Testosterone, fathers as providers and caregivers, and child health: Evidence from fisher-farmers in the Republic of the Congo

Mothers' and fathers' joint profiles for testosterone and oxytocin in a small‐scale fishing‐farming community: Variation based on marital conflict and paternal contributions

“…For example, in studies conducted in small‐scale, pastoralist societies in which polygyny is culturally sanctioned, married men and fathers had elevated or comparable T to other men in their populations (Gray, ; Muller, Marlowe, Bugumba, & Ellison, ). Meanwhile, our team's prior work from the present fisher‐farmer population in Republic of the Congo showed that fathers who were rated as better providers had higher T compared to their peers, which may reflect risk taking or competitive dynamics related to provisioning (Boyette et al, ). The relative lack of sampling diversity in this research area limits our ability to build frameworks for the psychobiological, intervention, and clinical implications of these hormones across a broader range of human experience and also poses barriers to framing and reconstructing their adaptive functions in more evolutionarily relevant ecological contexts (Crespi, ; Gettler, ; Gettler & Oka, ; Gettler, Sarma, et al, ; Olff et al, ; Saxbe, Schetter, Simon, Adam, & Shalowitz, ; Swain et al, ; van Anders et al, ).…”

“…Thus, T is a psychobiological mechanism that can influence relationship dynamics between parents, shape how parents allocate limited time and energy to diverse parenting behaviors, and affect the quality of parental engagement in those behaviors (van Anders, ; Gettler, ). Through these pathways, T has broad implications for family system function as well as child development and well‐being (Boyette, Lew‐Levy, Sarma, & Gettler, ; Rosenbaum & Gettler, ).…”

“…In our prior psychobiology research from this site, we published results that focused on men's T, fathers' indirect and direct care, and T's correlations with measures of child health. At the time of that publication, we did not have OT data from parents and the earlier work did not include analyses of maternal psychobiology or mother–father conflict (Boyette et al, ).…”

Evolutionary insights on male health and biology as men age

“…In Chapter 5, Bribiescas anticipates some of these questions and lays out the case for what he describes as the “Pudgy Dad Hypothesis,” which I particularly appreciate given that around this same time my lab was working on a manuscript that we affectionately referred to as the “dad bod” paper . Laying the groundwork for the Pudgy Dad model, Bribiescas succinctly describes the growing anthropological research on the biology of fatherhood and on the roles of fathers in shaping child survival, health, and development outcomes . He bridges from these areas to propose that due to the physiological and social constraints of aging, older hominin males were in a biological position to exhibit lower testosterone (T), enhanced deposition of fat (i.e., investment in survival), and greater propensities toward incipient forms of paternal care, compared to males in their reproductive primes.…”

“…For example, do older males in energetically constrained and/or pathogenically challenging environments show declines in T with age? The data are mixed across settings . How much variation is there between younger and older men for adiposity in such settings?…”