Dads – do you feel a bit of a spare part? Do you see yourself in relation to your kids as about as useful as a stick of furniture – one of the lesser used pieces, like the side table in the guest bedroom? Well, the good news, delivered in a BBC documentary just in time for Father's Day, is that those traditional dad activities, such as talking over your children's head with long words and complex sentences, or swinging them around so that their shoulders threaten to come out of their sockets, are biologically useful. Fathers make evolutionary sense – and not just as reconstructed pseudo-mummies, or "new dads".
"There's a lot of talk at the moment about the absence of fathers, and a curiosity about what it is that fathers actually do," says child psychologist Laverne Antrobus, presenter of "The Biology of Dads", a one-off documentary in BBC Four's Fatherhood season. "In some ways, parenting has been merged. Fathers have been invited to be like mothers rather than to be like fathers – this idea of everything being about nurture. So I wondered what it must be like for fathers who think, 'What do I do that's unique and a bit different?'" Antrobus has collated the latest academic research on the subject, including the already well understood role of the kind of rough-and-tumble games preferred by fathers, which teach toddlers the boundaries of aggression and discipline.
Less well known is the part fathers play in language development – conversing with their toddlers, seemingly inappropriately, as if with a fellow adult. "Mums are constantly adapting their vocabulary so a child knows the word, but dads spur them on," says Antrobus. "They not only use longer words, but they encourage more complex uses of language, such as wit and sarcasm."
Never mind that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, the gist of Antrobus's film is that fathers consistently push boundaries and nurture independence. What men might find less palatable is what has been happening to their hormones in the meantime. For in a very real, biological sense, fathers of newborn children become more like women.
Now, I remember my wife regularly declaring that her hormones "were all over the shop" while she was pregnant, and in the months after she gave birth to our daughter. Little did I suspect that my own hormones were also on the march. Firstly, it seems that the female hormone prolactin, which triggers lactation and the urge to breast-feed, and which lies dormant in men, springs into action in fathers-to-be. Indeed there is a syndrome known as Couvade Syndrome, or "sympathetic pregnancy", whereby the partners of pregnant women report feelings of morning sickness as well as the urge to binge eat unusual foods. Simultaneously, the key male hormone, testosterone, the one strongly associated with aggression, goes into free fall, back to levels not experienced since before puberty.
Dr Nick Neave, an evolutionary psychologist at Northumbria University, reckons this is nature's way of curbing a new father's behaviour. "You don't want some big, butch, hairy, violent male around these infants, because males who are high in testosterone have low levels of frustration tolerance," he says. "You don't want these guys flying off the handle when the baby starts to cry."
Even so, in the case of "shaken baby syndrome" the overwhelming proportion of perpetrators are men. One can only imagine the carnage if levels of testosterone didn't drop off naturally. And how does this square with anecdotal evidence that suggests that the birth of a child sometimes triggers either physical abuse directed at the mother, or the man loping off to have have an affair with another woman? "We didn't go there (in the film) because if you've got somebody who is prone to domestic violence there will be a lot of other things that are happening at about that time. There will be a dynamic in that relationship that is around vulnerability, for instance", says Antrobus. "In an evolutionary sense, what is really important is that you get this drop in testosterone, thank goodness; it's an opportunity to get the best out of dads."
In her BBC film, Antrobus observes an experiment in which a new father is handed a doll wrapped in his daughter's blanket. His child's pheromones, the chemical messengers that can affect someone else's behaviour, soon have the new father protectively cradling the doll and subconsciously comforting it with blanket tucking and pats to the back. The experiment is repeated with a testosterone-packed single male, who might as well be – in Laverne's words – "holding a sack of spuds".
drive from www.independent.co.uk