Research suggests that Men are Also Wired for Childcare

While common convention says that Women have a biological predisposition for raising and caring for children, a new study indicates that men may also share this trait. The results of the study were recently published in the Sept. 12 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A report on the study from the National Science Foundation explained the results of the study. Research indicates that men’s testosterone levels are reduced after entering stable relationships and becoming fathers. This suggests that men, like women, are biologically constructed with the internal ability adjust their priorities as their social duties shift to caregiving and fathering.

“Fathers who are the most involved with physically taking care of their children have the lowest testosterone,” said Lee Gettler, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and lead author on the study. “What we see in our research is that men are biologically attuned to being caregiving parents and that they respond to the transition to fatherhood with large declines in testosterone.”

Researchers for the study followed a group of 600 men over several years. During that time, researchers were able to record the changes in their hormones as they enter stable relationships and became fathers.

“It has been known for some time that fathers in many cultures have lower testosterone levels than non-fathers,” said Christopher Kuzawa, associate professor of biological anthropology at Northwestern and co-author of the study. “However, because past studies investigated these relationships as a single snapshot,” said Kuzawa, “they were not able to establish whether fatherhood lowers testosterone, or whether men who had lower testosterone to begin with were more likely to become fathers.”

“The research speaks strongly to the complex and interesting interplay between biology and behavior in our species,” said Carolyn Ehardt, NSF physical anthropology program manager, “This includes the fascinating flexibility characterizing a very adaptive set of interrelationships between human physiology and social and cultural variation.'”

To read the full NSF article, visit: http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=121658&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click