How fatherhood rewires your brain

Here’s a bit of good news for Filipino men. And women.

Being a dad, a papa, a tatay does something to a man’s brain that actually makes them more caring.

Or, as some would put it, more motherly.

In the first known study of what happens to men’s brains when they become dads, a group of researchers in Israel belonging to Bar-Ilan University and the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center found that parenting “implemented a global ‘parental caregiving’ neural network.”

Translation: Being a parent triggers a change in the way men’s brains operate to make them more nurturing.

The study is significant for a key reason: The assumption that only mothers can be, well, motherly, may be wrong. That men, just like women, have what it takes to take on a role that many cultures, including the Philippines, believe is the realm of women.

The circuits just have to be activated, and one does that by plunging into parenthood.

“It’s clear that we’re all born with the circuitry to help us be sensitive caregivers, and the network can be turned up through parenting,” Kevin Pelphrey, a neuroscientist at Yale University, who was not part of the research group, told Science magazine.

“What we thought of as a purely maternal circuit can also be turned on just by being a parent—which is neat, given the way our culture is changing with respect to shared responsibility and marriage equality,” he added.

The study involved two kinds of couples: straight couple composed of a dad and a mom; and gay couples, with two male parents. The study participants were all new parents. They were videotaped, had their saliva samples tested and their brains scanned.

Neurons associated with parenting were activated in the brains of all participants, according to Science magazine. But there were differences found in men who were with women partners and the gay couples.

For straight couples, “the finding would seem to suggest that mothers are more wired up to nurture, protect, and possibly worry about their children,” the Science report said. “The fathers, in contrast, might have to develop these traits through tending, communicating, and learning from their babies what various sounds mean and what the child needs.”

But what the researchers discovered in gay couples was striking: “All of these men showed activity that mirrored that of the mothers.”

And it had nothing to do with them being gay, the report said. The findings suggest men, when raising children without women around, can summon similar nurturing or motherly instincts typically associated with women.

The report, citing comments from one of the researchers, neuroscientist Ruth Feldman, explains. “This finding argues strongly that the experience of hands-on parenting, with no female mother anywhere in the picture, can configure a caregiver’s brain in the same way that pregnancy and childbirth do.”

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