Anthony Morgan, host of The Nature of Things, blows bubbles. The latest episode of the CBC show looks at how fatherhood changes new dads.HO/The Canadian Press
Just before my first baby was due, my late mother-in-law, a tough bird, asked my husband whether he would be in the delivery room. When he said yes, her initial reaction was … I’ll call it skepticism: Why would any man want to be confronted with his wife’s “hoo-ha” in that state? Then she softened. Being there, she admitted, “might make for kinder men.”
Turns out she was right. Just in time for Father’s Day, a new episode of The Nature of Things (CBC/Gem), Dad Bods, digs into the exploding science about how fatherhood impacts male brains and bodies. The good news: Being a steadily involved father changes male brains, physically, in a way that creates more empathy. The don’t-panic-but news: Their testosterone drops significantly. Some might even say “plummets.” It does come back up, when the baby grows into a toddler – but never quite to pre-fatherhood levels.
“Whenever I talk about this show to men, a certain look comes over their faces,” Christine McLean, the episode’s writer/director, told me. “Testosterone is prized.” We were on the phone, but I could hear the grin in her voice.
“But then I tell them that with that drop, there’s a decrease in aggression, and so many positives for baby, dad and family,” McLean continues. “Involved dads live longer and have better health. They tend to have stronger marriages, better relationships with their kids, and the outcomes for their kids, particularly in the area of mental health, are better. And we see the same effects on involved grandfathers, uncles and even friends. You can make the argument that it’s good for the community as a whole.”
Indeed, my favourite moment in the episode comes courtesy of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, 78, a renowned American anthropologist whose 2024 book Father Time was the springboard for Dad Bods. For most of her career, Hrdy studied maternal health. Then in 2000, she came across a study that the scientist Ann Storey did at Memorial University, showing that male seabirds were equally involved parents, working themselves to exhaustion to feed and protect their young. Hrdy started to wonder about the biological effects of human fatherhood. She took blood samples of men before and after they became parents, and – what a shock – the testosterone-drop news caught the attention of scientists worldwide. Today it’s a burgeoning field.
So here’s my favourite moment: Hrdy, in a gentle cri de coeur, asks, “Why didn’t we think of this before?” Men’s latent capacity for care, and its latent potential – the possibilities are monumental. Happier families. Less violence. Fewer wars. In other words, it might make for kinder men.
Marsha Lederman: As the mother of a teenage boy, I forced myself to watch Adolescence. You should do the same
Dad Bods is McLean’s third documentary for The Nature of Things (she’s currently working on her fourth, about icebergs). She’s been a journalist, a radio host, a TV current affairs producer and an instructor at several universities. She’s made dozens of documentaries and conducted “tens of thousands of interviews,” she says. Though every episode of The Nature of Things strives to be international and include diverse voices, Dad Bods is particularly ambitious. Researching and making it took almost two years, and it spans the globe, with stops in Canada, the U.S., Israel and Argentina.
We meet puffins in Newfoundland, gay dads in France, and fathers in the Philippines, who’ve had to step up, since many of that country’s mothers emigrate to become caregivers in Canada and elsewhere. Visiting two nearby villages in Tanzania, we learn that the testosterone is lower in the village where men co-raise their children and grandchildren than it is in the village where the men are away, guarding their grazing cattle.
McLean includes charming cellphone videos of fathers holding their babies, because, in addition to the experts, she wanted dads to speak for themselves. We learn that men do gain baby weight – about 14 pounds. We discover that skin-to-skin contact with their babies not only lowers fathers’ blood pressure and heart rate, it releases the feel-good hormones oxytocin and dopamine – and that absorbing healthy bacteria from their fathers’ skin aids babies’ digestion.
“Fathers’ skin-to-skin contact with newborns is a relatively new process in hospitals, and we have several shots of men doing it,” McLean says. “They look so stoned, I laugh every time I see it.”
And if you’ve ever wondered why fathers toss their babies in the air while mothers watch frozen in fear, there’s a biological reason for that, too: Motherhood stimulates a woman’s amygdala, the part of the brain that detects danger, while fatherhood rewires a man’s frontal cortex, which increases his ability to read his baby’s social cues, and to connect.
“There have always been good dads, but fatherhood is evolving, and that’s a good thing,” McLean says. “There used to be a stigma around stay-at-home dads, but I’m seeing less of that with the current generation of parents.” Canadians in particular are great dads, she adds – paternity leave is on the rise, as is single fatherhood, and one in ten Canadian fathers stay home with their kids.
None of this is to diminish the difficulties and importance of motherhood, McLean says. “But women seem to appreciate an involved dad. It’s a positive development over the last two generations that we should applaud. Fathers deserve credit for the impact we now understand they have.” And the further impact they could have, in growing kinder.
