What Do Fathers Want?

OK, this is a little bit circular, because Cathy Arnst's post with that title, on her Business Week blog Working Parents, mentions my Psychology Today blog, About Fathers.

Even so, you should check out Cathy's post, in which she wonders why fathers choose to participate in some of the kids' school activities, but not others.

And thanks, Cathy, for the mention.

Vatican condemns abortion for 9-year-old girl, allegedly abused and pregnant with twins

The nine-year-old Brazilian girl weighs 80 pounds. She was allegedly abused by her stepfather, according to the BBC. She became pregnant with twins. Doctors feared that if she tried to give birth she would die. Her mother had doctors perform an abortion, allowed in these circumstances by Brazil's otherwise tough anti-abortion statutes.

The Catholic Church responded by throwing the mother and the doctors out of the church. Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who is Catholic, condemned the excommunications. A senior Vatican official condemned him.

The official, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re (photo) told the Italian newspaper La Stampa that the twins "had the right to live."

Did the nine-year-old girl have a right to live?

If the girl's doctors were correct, then somebody was likely to die--either the girl, or one or both of the twins.

I can't begin to imagine how I would have handled this situation, if it were my decision to make. How does one compromise when there is no compromise possible? How does one protect life when either choice could mean death for somebody?

Cardinal Re apparently had no room for such reflection: Abortion is a sin. Let the girl die, if it be God's will.

That, I suppose, is one of the gifts of faith. Decisions that should be frightfully difficult become simple. No hesitation. No exceptions.

Tilted against fathers: A Brit perspective

Several months ago, Nick Clegg, a member of the British parliament and leader of the Liberal Democrats, suggested that some of the laid-off steelworkers and miners in his district (near where The Full Monty was set) should take jobs as childminders. (That's Britspeak for day-care workers.) "I was stunned," he writes today in The Times online, "when my office received complaints that it was inappropriate work for men, with a barely disguised hint of suspicion about why men would want to spend so much time with young children."

Only 1 percent of childminders are men, an indication, Clegg says, that Britain clings too closely to traditional notions of what constitutes men's work.

And it clings too closely to traditional notions of a man's role in the family. In England, mothers can take a year of parental leave. Fathers get two weeks. "This split is out of step with the reality of many modern families, and discourages fathers from making a commitment to the care of their own children," he writes.

During World War II, he notes, women flooded the workforce, filling all kind of jobs, including those traditionally held by men. In a suggestion as apt on this side of the Atlantic as that one, he suggests that it's time for us to re-invent ourselves again:

"Many men will be forced to let go of their earlier identities and try something new--like the unemployed car worker in the West Midlands who explained on Newsnight last week that he was retraining to become a social worker. And many women may become the only family breadwinner for the first time. For many couples this will be unsettling and deeply disruptive to the settled patterns of life, work and marriage."

Unsettling, to be sure, but essential. Those settled patterns have kept too many of us--mothers and fathers alike--in cages.

It's a surprisingly thoughtful and perceptive piece, for a politician. And it's the kind of talk we could use more of here in the colonies, as well.

Progesterone and bad fathering

The hormone progesterone serves vital functions in women who are becoming mothers. It helps keep pregnancies healthy, and it primes pregnant women to show maternal behavior at birth.

That's been known for a long time. What hasn't been clear is the role of progesterone in men--in particular, how it affects their paternal behavior.

It's considered bad form to knock out progesterone in men to see what happens (or to shoot 'em up with it). But Teresa Horton of Northwestern University has done those experiments with male mice.

She has shown (in a chapter in this recent book) that when the effects of progesterone are blocked in male mice, they become better fathers. Progesterone, in other words, has the opposite effect in men that it has in women: It encourages good mothering, and bad fathering. Male mice whose progesterone is blocked are better fathers and they are less likely to kill their pups.

When males are given progesterone concentrations similar to what females have during pregnancy, they become infanticidal, and it lasts for at least five days after the concentration is reduced.

Researchers have known since the 1930s that progesterone was important in maintaining pregnancy. But it hasn't been studied in fathers until very recently. Why? For my speculation, see my previous posts, Where are the Fathers?

Minnesota is considering changing its custody laws to presume that parents will share physical custody. That does not require shared custody; but it establishes that as the presumption, unless negotiations or a judge's ruling lead elsewhere. Only a handful of states--notably Iowa--have moved in this direction. Fathers' advocates generally like it, believing that it gives them more rights following divorce. Women's advocates are generally unhappy about it, for the same reason. And experts are divided.

And a study out of England suggests that good fathering has benefits. Here's the gist of it, from New Scientist:

"The more effort a father invests in his children, the smarter they are as kids and more successful as adults, new research shows. And highly educated fathers make even more of a difference than less educated dads, all things being equal."

Study: Where are the fathers?

I'm thinking of beginning a series of posts under the title above. The idea is to look at studies that might naturally have included fathers--but which examined only mothers.

For example: A recent study by Deborah Laible and Tia Panfile in Child Development looked at conflicts between mothers and toddlers when the kids were 30 months old, and at 36 months old. It found that mother-child conflict was marked by more resolution and compromise when mothers and toddlers were more securely attached. And it found that children's temperatments were related to the kind of mother-child conflict, and its frequency. Interesting.

You might argue that it's fair to look at mothers and children in this study, and perhaps to study fathers at another time, in another paper. And I wouldn't disagree. But the setup to the paper talks about parents, not mothers. And yet the research was done exclusively on mothers.

From the study's introductory paragraphs:

"Conflict between young children and their parents [emphasis mine]" is normal and frequent during the preschool years.

"Parents with young children are engaged in conflict with them on average between 3 ½ to 15 times an hour."

"Children may learn important lessons out of these early conflicts with parents."

I have no business telling Laible and Panfile what kind of study to do; if they want to study mothers exclusively, that's up to them. But all the background they cite relates to parents, not just mothers. Did they think about including fathers? I asked Laible in an email.

"We did do audio recordings across dinner and dinner often included mothers and fathers," she emailed back. "In listening to the audiotapes, it did seem like the nature of father-toddler conflict was very similar to mother-toddler conflict." She said she would expect similar findings with fathers. "There were also some interesting three-way conflicts with fathers, mothers, and toddlers," she said.

That might have prompted her and Panfile to look at fathers; but no. "Honestly," she wrote, "we didn't look at fathers at all or take them into account."

The study was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, part of the National Institutes of Health.