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How Men’s Bodies Change When They Become Fathers

parenting.nytimes.com

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Re: How Men’s Bodies Change When They Become Fathers

#181

Post by tkahnoski »

anonu wrote: post #161

I am 14 months into kid #1. I've observed friends and family who are well into kid #2. My thought process was that going from 1 to 2 was going to follow some sort of logarithmic increase in complexity - but I am now convinced that the change is exponential. With 1, you can split the work. With 2, the dad will probably be focused on the older kid and the mom on the younger kid. Thus, there is less help to go around. M…

Parenting style definitely changes 1 to 2, 2 to 3, after 3 it's kind of a wash. Helicopter parenting or "Tiger Mom" styles don't scale well.

A colleague of mine has 7 kids. Both she and her husband work full time with white-collar jobs. If she hadn't gotten raises and promotions they likely couldn't afford the childcare costs and she would be a stay at home parent. (Cultural norm for her).

I can't imagine how this would work in a blue-collar setting where work has to be done on-site. Between sick kids who can't go to school/childcare, doctor vists, dentist appointments, parent teach conferences, flexible work hours to come in late/leave early are normal things parents need to do and even more so when you start talking 3 or more kids.

The loopback can happen, but it doesn't really manifest until much later. Spreading them out 2-3 years seems like the best way to scale to large families as that first two years really are all parenting unless you have teenagers in the house.

(Also don't get me started on current employment laws as it relates to pregnancy and how being a mom can impact both wage and career opportunities)

Re: How Men’s Bodies Change When They Become Fathers

#182

Post by rlucas »

nradov wrote: post #177
KaiserPro wrote: post #81

my changes: o hair loss (Eldest's birth and early life was traumatic) o Loss of short term memory (mostly temporary, sleep loss related.) o loss of hearing (eldest was fond of screaming) o grey hair. We split child care into two shifts. I took nights, wife took days. Hence why I had less sleep than the wife.

It seems unlikely that a child could scream loud enough to cause significant hearing loss.

It’s the fact that the source of sound is often 10-20 cm from your ear. As the average source-ear distance grows though, their lung volume grows too so you end up with a looong period of dangerous sound pressure levels.

Re: How Men’s Bodies Change When They Become Fathers

#183

Post by leet_thow »

drakonka wrote: post #87
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #42

Looking into the T drop in fatherhood, the original study seems to account for self reports of 'sleep quality' but I wonder if sleep deprivation is not still a confounder in this finding. Annedoctally as a recent father of a 6 month old, I would likely self report a good sleep quality in a questionnaire. However, objectively I know I sleep about 5 hours 30min yesterday evening, which would be sufficient sleep 'depriv…

I am not an expert in this field and wonder if the _cause_ of the testosterone drop necessarily has to affect the outcome of bonding/nurturing behaviour? For example, maybe all or part of the testosterone drop _is_ due to the degraded sleep quality. If that drop then still results in them being more motivated to bond with their child and less motivated to find other partners, the effect seems to be the same - the man…

It is hypothesized in evolutionary psychology that the testosterone drop is so that males will not be attracted to their daughters. I remember this from reading the "Evolution of Desire."

Re: How Men’s Bodies Change When They Become Fathers

#184

Post by whenchamenia »

chewxy wrote: post #37
Kecelij wrote: post #35

"University in Israel suggested that the parts of the brain that light up the most are startlingly different for each parent." Startlingly? Almost like every person was different..

'each' here is bound to a specific instance of a pair of parents - i.e. "... are startling different for the mother and the father" English is not a good language

This is a problem with how its written, not an entire formalized language.

Re: How Men’s Bodies Change When They Become Fathers

#185

Post by cpayne624 »

seidleroni wrote: post #142
agent008t wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are the others in this thread exaggerating the negatives? Or is it more that those difficulties are fairly short-term, and in the longer run don't really matter / are forgotten? Say, like preparing for and sitting a difficult exam, or going to the dentist, etc.

As a dad myself (2.5 yr old and an almost 1 year old), the negatives do not seem to be exaggerated at all. Going to work as a software engineer is the easiest part of my day, by far. What is not always mentioned are the wonderful parts of it, which is hard to describe. Scott Hanselman wrote something where he said that having kids is 49% awful and 51% amazing, and that 1% makes all the difference, and it really hits…

Atwood? https://blog.codinghorror.com/on-parenthood/

  > every week it gets a tiny bit easier
This has been my experience, too. I take comfort in it (got a 5 and a 3 y/o)

Re: How Men’s Bodies Change When They Become Fathers

#186

Post by rubidium »

anonu wrote: post #159
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #42

Looking into the T drop in fatherhood, the original study seems to account for self reports of 'sleep quality' but I wonder if sleep deprivation is not still a confounder in this finding. Annedoctally as a recent father of a 6 month old, I would likely self report a good sleep quality in a questionnaire. However, objectively I know I sleep about 5 hours 30min yesterday evening, which would be sufficient sleep 'depriv…

Correct. The same applies for post-partum depression which many attribute to an increase in new hormones in the women's body. But how much of this effect is attributable to simple sleep deprivation?

There’s a definite difference. There’s some pretty normal post baby blues for many moms that is a mix of hormones + sleep. But post partum depression is a different animal entirely and takes a lot of support and good council.

Re: How Men’s Bodies Change When They Become Fathers

#187

Post by jdbernard »

anonu wrote: post #161

I am 14 months into kid #1. I've observed friends and family who are well into kid #2. My thought process was that going from 1 to 2 was going to follow some sort of logarithmic increase in complexity - but I am now convinced that the change is exponential. With 1, you can split the work. With 2, the dad will probably be focused on the older kid and the mom on the younger kid. Thus, there is less help to go around. M…

In my experience going from two to three was a bigger change overall than one to two. Primarily because the kids now outnumber the adults. Also, particularly while they're little, you now have more kids than one parent has hands. So mom/dad can't physically restrain/direct all the kids by themselves. One to two felt to me like roughly a doubling of work. And that was when we felt like we weren't sure how much more we could handle. Then with our third it felt like the exponential increase you mention and we laughed at our previous feelings. The same strategies and patterns will scale from one to two but not necessarily to three because you get outnumbered. So three felt like more of a sea change.

At the same time, the mental adjustment was easier. None to one was the biggest mental adjustment for me (wow, I'm a parent now! Oh God help I'm responsible for keeping another human alive). One to two and two to three were more like changes in degree rather than a complete paradigm-shift mentally. For number two and three I've already worked through the reality that I'm now a father.

Age difference has to play some role as well. Our three are very close in age. Maybe the experience is different when there is more distance between them.

Re: How Men’s Bodies Change When They Become Fathers

#188

Post by m_coder »

mleo wrote: post #173
DrAwdeOccarim wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't noticed the "anything about a newborn/small child must be 100% positive" in my group of friends, especially my work colleagues. I've been pretty straight forward about how hard the whole thing has been, especially adding a second child to the mix before the first one was 2 yo. I wouldn't recommend having a second child to anyone unless they really, really wanted it. It's hard af. Logarithmically harder than…

I can see the social media aspect of presenting the perfect child persona, but it is BS. Going to three is exponentially harder. With two, one parent can usually manage both or worse each can manage one kid. Go to three and parents are outnumbered. And generally only two kids ever get along at one time, so there always the outlier. Even numbers are best it seems.

And moving to five children is another level. :) Parenting is what you do not a side project. Also the effects of parenting are more like keeping a good culture going and showing what are healthy ways of relating so that children can relate well to each other and enjoy being part of the family.

Re: How Men’s Bodies Change When They Become Fathers

#189

Post by senectus1 »

agent008t wrote: post #132

So, reading this thread is making me really not want to have children. Seems like one would have to be completely insane to voluntarily sign up for that. People that have children. Do you think it was honestly a good idea in retrospect, and if so, why? If your wife had been on the fence about having children, would you have preferred to go child-free, in retrospect?

yeah, they're my lasting positive impact on the world.

I've raised great kids, and the world is better off for them being in it.

Re: How Men’s Bodies Change When They Become Fathers

#190

Post by digitallogic »

reallydontask wrote: post #50
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #42

Looking into the T drop in fatherhood, the original study seems to account for self reports of 'sleep quality' but I wonder if sleep deprivation is not still a confounder in this finding. Annedoctally as a recent father of a 6 month old, I would likely self report a good sleep quality in a questionnaire. However, objectively I know I sleep about 5 hours 30min yesterday evening, which would be sufficient sleep 'depriv…

> Annedoctally as a recent father of a 6 month old, I would likely self report a good sleep quality in a questionnaire. However, objectively I know I sleep about 5 hours 30min yesterday evening, which would be sufficient sleep 'deprivation' to impact T production. When our 9 month old started to sleep through the night (at around 4-5 months), we'd get between 5-6 hours of sleep, which after the interrupted sleep of t…

> I know I could only survive on this little sleep because I wasn't exercising.

And exercise itself has a major influence on T levels.

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