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| The stay at home dad - revolution or evolution?
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Stay-At-Home-Dads are on the increase. Since the last article we published on Stay-At-Home-Dads in August 2008, the estimated number of dads who are the main carer in the family has risen from 12,000 to over 40,000.
In Australia, the number of households where women earned more than men rose from 385,000 in 2001 to 521,000 in 2013. According to last year's NATSEM report, "The proportion of female breadwinners rose systematically during the GFC compared to the pre-GFC boom in Australia, and across the full distribution of household income".
And it's likely to stay as an upward trend. So it's not surprising then that men are taking much more of a role in the caregiving side of things. There is absolutely no reason why not; although many people in our society/culture still find it hard to get their heads around men staying at home while the little lady goes out to win the bread.
An article in the UK's The Telegraph by Stay-At-Home-Dad Matt Gaw recently highlighted this, quoting The Fatherhood Institute, a charity and think-tank lobbying to include fathers in national policy, who reported that the last five years have seen up to 21 per cent of dads of under-fives taking responsibility for childcare at some point during the working week. That's not to say it's full time, but it's definitely doing a large share of the load.
Our own survey revealed that while only 5 per cent of Dads were doing the lion's share of the caregiving, drop offs and pick ups etc, the number of families who divide it equally between mum and dad is over a third (34 per cent).
However despite all this load-sharing, Gaw says in his article that some attitudes have failed to evolve as visiting play groups, social occasions and even on the slog of the school run, there has been a sense of surprise – bordering on suspicion – that it is always Matt and not his wife who turns up. We suspect the same is true in Australia.
But while society may still be slightly suspicious of men taking over the role of principal parent, it appears that evolution may be well ahead of the game as a new study shows that men do actually develop mothering skills over time and so despite what we mothers sometimes like to think, that we have far superior parenting skills to our partners, actually it's not true. Because once they're put in a caregiving role, men develop the same skills and responses.
Women do seem to have a natural inbuilt ability to dive into the multi tasking, juggling and child-wrangling that is parenting, while father have traditionally taken a while longer to learn the ropes, but fathers can apparently develop the same cognitive and emotional responses to that of a mother, and a new study by researchers at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, finds that the more a dad cares for his offspring, the more his brain looks and behaves like that of a mother engaged in the everyday care of a child.
According to an article published in The Los Angeles Times and the UK's Independent, the study concluded that the very practice of caregiving activates what the researchers identified as a "parental caregiving neural network".
This is true whether the caregiving is by a mum who is her child's primary caregiver; by a dad who steps in to help out or who becomes the main caregiver or by a gay father raising a child with no woman in the picture at all.
In a series of experiments, the researchers visited and videotaped 89 first-time parents as they interacted with their babies. They took measurements of the parents' levels of oxytocin, a hormone that mediates behaviour related to nurturing, trust and affection.
Later on they scanned the brains of the parents as they watched video of themselves with their babies, and of other parents interacting with their own children. The aim of the scan was to identify patterns of brain activation associated with caring for your child.
Key components in the so-called parental caregiving neural network are circuits that are central in attaching emotional importance to experience, as well as others that help us assign needs, intentions or mental state to other people. The circuits that came alive with caregiving involve emotional processing, reward and motivation, and in developing a smooth exchange of give-and-take known as "parent-child synchrony".
Apparently in mothers, the brain's emotional processing circuit was most activated by watching videos of their interaction with their baby. In fathers who were not full-time caregivers, the largest activations were seen in regions involved in interpreting and responding to another person's social cues – that's to say observing and responding to things like facial expressions, body language and tone of voice.
The results led to the identification of the 'parental caregiving' neural network that is active in both men and women and consists of two integrated systems: An emotional processing circuit and a 'mentalising' circuit associated with social understanding and cognitive empathy. One of the functions of the emotional circuit is to regulate a parent's vigilance and awareness of the child's safety, whereas the 'mentalising' circuit helps parents read their infant's signals.
Although maternal and paternal care were found to have a common neural basis, there were distinctions between the female primary caregivers and the fathers in a secondary child-caring role: The mothers in the study showed more activity in the emotional circuit, whereas the heterosexual fathers exhibited a greater response in the cognitive or perceptive circuit.
In the group of gay fathers, both circuits were active and showed a high level of connectivity. There was no difference in masculinity and femininity between the straight and gay men in the study, thus ruling out any effect those traits might have had on the parental response. In addition, the more time the straight men spent alone with their children, the greater the connectivity between the two relevant regions of the brain.
"Fathers should engage in childcare activity because this is their pathway to brain changes and attachment," Ruth Feldman, the lead researcher at Bar-Ilan University in Israel told Bloomberg. "When mothers are around, fathers' amygdala (the emotions processing part of the brain) can rest and mothers do the worrying. When mothers are not around, fathers' brains need to assume this function".
So whether Dad is going to stay at home full time or just participate in after work/weekend care, then basically the more he does, the better he will be at it… when you put it like that it sounds pretty obvious. But anyway, Hurray for evolution!
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