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Chapter 1: What defines a good dad according to Dr. Darby Saxbe?
Oh, hey, that's the lady who has a podcast who you call Dad Ward because she doesn't mind embarrassing herself. So now you are mine. Hey, let's talk about dads. Who are they? What do they do? And in the words of many, many patrons who wrote in with questions, why do so many of them suck so bad? How did the good ones get it right? And we're going to find out. Hop in the back seat.
Let's examine patternology about dads. You horse around back there. I'll turn this podcast around. But first, let's indeed thank those patrons for all the sweet and funny questions you sent. And if you'd like to submit yours before we record an episode, you can join the fam at patreon.com slash ologies for one hot dollar a month, which supports us.
Also, if you do have little ones, we have Smologies. Those are shorter, kid-friendly, G-rated episodes we put into their own feed, available to subscribe for free wherever you get podcasts. Just look for Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S.
Thanks to everyone who leaves reviews for the show, which always melt my heart, and they help others find ologies, such as this still warm one from Slugworm, who wrote, "...long-time listener, first-time reviewer, fell so in love with science again, my long-lost curiosity with nature, that I changed my degree to biology."
I graduated with honors this last year, took a class in Costa Rica, went on birding trips, worked on a decades-long research project, made a program for kids, and so on. Slugworm. If I told you how much that meant to me, this would be a very long episode. So thank you so much. Thanks to everyone who leaves reviews. I read them all.
Also, thank you to sponsors of Ologies who make it possible for us to donate to a cause of the ologist choosing each week. Okay, Paternology, it comes from the Greek for pater, father. Don't get it twisted with Paterology, which is the study of God the Father in a holy, churchy way.
But capital T, capital P, the patriarchy, also comes obviously from the same root, the rule of the father, which many anthropologists trace the patriarchy to an envy of motherhood and creation.
Patriarchy deserves its own episode, but let's crack into this can of worms about dadhood with an absolutely brilliant, highly lauded clinical and research psychologist and USC professor of psychology who runs a lab, NEST, dedicated to studying family systems and specifically how dynamics and stress and hormones change with parenthood is their focus. And I've been hunting them down for years.
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Chapter 2: How do male hormones change during and after pregnancy?
They're my neighbor. They live literally three blocks over. So they just came to my home studio with my small poodle mutt Grammy snoozing in the corner to chat about fatherhood, the industrial revolution, male hormones during pregnancy and after, what defines a good dad.
diaper changing, division of labor, dad bods, gorillas, toxic masculinity, and their new excellent book titled Dad Brain, the new science of fatherhood and how it shapes men's lives. You can get your hands on it, get it as a gift for a dad, for your spouse, for yourself. So essentially, this book is valuable for anyone who was the result of a sperm and an egg.
I genuinely think the more fathers who have this book, the better world we can make. So without further hype, let's get into it with author, researcher, psychologist, and patternologist, Dr. Darby Saxby.
Thank you again so much for doing this. Oh, my pleasure. My sister, by the way, is a super fan. She loves your show.
She was so excited that I was going to be on it. She listens to it all the time. What's her name? Kat. Oh, my God.
I'm glad that she could vouch for us because sometimes you worry that people are like, Is this someone just talking to dolls in the basement, you know? Oh, but for an introduction. Darby Saxby, she, hers. I've been interested in talking to you and people from your lab for literal years. Can you describe some of the research that goes on there?
Definitely. Yeah. So I run a lab called the Neuroendocrinology of Social Ties. So the acronym is the NEST Lab. And NEST is kind of like an apt metaphor because we're very interested in family relationships and stress and how people connect with each other. And we've been studying specifically the transition to parenthood over the last 15 years or so.
So we have this long-running longitudinal study where we bring couples into the lab when they're expecting their first child.
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Chapter 3: What role does social media play in modern fatherhood?
And we follow them across the first postpartum year. So we are looking at their brains. We're looking at their hormones. We're looking at how they talk to each other.
And you can also see her 2018 paper, The Birth Experiences Questionnaire, a brief measure assessing psychosocial dimensions of childbirth. It was in the Journal of Family Psychology. And it's a 10-item questionnaire measuring stress and fear and partner support during birth.
And it looks at prenatal stress and anxiety and social support to try to predict how the adjustment into parenthood is going to go. And Dr. Saxby's lab has also found that something called meaning making or how a birth story is related or remembered can predict relationship strength down the line. So what stories do you tell about it?
Did you have a kid that's disrupting your norm or did you become a dad?
So very interested in how people relate to each other and sort of what that portends when a couple transitions into this new reality of parenthood.
And that's a major role shift. Yeah. And we hear a lot about motherhood and everything from birth trauma to to intergenerational trauma and how taxing it is on the body and women's maybe disproportionate roles in raising kids. And I thought it was so fascinating that you wrote your book, I feel like, is that not studied as much?
Definitely not. Okay. One of the first things I did when I was starting to work on the book is I just did like a PubMed search. It's like, if I say maternal and then I say paternal, how many articles am I going to pull up? And the ratio was like 10 to 1. And, you know, it's interesting because biomedical research, as I'm sure you know, is actually male biased. Of course.
Like there are way more studies of men's hearts, of men's lungs, of men's brains. The lab animals we use are mostly male. But when it comes to parenthood specifically and looking at parent-child bonding, the work is almost exclusively focused on moms. And it's interesting because dads are actually participating a lot more in childcare.
So we've seen these generational changes where men are reporting more time spent with kids compared to their fathers, their grandfathers.
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Chapter 4: How does fatherhood impact toxic masculinity?
Like, we've seen this huge uptick, but the research has not totally caught up to that.
Wow.
How much of your research has to be done studying social media and how people identify and what narratives they tell, at least publicly? Do you even have to dip into that? Yeah.
No, I don't formally look at social media, but as a human, I do.
Yeah.
And I'm like... There is this really crazy rise of like the mom fluencer and like the parenting culture on social media, which I think is actually kind of bonkers. I think a lot of it is designed to stoke anxiety in women. It's like if you put your kid in timeout, you're causing brain damage or... If you let them cry before they fall asleep, you know, it's child abuse.
And so there is this stress level that I think a lot of new parents have. And that's another reason why I want to talk about dads and get dads more into the picture, because moms are isolated and struggling and they need more helpers.
And now you've got two teenage children, right? Yes. So for 15 years, been studying this, and your children are about that age. Did it coincide with like, oh man, I'm popping out some babies. I better figure out... the science behind this.
Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Like me search. Yeah. Research is me search.
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Chapter 5: What are the historical roles of fathers in parenting?
And so I'd been watching parents and kids interact. I was like, I'm an expert. This will be a snap. And then we had kids and both my husband and I were just like totally rocked by that and struggling with sleep deprivation and confusion about what we were supposed to be doing and feeling totally inept. And I was like, if I'm as well resourced as an academic person, And this is still hard for me.
This is a really interesting nexus to focus on because it is this big sea change for a lot of people.
What surprised you the most? Was it the sleep deprivation? Was it like the overstimulation? What was it?
Yeah, I think it was sleep deprivation and then also just like the fact that you can't just put a baby down and walk away. It's like it never, like the switch doesn't ever really flip off. Like actually the thing that surprised me most is when you're breastfeeding, especially with a really new baby, you have to do it like every two hours. There's just no off button.
Do you find that resentment builds from that because the birthing parent is like, I had this succubus in me for like a year. This beautiful angel that I can't wait to meet that's also draining my life fluids and continues to. And do you find, I would be resentful as hell, even though there's nothing biologically necessarily that could be done. But is that part of the friction in the couple's
Definitely. OK. Like mom has a big head start in a lot of ways. If it's a biological pregnancy, she has felt the baby kicking and has this relationship already developed. And then the baby comes out is dependent on her for food. And I think dads often feel like a third wheel. They're not sure how to be involved. Mom is exhausted and already feeling like she's doing too much.
We actually did a study about this in my lab where we brought the pregnant couples in and asked them to map out how they plan to divide baby care. Then we brought them back after the baby's birth, did the same scale.
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Chapter 6: How can dads contribute to their child's development?
And in every case, moms were doing more after birth than the couple predicted. Yeah. So, and that's not, it's like, it was surprising to us as researchers, but every single mom I've talked to about this is like, that's the least surprising thing I've ever heard, right? Because you can have these beautifully egalitarian intentions, but there are some biological realities in the early months.
And so I think it can be challenging for dads to fully participate unless the couple is really proactive about it.
In part of the forward to your book, You obviously had an acknowledgement that a lot of the roles are cisgender and hetero couples. When you're doing your research, how do you figure out which demographics to study and which underrepresented groups to include? Or even just the wording around it?
Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, it's a really important question because there are all these gaps in our research. And so much parenting research, like I said, is focused on moms, but even more of it is focused on cisgendered heterosexual parents.
So Darby says that to really study something in depth, you need good sample sizes. And this first research was to hone in on cisgender hetero couples because there's just such a lack of info there when it comes to fatherhood. and then further down the line at some point to gather large enough sample sizes to include a range of genders and types of partnerships in parenting.
And for gender roles and identities, I think you will love the neuroendocrinology episode with Dr. Daniel Pfau, and we'll also link a Pride page with some excellent episodes from LGBTQIA plus ologists that we love. But for these rounds on paternity, they went wide in other ways.
But we are very lucky to have a lab in L.A. because we were able to get a really ethnically, socioeconomically, racially diverse sample.
What about the anthropology of how children were raised? It's changed so much even in 50 years, in 60 years, and then pre-industrial revolution and maybe the loss of multigenerational housing. What kind of role have fathers had historically?
It's actually changed a lot. And for 95% of human history, we lived like hunter-gatherers. So we were foraging, occasionally hunting. Women actually brought in more calories than men in many societies. And so, you know, the whole sort of like when people say like working mothers are unnatural, it's like, no, mothers have always worked.
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Chapter 7: What are the effects of father involvement on children?
And Darby tells me that in some hunter-gatherer societies, like the Aka and the Congo, fathers are within arm's reach of babies about 47% of the day. And they hunt and socialize with them in their arms or on their back. Some dads even let babies suck their man nipples for comfort.
But agrarian models of living, starting back around 10,000 years ago and then the Industrial Revolution, starting in the mid-1700s, changed the game.
Like most humans were subsistence farmers who were just growing what they ate. Mom, dad, and kids are all working together, right? Again, like moms are working. Kids are working too. Everybody's working together at home. And then once you industrialize, you have this separate domain, which is the workplace, where someone has to physically go out and earn money.
Interestingly, the first factory workers were women, like the mill girls, like the Lowell textile mills in Massachusetts. Women were considered better factory workers because they were more expendable. They weren't needed at home on the farm because they weren't working as hard as the men.
Oh.
So they went to factories. That sucked for them because the factories were exploitative and had bad conditions. And then ultimately, like unionization happened, wages rose, men started being the ones that worked outside the home. And so we kind of did this weird social experiment where like work became men's thing and home became women's thing. Yeah.
And women were the primary caregivers of kids. But I think like you hear all this talk about how that's the natural order of things with neo-traditional gender roles, trad wives, all of that. Yeah. And it's like, this is like 150 year blip. Woof. This is not actually our most normal configuration. Yeah.
Yeah. So alloparenting is natural. Community members taking care of and helping raise children who are not their offspring, be it aunts or uncles or friends or grandparents or neighbors. And for anyone who thinks that maternity leave is time away from work, think again.
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Chapter 8: How can fathers navigate challenges in parenting today?
It's work. It's just unpaid. And birthing parents have always worked, even while pregnant and postpartum. But jobs that you clock in for to get paid a resource to trade for other resources, evolutionarily speaking, that's pretty brand new. Or I should ask, culturally, did you ever interface with the Jerry Springer show? Yes. Okay, when it comes to two-year-old AJ Collins, you are not welcome.
Side note, Jarrett reminded me that was Maury Povich. That was not Jerry Springer. So no emails. You are not the father. This notion of people getting out of paternity. I feel like seems antithetical to our anthropology because it seems like we are wired to reproduce at some point. Males, I feel like, are thought of as like sire as many of your genetics.
And then you come to like, whew, got out of that kind of a situation just by virtue of genetics. But Has there been a change in dad's willingness to actually raise a child versus just father one over the last decade or so? Yeah.
Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think if you look at time diary data, right, like big studies of, you know, like the American Time Youth Study, you see men are spending more time with kids than previous generations, and they're reporting that they enjoy it. Oh, okay.
Oh, well, that's something.
Especially after the pandemic, I think there was this shift in our feelings about work. I think a lot of people like millennials, Gen Z started thinking like, I don't want my life to be my job, right? It's like a different mentality from the boomers. And they're like, I want to have time at home with my kids. And so I think it's a value shift as well.
But that said, there's a lot of variability around this, right? Because like, And this is interesting, like the time trends really track with education, which is like a new thing. That's a new disparity. So the most educated affluent dads are the ones that are spending the most time with kids.
And it's the non-college men who are actually spending less time with kids than non-college men of previous generations. So there is a little bit of a divide that's emerging in how men are kind of showing up as parents.
And does that socioeconomic divide... Is it just like you, if you are making less money, you have to work more in order to put food on the table and to pay for gas and to pay for health insurance and all of that? Is there more hustling that happens?
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