Birth of a Father: Fathering in the First 1,000 Days

Abstract

As a result of societal changes, fathers participate more actively in child care than they used to. In this article, we propose a context‐dependent biobehavioral model of emergent fatherhood in which sociocultural, behavioral, hormonal, and neural factors develop and interact during the first 1,000 days of fatherhood. Sociocultural factors, including different expectations of fathers and varying opportunities for paternal caregiving through paid paternal leave, influence paternal involvement. Levels of hormones (e.g., testosterone, vasopressin, oxytocin, cortisol) predict fathers’ parenting behaviors, and involvement in caregiving in turn affects their hormones and brain responses to infant stimuli. The birth of the first child marks the transition to fatherhood and may be a critical period in men’s lives, with a smoother transition to fatherhood predicting more optimal involvement by fathers in subsequent years. A focus on prenatal and early postnatal fathering may pave the way for developing interventions that effectively support fathering during pregnancy and in the first years of their children’s lives.

Father Involvement in Infant Parenting in an Ethnically Diverse Community Sample: Predicting Paternal Depressive Symptoms

“…There may several pathways linking early paternal involvement to later depressive symptoms in fathers. Specifically, lower depressive symptoms have been associated with changes in hormonal and neural functioning ( 79 ) and increased oxytocin levels ( 80 ). Oxytocin, known as the “love hormone” due to its links with social bonding and reproduction, increases in fathers following the birth of the child and after father-child interactions ( 81 ).…”

Exploring the transition into fatherhood: behavioral, hormonal, and neural underpinnings of responses to infant crying

“…Handgrip cry paradigm. The handgrip data described here stems from a paradigm previously described in detail for the same sample in Alyousefi-van Dijk et al (2019).Although Alyousefi-van Dijk et al, (2019) described only the prenatal visits, the paradigm, preprocessing, and statistical analysis for the postnatal visit added here were identical. In summary, the handgrip task contained 30 trials of auditory exposure of either an infant cry sound or a control sound (12s duration) while participants were asked to squeeze a handgrip dynamometer with alternating full or half strength.…”

“…Human fathers, who find infant crying more aversive than mothers do (Zeifman, 2003), remain underrepresented in these studies. Although father involvement has significantly increased in modern western societies (see Bakermans- Kranenburg, Lotz, Alyousefi-van Dijk, & Van IJzendoorn, 2019), the mechanisms underlying the highly variable quality of paternal care are still poorly understood (Lucassen et al, 2011;Van IJzendoorn and De Wolff, 1997). Previous attempts at unravelling these mechanisms have sometimes been clouded by variety in parental phase of participants (i.e.…”

“…Several biological processes have been related to paternal behavior. For example, hormones have been shown to play an important role in both parental sensitivity (Naber, Poslawsky, Van IJzendoorn, Van Engeland, & Bakermans-Kranenburg, 2013) and handgrip force used in response to infant crying in nulliparous women and men (Bakermans- Riem et al, 2016;Riem et al, 2017), as well as in first-time expectant fathers (Alyousefi-van Dijk et al, 2019). Specifically, low levels of testosterone have been found to relate to higher observed quality of parenting in expectant but not new fathers, and only in those with low levels of cortisol (Bos et al, 2018).…”

Determinants of participation in childcare amongst fathers who work very long hours

“…I demonstrated in Chapter Three that fewer fathers in Australia than many other European and Nordic countries take leave, and that fathers in Australia take, on average, shorter lengths of leave, due to significant differences in policy across country and cultural contexts. A recent literature review by Bakermans-kranenburg, Lotz, and Dijk (2019) suggests that opportunities to engage in caregiving can alter fathers' hormonal and neural functions, supporting a sense of bond and attachment between fathers and their young children, leading to ongoing paternal participation with children in subsequent years. They argue that work-related provisions that actively support fathers' participation in infant care in the early days and months after birth are vital.…”