Do Fathers Matter?: What Science Is Telling Us About the Parent We've Overlooked Read Online Free PDF Page A

he doesn’t do much.
    Hewlett observed that Aka fathers held their infants about 9 percent of the time during the day, but 20 percent of the time in the evenings. This is not all what we would call quality time—the fathers with children in their arms are often engaged in something else. But the many hours fathers and children spend together leads to unusually intimate relationships, “because the father knows his child exceptionally well,” says Hewlett.
    In the United States, quality time for fathers often means playtime. Aka fathers do not often play with their children “because they can communicate their love and concern in other ways … They know subtle means of interacting with their children.” The Aka demonstrate the importance of what we might call “quantity” time—simply spending time with children, even if the parents are not always focused on them. Child relationships based on quantity time contribute to emotional security, autonomy, and self-assuredness.
    Studies of the Aka and other non-Western societies challenge much of what we think we know about fathers. They show us that fathers can—and will—do more in the right circumstances. It’s unlikely, given the pressures of our changing society, that many fathers will have the leisure to spend as much time with their children as Aka fathers do. Still, the Aka give us another view of what fatherhood can be like, and one from which we might be able to learn something about what kind of fathers we’d like to be.
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    The Aka give us insight into fatherhood from the time of our prehistoric ancestors, but they don’t tell us much about how fatherhood might have changed during the past few decades. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, men are shaped to become fathers not only by evolution but also by their own families and their environments. We are now learning that a family’s ill health and exposure to toxins in the environment can adversely affect their future children and even grandchildren.
    Most of us know that a woman who becomes pregnant should stick to healthy foods, skip mercury-laden fish, quit smoking, and avoid exposure to paint thinners. All of these things, and more, can affect the health of the fetus. That’s easy enough to understand; we’re never more intimately connected to our environment than when we are in our mother’s womb.
    The same sort of reasoning suggests that a father would have little or no impact on the health of the fetus, with which he has no physical connection whatsoever. But that reasoning is faulty: research is showing that a father’s environment, his behavior, and even his appearance can have a substantial effect on fetal health—and on the health of his grandchildren.
    The first glimmer of this phenomenon came up in the mid-1960s. A pharmacologist named Gladys Friedler was studying the effects of morphine on female rats, and she found that the drug altered the development of their offspring. She then tried injecting males with morphine and mating them with healthy females to see if that exposure would also affect the offspring. The conventional wisdom was that it couldn’t; that the morphine might affect the males in a variety of ways, but that it wouldn’t affect their sperm. But the conventional wisdom was wrong. The rats’ pups were underweight and underdeveloped—solely from the fathers’ exposure to morphine before conception. Friedler didn’t fully understand what she was witnessing. Neither did anyone else; and nobody believed her. She struggled to get funding for more experiments, and colleagues urged her to abandon the research. But she persisted, and it is only within the past decade that her work has been confirmed.
    Researchers have now seen signs of this kind of paternal inheritance in a number of recent studies. Some of the most interesting findings come from what is now an isolated resort community in northern Sweden called Överkalix parish, with mountains lit by