by Anna Machin
The majority of work on fathering comes from the UK, Australia, the US and, as the location of Ruth Feldman’s prolific laboratory, Israel. However, the most powerful evidence for this close association between parenting behaviour and child brain development has recently come from China. In their 2016 study, experimental psychologists Jia Yan, Rachel Han and Peipei Li from Beijing Normal University explored the transmission of parenting styles from grandparent to father and the impact this had on the father’s responses to his child’s displays of negative emotion.
Yan, Han and Li studied the biological fathers of 172 families from two cities in China. They asked the fathers to complete three questionnaires; one asked them to reflect on their own parenting experience before the age of sixteen, one related to how well they felt they coped with their child’s displays of negative emotion and one related to how well they coped with their own negative emotions. The idea was to see whether there was a relationship between how the fathers were parented and how well they coped with their children’s more negative emotional outbursts – remember that a secure attachment in childhood leads to a functioning oxytocin system and the ability to cope with life’s stressors as an adult. The results were clear. Fathers who had received high levels of care when they were young were adept at dealing with their children’s difficult behaviours – they were supportive and ultimately had stronger bonds with their children. In contrast, fathers who reported very controlling parents coped less well with their children’s negative emotions. They were overly punitive or dismissive and risked exhibiting controlling or neglectful parenting. The scientists concluded that children who were brought up in controlling environments risked having issues with their abilities to ‘emotionally social ize’ their own children – that is, teach their children how to process and express their emotions in a healthy way. And as one of the key roles of the father is to build resilience and emotional strength in their child – something we will explore in greater detail in Chapter Ten – these findings have important implications for their children’s future mental health and present the possibility that without some sort of intervention, patterns of poor parenting will continue to cross generations.
One aspect of Yan’s study that I have not so far mentioned is the fact that the likelihood that the negative parenting behaviours of generation one would pass to generation two was influenced by one aspect of dad’s personality – the extent to which he was able to regulate his own emotions. Where he could deal rationally and healthily with his own negative emotions, he was able to overcome the negative experiences of his own childhood and respond to his child’s emotional outbursts appropriately and sensitively. However, where he found difficulty in handling his own negative emotions – he lacked the tools to respond effectively or found that his emotion would subsume him, making him unable to control his impulses – here the impact of his childhood experiences were felt in his relationship with his own child.
But the positive that we can take from studies like Yan’s and those that we encountered earlier in this chapter that looked at the genetic inheritance of parenting is that having a poor experience of parenting as a child does not necessarily mean that you will yourself fail to be a supportive parent. The relationship is not so clear-cut. Rather, whether or not you overcome your childhood and commence on the path of fatherhood as a ‘new man’ is dependent on a large number of factors that are both psychological – including your own mental health and personality – and genetic – the extent to which your genes protect you or open you up to risk. But where you may have been dealt a less than ideal genetic or psychological hand, all is not lost. Within the UK, there are several wonderful organizations, details of which are at the end of this book, who under the umbrella of the Parent Infant Project work with parents to overcome their natural tendencies, many of which are the result of their own parenting or traumatic life experiences, to become the most sensitive and wonderful parents. Further, despite the fact that we can recognize a number of factors that contribute to an individual’s parenting style, this does not mean we have the ‘formula’ for successful parenting. And this is because there is always an unknown element: the individual’s will to bring about change if needed and work to be the parent they want to be, regardless of the hand life or biology has dealt them.
So, no factor takes the lead in defining who a dad will be – he is, to an extent, a mix of his genes and his experience, but even these two factors do not exist in isolation from each other. A man’s own experience of being parented impacts his own practice as a dad, but the relationship is not direct – personality gets in the way. And personality itself is a mix of genetics and experience. It’s enough to make your head hurt. But understanding how someone’s personality may impact their parenting behaviour is important for explaining the individual differences in fathers that we will observe.
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Imagine the scene. Your toddler is seated in their high chair, ready for lunch. You are under a time pressure, as their morning nap was longer than usual and you need to squeeze lunch in before hightailing it to the doctors for a check-up. You present your child with your carefully thought-out, homemade meal, devised to ensure an optimal nutritional and taste balance. Not for nothing is your kitchen shelf heaving with tomes by the kings and queens of child nutrition. However, your toddler obviously hasn’t read the books and is blind to the advantages this healthy meal will confer on him. No, he is less than happy and throws his food on the floor. He then proceeds to attempt an audacious escape from his high chair and make a beeline for the snacks cupboard, where he knows a chocolate biscuit must be lurking. You place him back in his high chair and hurriedly make a sandwich, which you then attempt to feed him by distracting him with a toy and shovelling it in whenever his mouth is open. Lunch completed, you go to put his shoes on. But he is having none of that and proceeds to throw a full-blown tantrum as you try to quell the beast long enough to make a successful fit between foot and shoe. In the end, you give up and shove on some wellies. Finally, child partially fed and clothed, you begin to make for the door when a familiar smell reaches your nostrils. You exclaim, bundle him up and head for the changing mat.
How do you think this dad would feel? He may take it in his stride, accepting that it is part of the anarchy that is raising a toddler. Or it may leave him feeling like his child is the Antichrist and he the most incompetent parent ever. It will depend in large part on this dad’s personality. Remember that there is a general consensus that our personalities are made up of what we call the ‘big five’ – conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, openness and agreeableness. When we look at personality like this and consider that we are all a varying mixture of all five of these, it becomes clear how our personality can impact the way we parent. Jay Belsky is one of the pioneers of parenting studies. As early as 1984, he argued that how an individual eventually parents is influenced by three key factors. One, their own genetic and psychological resources. Two, the temperament and personality of their child. And three, the external resources of support they can rely upon and sources of stress that they experience. But Jay stated that the most important of these is the first factor and the most vital element of this factor is personality. And this is because a healthy mindset – one high in agreeableness and openness – can act as a buffer against a temperamentally difficult child or an unsupportive marriage or workplace. So, if we are high in neuroticism we may expect and perceive our child to be more badly behaved and ourselves more unsupported, for example, than someone who is predominantly agreeable. Or, if we are high in conscientiousness we may work hard to do a good job as a parent but find the threat to an organized life that children inevitably are tough to take. As a result, we may feel more stressed than someone who is open and comfortable with new experiences and challenges.
My own work with new fathers certainly seems to bear out the influence of a dad’s personality on his perception of his fathering experiences. Because I tend to work with fathers during the ver
y early weeks of their journey, I quickly came to understand the influence that a man’s personality had on his perception of his birth experience soon after I started researching dads. I remember visiting one dad, Jim, just a couple of weeks after his son, Sean, had been born. As he recounted his experience it became clear that, objectively at least, he had had a pretty traumatic time. His baby had had to be delivered by an emergency caesarean, from which he was by necessity excluded for a significant period of time, and following this his wife had had a life-threatening haemorrhage. He was literally left alone, holding the baby with no idea whether his wife would live. I asked him how he had coped at the time and whether experiencing this had had any long-term impact on his mental health. I expected at least some residual elements of trauma to be present. His reply surprised me and taught me never to assume I knew how someone would cope with any given experience. He said that it had been stressful, but at the time he had reassured himself that he was in the best place and everything that could be done would be. He explained that since then the birth had not troubled him. He was not the sort to ask ‘What if?’ but was very much of the school of thought that the past is the past and it is best to move forward. Everything had turned out fine, he had been lucky and there was no use in dwelling on what happened. A salutary lesson for me.
A week later, I visited Zac and we discussed his birth experience. Now, these early visits are often quite swift – new dads do not need me taking up any more of their precious down time than is necessary to check everything is okay and take a blood sample – but I spent over an hour with Zac that evening. His baby’s birth had been objectively straightforward – even the dream for some parents. A water birth with minimal intervention had resulted in a beautiful baby boy called Aiden. But Zac was deeply traumatized. He had found watching his wife’s pain and his inability to ease it for her almost unbearable and he had been plagued by negative emotion and flashbacks ever since. He was even questioning whether, if they had further children, he would be able to be in the birthing room a second time. Where Jim and Zac differed was their personalities, something I measure at the start of all studies. What to one man is trauma, to another is a situation to endure and then leave behind. As a consequence, it is important to know that as a dad there is no right way to speak of, feel about or cope with your fathering experience – it will be unique to you as a consequence of your individuality.
Personality can continue to impact not only the father–child relationship but the whole family as time progresses. A team of psychologists from the National University of Singapore, led by Ryan Hong, followed 263 fathers for a year following their child’s seventh birthday. They wanted to explore whether personality impacted the way each father perceived his child’s behaviour and how this related to his parenting behaviour and the extent of family cohesion at the end of the year.
The team found that where a child had no difficulty controlling or expressing his emotions, the father’s parenting was characterized by positive support regardless of to what degree his personality could be categorized as neurotic. In contrast, where a child had more difficulty in this area, fathers high in neuroticism coped less well – they tended to overreact, to impose restrictive control in an attempt to curb their child’s behaviour and withdraw warmth and support as a punishment. Fathers with high degrees of openness coped well with children who had a bias towards negative feelings – discomfort, fear or anger – perhaps because their openness to new experiences and challenges meant that they did not perceive their child’s behaviour to be particularly difficult or stressful – they could go with the flow. Fathers of very active but happy children – trying in their own way, if only on their parent’s energy levels – coped better if their personality was dominated by the agreeableness factor, as they could accommodate their child’s exuberance. And fathers who were conscientious were able to cope with the challenges of children who had difficulty controlling their emotions and behaviours, perhaps because they benefited from their father’s focus on consistent routine and discipline.
Being a dad is a complicated business. There’s a lot to learn, to monitor, to focus on and to achieve. And what underlies how the individual man fulfils these tasks is equally as complex. But while you may be the sum of your genetics and your experience, this is not your whole. Individuals do overcome the most neglectful of childhoods and the most risk-laden set of genes to be the most wonderful fathers. Because our destination is not entirely written for us at birth, in the first 1,000 days or even by the totality of our experiences to date. One of the most wonderful things about humans is our ability to reflect on who we are and on who we want to be, and by doing so we get to have some say in our final destination. This may involve you in some work – but with the right help, it is possible. This help may be simply talking about your experiences and difficulties with your partner, family or friends. Or it may need the help of a professional counsellor, who can help you to define, explore and overcome your natural instincts or behaviours. Or it may need more intense help from one of the wonderful organizations listed at the back of this book who help parents come to terms with their life experience and build strong and healthy relationships with their children. But if the will is there, then it is truly possible to be the sort of dad you aspire to be.
PART FOUR
The First Few Weeks
CHAPTER SEVEN
I Love Yah, Baby!
Play, Laughter and Building the Bond
Picture the scene. A father returns from a long day at the office. He opens the door and, before he has even had time to remove his coat, his toddler runs towards him with a squeal of delight, arms outstretched. The father lifts his daughter into his arms and throws her above his head, over and over. Soon, the little girl and her dad are hysterical with laughter. Next, he holds his daughter’s hands as she bounces on the sofa, gaining momentum and height with every jump. The dad decides to interrupt this impromptu trampoline session with an energetic bout of tickling before he lifts his daughter up again and aeroplanes her around the room. Finally, exhausted, they both collapse on the sofa in a hug, broad grins stretched across their faces. Daddy is definitely home.
Fathers build deep, profound bonds with their babies that, as we know from previous chapters, can be fundamental to the survival and success of their child. However, as we also now know, beyond changes in his natural baseline levels of oxytocin and testosterone, fathers do not experience the extreme physiological changes associated with pregnancy and childbirth that give mothers a head start in the bonding game. So, what prompts these vital bonds between father and child to develop?
In Chapter Two, we explored the connection that forms between dad and his unborn child, but in this chapter I want to look at the experience of building the arguably more critical bond that develops after birth. For mums, childbirth involves a sea of neurochemicals that are there to start and control the path of labour and provide some respite from the inevitable flood of pain. Luckily for mum, these neurochemicals – oxytocin and beta-endorphin – also have a great side effect: they underpin the bond between a mother and child. Beta-endorphin is a reward chemical in its own right and oxytocin, because of its close relationship with dopamine, also induces feelings of love and euphoria in mum that help her remain bonded to her baby, however tough the long days and nights may be. But although it is undoubtedly an emotional roller coaster for dad, he lacks any experience of the extreme physical and emotional challenges of childbirth, meaning that he must fall back on his physical and verbal interactions with his child to provide the neurochemical kick-start that is required for the all-important bond to form. In the first few days and weeks, finding the opportunity to do this can be somewhat difficult. This period of a baby’s life is largely dominated by mum as the source of food and comfort, and fathers can find it difficult to get a look-in. Obviously, they are vital to their new family at this point – supporting mum, dealing with visitors and keeping the domestic show on the road – but finding an activity t
hat defines their exclusive relationship with their child can be hard. Richard’s experience of his feelings just after birth are common:
It was difficult to relate to my daughter, Florence, and relate her arrival to me and Sam. I suppose because it was in a medical situation. She got given to me, and then taken to an incubator to do all the stuff, and then given to me again while Sam was getting stitched up, I guess. Obviously, it is a unique experience, it is difficult to characterize. I didn’t feel like a father at that point, my mind hadn’t quite caught up with what was happening. It was me and Sam in this room with this baby.
Richard, dad to Florence (six months)
In the long-term, building the bond with a child is undoubtedly a rewarding process. However, in the short-term it can be the single biggest source of stress and anxiety for a new father.
For many fathers, like Richard, while the moment of birth brings with it sensations of pride and relief, the expected flood of deep and profound love and attachment is often absent. In the days following birth, this sense of slight separation can be exacerbated by the couple’s choice to breastfeed – an intimate behaviour between mum and baby that a dad can support and observe, but not participate in – and by the slow pace of the baby’s development, meaning that opportunities to interact are few and far between and rarely result in much recognition from your child. This can be incredibly difficult for a father to handle and can lead him to feel like a ‘secondary parent’, consigned to the role of chief flower-arranger and chef. Zac’s experience echoes that of many new dads: