invest in care, they have a biology that reflects that.
And so it's not so much that only dads are wired a certain way or only moms are wired a certain way. We're all wired to be flexible and adaptable. And that's kind of our human superpower.
Do the dad's brains, and I guess mom's brains for that matter as well, do they change in response to behavior? Or when you say hardwired, that almost makes it sound like they are hardwired to adopt a certain behavior, to adapt to certain situations.
Chapter 6: What brain changes occur due to parenting experience?
Is that the default position for dad's brains? Is that what you're saying?
Yeah, so I mean, like, if you think about not so much the mothering brain or the fathering brain, but there's this sort of shared parenting brain that helps us think about other people's minds, engage in social cognition, right? So if you're the parent of a young infant, you, you know, if you think about just in the first few minutes of a baby's cry, you're
you have to be able to orient to distress you have to be able to problem solve to soothe you have to be able to modulate your own irritation or emotion you have to be able to find the interaction rewarding enough to want to repeat it so all of these areas are areas of the brain that change in parenthood right like emotion regulation salience detection reward processing social cognition.
And so those are sort of shared, but then there are some differences in how they emerge and when they emerge for both mothers and fathers. So in mothers, it looks like the brain starts to remodel in pregnancy and in the early postpartum period. And the influence of pregnancy hormones is probably driving a lot of that remodeling.
For fathers, it looks more like a story of experience-dependent plasticity.
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Chapter 7: How does testosterone influence fatherhood behaviors?
So where we think there's change happening in dads is... as they start to interact with babies and spend time with them. So I found in my lab, we see bigger changes to father's brains when they report spending more time with kids and when they find interactions with their kids to be more engaging.
So it's father's motivation that seems to play a really important role in what's happening to men's brains. But where you see the changes are in some of the same parts of the brain.
What sort of changes are we talking about here? Like if you were to look at a highly engaged dad's brain, someone who's highly engaged with their kids, what are the changes and what do they fundamentally mean?
Yeah, so what we see from prenatal to postpartum in both moms and dads sounds scary to some folks, but we think is adaptive, which is a loss of gray matter volume. So when we're losing brain volume, it's tempting to adopt kind of a deficit framework. that you have less brain, but it actually seems to reflect a process of becoming more efficient and more streamlined.
Chapter 8: What lessons can non-parents learn from the experiences of fathers?
So we also lose gray matter volume in early childhood as we prepare for school age, for example, right? Like it reflects a process of learning And we kind of become canalized along certain pathways. And so where you see volume reductions are in what's called the mentalizing network. And that's the part of the brain that helps us think about other people's minds.
And it's considered kind of a seat of empathy. And so you see some kind of shrinkage and streamlining in those areas when you compare expectant moms and early postpartum moms, as well as expectant dads and early postpartum dads, you seem to be seeing this shrinkage across the transition to parenthood. What it looks like from some of the newest studies of moms is there's also a rebound effect.
So it's really like a U-shaped pattern of change. And that's likely what we'll see in dads as well, but we're still doing the longitudinal studies to kind of look at that time course in dad's over months and years.
So what does it mean then? What does someone experience when they have these changes in the brain?
Yeah, so they might feel like they're more able to focus on understanding what a new baby might be thinking or feeling. And so they're sort of honing their ability to essentially bond with a new baby. And that's what the research seems to be telling us, that when the brain changes more, and this is true in studies of both mothers and fathers, there is better bonding.
So that these brain changes, which appear to be really normative in pregnant and newly postpartum women, and a little more variable and experience dependent in dads, these changes are kind of supporting the construction of a healthy parent-child bond. And that's probably due to that increased sensitivity and understanding of what a baby needs.
If just compare fathers to non-fathers, when you look at that, men who become fathers versus men who never have children, is something like testosterone level likely to be different? Do men who are fathers have lower testosterone levels?
Yeah. So actually, one of the best studies of this was done in the Philippines by Lee Gettler, who's a researcher at Notre Dame. And he had a very large kind of population-level cohort of men who he followed from pre-parenthood, so starting in their late teens, early 20s. And so there's been a lot of work on both human fathers and then in biparental animals like birds and
and primates and rodents, finding that testosterone does drop around a transition to fatherhood. And Gettler's study was really clever because he had this long-term design. So he could answer the question of, is it that lower testosterone men are selecting into fatherhood?
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