How Fathers Think, and Why

Michael Gurian
September 2, 2005

These are the final extracts from "What Could He Be Thinking?" by Dr Michael Gurian. This series has covered most aspects of the differences in thought processes and behavior between men and women. The final extracts concern men's role as fathers. They are posted with the author's permission.
Robert Griffith, Editor.

The Nature of Being a Dad

Linda, thirty-three wrote:

I think my husband's favorite line is, "Don't worry, honey, the kids'll be fine." I try to get him to back me up on stuff, and what do I get? "It'll be okay." Or "Don't worry." Last week I told my twelve-year-old son he was too young to go to the mall with his friends. "Too many things can happen there" I told him. "Jim" I said to my husband, "don't you agree?" Jim said "You gotta trust him sometime" and shrugged his shoulders. It drives me nuts! Sometimes I think I'm the only safety patrol in this house!

Grace, sixty-seven, wrote:

Things have certainly changed since I was raising my kids. One thing that's really changed is fathering. It used to be moms were glad the dads were out of the way, especially when the kids were young. Now, fathers want to be part of everything. I think the new trend is good. I think it's great for my grandkids. But I've noticed something. No matter how involved dads are - my son is very involved with his kids - I think dads are just dads, too. They're not moms. They just do things in a different way.

The Biology of Fathering

Let's explore the depths of fathering from the lens of everyday life and from the seat of that life, human biology. Fathers are, by nature, fathers just as mothers are, by nature, mothers. The mind of the father is natural to the man. The act of fathering is, in many ways, a biological crucible. Nearly every biological and nature-based factor we've explored in the previous chapters of this book is crucial to fathering.

• A father's brain chemistry sets him up for a different kind of parent-child bond than the mother experiences
• Testosterone and vasopressin mix with the male brain to create a particular kind of parenting called paternal nurturance
• Fewer verbal centers and more spatial kinesthetic tend the father toward a predominance of physical play over verbal empathy, side-by-side connectivity over eye-to-eye contact.
• Abstract-mechanical cortical functioning tends to weave through a dad's training of his children's skills and proclivities, providing children with mechanical and design challenges they might not get except from a dad.
• The need for constant self-worth assessment drives a father, and thus a child, both boosting and challenging the child's self-worth and sense of self-esteem.
• A father's ethical biology is crucial, especially to risk-taking adolescent children.

At a biological level, human males bond with offspring differently from females, which leads to profound differences in nurturing techniques.

One clear scientific way to begin an observation of male/female differences in bonding with offspring is to look at other animals. Among many mammals, a father's biological role is not as complex as it is among humans. The lioness, for instance, does most of the parenting of children; the lion, much less. During certain developmental stages in the lives of gorilla and chimpanzee children, the mother spends more time with children and does more parenting.

In these situations, not surprisingly, the lack of a "hands-on" father is rarely felt by the child because these mammals rely heavily on such social structures as packs, herds, and groups. Offspring are raised by the mother and the pack, of which the father is a part; when the father is wandering in search of food, other males and females are close by.

Among humans, however, the father's biological role is the most comprehensive in any known species. Our fathers bond more directly with their offspring than do most male mammals. The human father's bond with offspring is one of the primary reasons humans flourish as a species. Human nature has adapted the father's biological role to parity with the mother's, and human children have advanced beyond the other mammals in their abilities, skills, and confidence.

Yet even as human fathers bond as powerfully to children as human mothers, the nature of the bond is different.

The Bonding Difference

When a woman becomes pregnant, her hormonal system changes to accommodate the gestation of her child. Her progesterone Ievels, for instance, can rise to more than twenty times their previous levels. Her estrogen system alters, which alters other brain chemicals, like serotonin and dopamine. Her oxytocin levels change. In total, her hormonal and brain-chemical alterations are responsible for her neurochemical interest in imagining, caring for, protecting, and nurturing her child and her home.

Men share with women the instinctual connection to children. Men also share social, emotional, and psychological bonds with offspring. All human bonds in some way involve brain chemistry, so it is fair to say that the male brain attaches acutely to children.

However, that brain system does not undergo significant alterations in progesterone, estrogen, serotonin, and oxytocin. Since the male body does not go through physical pregnancy, male hormones, brain chemicals, and bodies don't significantly change. Female chemistry forms its bond with offspring more quickly than does the male's, and with greater biochemical input. This biological difference in bonding is the primary reason that 90% of young males who impregnate teen females abandon the mother and the child. It is a primary biological reason that a society that does not legislate marriage will face a problem with "deadbeat dads," men who leave their offspring behind and form new families or just abandon their fiscal responsibilities. It is a primary biological reason that fathers have more trouble adjusting to and respecting a physically or mentally disabled offspring. And it also explains why married men have so many extramarital sexual affairs during their wives' pregnancy.

To point out this biology is not to exclude other reasons for each of these trends. Males who impregnate teen females tend to be in their late teens and early to mid-twenties - so they lack psychological maturity. Men as a group are often less trained in empathy and so do not have as many internal resources for being empathic to offspring who disappoint them. Deadbeat dads often do not want to pay for offspring because of a lack of certainty as to paternity, fear of exploitation, and sometimes, as revenge against a former spouse.

Simultaneously, a behavior does not occur without starting out as a series of brain chemicals and neurotransmitters interacting inside the brain. So while it is true that males bond with offspring, it is also true that their bond is biochemically different from a woman's bond. This biochemical-bonding difference leads to a father's tendency toward paternal nurturance, a parenting style that is crucial to children's growth, but often somewhat different from a mother's.

Paternal Nurturance

Paternal nurturance is a term used to describe a particular way the male brain approaches children.

• Primarily because of lower oxytocin levels, males don't tend to bond as much with offspring through immediate empathy attachment as females do. Mothers will tend more quickly to say, "Are you all right?" and pat the child, or get a Band-Aid, or hug the child. Fathers tend to hug a child for less time than a mother and tend to say or signal nonverbally, "You're fine, you'll be fine," more often than mothers.
• Paternal nurturance tends toward a "respect" model more than an "esteem" model. A mother of three, who is also a family therapist, put this statement in the "question" box at a training I was giving. We had just been exploring, as a group, how to help boost self-esteem in kids:

"It is important to differentiate self-esteem and self-respect. Self-esteem is fluid. We need to allow the fluid to flow. We need to be very hands-on to help it flow in kids. Self-respect is different. It's earned over time through achievement. It needs failure as much as success, painful feelings as much as pleasant ones. I think women tend to focus more on self-esteem and men more on self-respect."

Don't You Even Care How The Kids Feel?

This question, uttered by many mothers at some time during their children's upbringing, can seem harsh to fathers. They'll often hear it and think, "What does she mean? I care. I just care about the important stuff. All those feelings don't seem that important."

Given the male brain system, men don't have the same relationship to their children's feeling life that mothers have.

Marianna, fourteen years old, wrote me:

"Can you help me understand my father? He's a great guy and all, but he doesn't care about my feelings. He's into his own stuff, or into me following rules, or he's into sports - he really' wants me to get good at tennis so we can play together- but he's not into me. By me, I mean how I feel. Ever since 1 was a kid, whenever I got hurt, he'd just say things like, 'Hey, don't cry. Be proud. You've got a war wound.' That stuff just doesn't work for me!"

A mom, Jennifer, sent me this E-mail:

"I don't think my husband realizes how he hurts the kids' feelings. For instance, the other day my son, Brandon, who's nine, was sitting on the couch doing a project. His father came over and brusquely told him to get off, then settled down for a nap. For the rest of the afternoon, Brandon was in a bad mood. I could tell he was hurt. Mike, my husband, didn't notice right away, but then near dinnertime he got irritated with Brandon for being so moody. He asked Brandon what was wrong and I helped Brandon tell his dad he felt hurt about the couch. His dad said, 'Okay, I didn't realize I was rough on you.' That made Brandon feel better. "Later I was talking to Mike about how hurt Brandon can sometimes get and how harsh Mike's tone can be sometimes. He heard me but he said. "You know, I get all that, but Brandon saw me coming, knew I wanted to lie down there, which I do every afternoon, and just wouldn't budge. Maybe I hurt his feelings, but he knew what he was doing. He was testing what I'd do. It's part of the game. Sometimes stuff's not about feelings, it's about respect. I wanted some respect."

This is an example of a paternal form of nurturance. Both cases reveal a male tendency in prioritizing feeling-life in children. The male brain, on average, does not sense as much, feel as much, rely on as much processing feelings with kids as the mother's brain generally does.

Also, with children of all ages, mothers tend to encourage the expression of complex emotion more than men, thus extending the life of feelings and emotions in the brain. Among other things, greater levels of oxytocin in the female brain guide women toward greater interest in immediate "bonding echoes." Bonding echoes are the coos, smiles, tears, laughter, words, and tactile feelings that occur when a woman talks to a baby, talks to a spouse, hugs a child who is crying, sits over lunch with a friend chatting. Echoes of the bonding experience itself are felt throughout the extended emotional experience. Mothers more often guide children toward the extension of emotional life in large part because the women themselves are provided such good feeling from the bonding echoes.

Fathers, on the other hand, are generally more "male brain" in their tendency to end emotional content more quickly. They don't tend to create verbal opportunity for expression of feelings between father and child but instead focus the child on learning how to control and manage and thus stabilize emotions.

In our generation, which is presently absorbing female brainbased thinking into a culture that previously suppressed female thinking, we have often come to the conclusion that the male "nonfeeling" way with children is inherently defective or even dangerous to the child. Though some men are so emotionally repressed as to be a danger to themselves or children, the male biological trend is not defective. From a natural sense, this aspect of paternal nurturance is especially helpful in the parenting of adolescents.

Divorced From the Mother But Still a Father

When children experience the divorce of their parents, the parent from whom they are most likely to lose emotional, physical, moral, and parental touch is the father. This fact lies at the heart of many of our social problems, as has been well documented during the last ten years. The average divorced father spends two to four days a month with his biological offspring. This fact in itself indicates how profoundly the biological attachment of parent and offspring changes once divorce occurs. Children are no less hardwired to attach to their parents when a divorce occurs than they were before its occurrence; but when their environment changes considerably, their hardwiring is less supported.

In situations of divorce, fathers may stay involved in their children's lives but lose their full role as father. They become what I call half-fathers. This father, after a divorce, systematically loses his biological bonds with his children - mainly because of lack of physical proximity - and feels like half a father. Not wanting to lose that half, too, he foregoes much of who he is as a father - he gives up at least half his paternal identity, hoping to gain the identity of "friend." This carries immense dangers for the child, the society, and even for the mother, who within a few years will often discover that her children are acting out more than they were and presenting a higher incidence of mental and other disorders.

If the father has helped stabilize emotion, divorce does not change the need for him to do that. The child still needs him for that. If he becomes a half-father, living in another city, or only seen every other weekend, he may still pay bills and provide safety, but he may well not focus as much on this aspect of fathering. His children have lost a great portion of their developmental security.

If the father has taught self-respect, he is still needed for that. He teaches independence, assertiveness. He provides and protects. He is biologically driven to care for his children and his children to be cared for by him in the ways already established in the family system. When he becomes a half-father, the child loses a great deal of developmental direction. The child's brain, quite literally, becomes confused.

Though some men quickly abandon their children after a divorce, and still others are alcoholics, mentally ill, or otherwise dangerous to children, most fathers are good dads who find themselves half-fathers because of an inadequate cultural understanding of the father's and child's nature. Part of our civilization's future will depend on mothers, fathers, extended family, judges, case managers, lawyers, and all others involved in divorce, becoming trained in parent-and-child biology and thus revising our divorce and post-divorce systems.

This series of extracts has only been able to cover a small part of the informative and entertaining text of Dr Gurian's book. You can order it at Amazon, click here.

Source

• Michael Gurian. What Could He Be Thinking? : How a Man's Mind Really Works. 1st edition, September 2003. St Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y., 10010

Related Links
Michael Gurian Home Page
Introduction: What Could He Be Thinking?
Deadbeat Dads
MenWeb: Men's Voices Magazine

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