Until a couple of weeks ago I’d never really considered the difference between mumming and dadding. The roles – now we’re all allowed to earn money – seem interchangeable, simply different names for parenting.
Perhaps, this is partly because I was a solo parent to my first two children and proudly took on both roles, providing for and nurturing my children. Or, perhaps it’s because the moments when I most appreciate my husband Mark as a dad are those where I see him completely calm, comforting one or other of our children, and see them relax. When this nurturing happens at a time where I am exhausted, I’m doubly appreciative.
But, then I appeared on Moral Maze on Radio 4 and it made me question what I’d taken so for granted. The role of fathers has swung into the limelight because of John Lewis’s Christmas advert about father and son relationships, and I was really surprised to hear guests who strongly believed there’s nothing interchangeable about the role of a mother and father.
“What is this heteronormative, right wing, conservative, patriarchal rubbish? Have I time travelled back to the 80s?” I thought at first. Then I felt sad at the thought that, while women have been able to step into and share traditionally male roles of having a career, and balance that (or struggle to find balance) with bringing up children, in some quarters men aren’t being allowed to step into and share the traditionally female roles of nurturing their children. No wonder there’s a masculinity crisis.
But, what if I was simply naive, and dads and mums do have different roles in parenting? This question niggled at me so much that I spoke to anthropologist Dr Anna Machin, author of The Life of Dad: The Making of the Modern Father, to find out.
“Fathers are as evolved to nurture and care and be empathetic, sensitive parents as mums are,” she explains. “Biologically and psychologically, they are prepared to nurture. They go through lots of brain changes [when they become parents], just as women do. It’s actually only recently, in the last 200 or 300 years, that from a cultural point of view, we’ve put this breadwinner, disciplinarian, secondary parent label on them. And that’s mainly to do with the Industrial Revolution.” So, those comforting abilities I so appreciate? Completely instinctive.
But, fathers also have a “stimulatory” role in raising children. “When they interact with their children, it tends to be more physical, pushing developmental boundaries more powerfully and putting the child in the way of risk and challenge, so building mental resilience,” she says. “The classic behaviour is rough-and-tumble play. And while women sometimes do that, the frequency is much lower.
“They also underpin the development of things like sharing, caring, helping – and are the main parent when it comes to emotional regulation. It comes down to basic evolutionary theory, which is that you don’t have two roles to evolve to be exactly the same, particularly with something as rare as fatherhood.”
I wonder how our family fits. When I met Mark, Astrid was four and Xavi aged two; he’d see me chase them around our kitchen and lounge each morning. Juno, three, loves the same game now. I don’t think it’s especially rough-and-tumble, more about excited squeaks, but nor is Mark a rough-and-tumble dad.
“The only time I did was once when you told me it was a good idea,” he tells me. His first instinct was to teach the children to balance balloons on chopsticks. In fact, he was quite nervous at how lax I was about risks; Xavi was a climber in his early years. Mark is most likely to play chess or video games or piano, get the children involved with cooking and chopping and watering plants. I can see how these help their social proficiency, and I wonder how much me being a pre-existing solo mum might have shifted our roles.
“It doesn’t mean you can’t flip it. Our brains are very flexible and good at relearning. As long as a child has somebody building their resilience and not over-protecting them,” Machin says.
I’m also slightly amazed that dads give their children all these extra attributes when, still in the UK, so many mums spend the lion’s share of time with children. “It’s not really about time,” Machin says. “Fathers, particularly in our culture, are good at doing things in a time-efficient way. Rough-and-tumble play and sports are a very time-efficient way of inputting developmentally. Generally, because they’re quite fast and physical, you get lots of lovely neurochemistry.
“Observe a mum at the park and a dad, and they input in a different way. Mums tend to say ‘careful’ or ‘don’t climb too high’ while dads say ‘try a bit harder’, ‘climb higher’, and ‘you’re fine’. They have more ability to accommodate risk.” She sees the same thing worldwide, but emphasises that this is not on an individual level, so some families flip roles.
Ed Davies, research director of the Centre for Social Justice, describes this difference – again, at a population level – as “mothers feather the nest, while fathers push children out of the nest.” Fathers provide secure attachment, but also push children to take risks. “The caricature is dads throwing babies in the air,” he says. “There are brilliant studies where if teenage elephants are running amok, you put in bull elephants to show them how to behave.”
So, if a child has no male role models at all, they look elsewhere for this sense of belonging – and worryingly, this can be to the manosphere or to gangs. The Centre for Social Justice recently published a report called The Lost Boys, while the Childhood Institute researched fatherlessness, and increased risk of poor academic results, mental health issues, addiction and criminality are all linked strongly with a lack of a father’s input. “If you’re not raising boys in your community, somebody else will,” Davies, who coaches teenage rugby, says.
Findings from the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge say it doesn’t matter the shape or size of your family: security, love and stability are what’s important. It was this research that gave me the confidence to choose to become a solo mum using a sperm donor who my children can meet when they’re 18.
Anna Machin is clear that single-parent and same-sex families make equally good parents. “This isn’t an argument for the nuclear family. Nor for marriage,” she explains. “Families can come in any permutations. Many families in other cultures that have social fathers and social mothers are so far from a nuclear family; they’re massively extended. What it’s saying is that regardless of your family structure: do you have the right inputs for your child? Find a social parent.”
This can be godfathers, which felt so important to me as a solo parent, though need not be this formal; family friends; uncles; anyone with whom the mother feels comfortable. It can also be a step parent. “It does not need to be biological,” Machin explains. “The brain and hormone changes that a man undergoes when he becomes a dad are through interaction with the child. The wonderful thing about fatherhood is anyone who’s male and has those instincts can take up this role. The most important thing you can bring is secure attachment and sensitive parenting. It doesn’t matter who provides it. Human children are little survival beings: if you provide what they need, they will attach to you.”
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She’s studied gay fathers’ brains, too. She says that if you brain scan a heterosexual couple when interacting with a child, for both parents the empathy, nurturing, planning and problem solving light up. But, there are differences in peak activation. “For mum, peak activation is in the brain’s core, nurturing and risk detection, showing mothering is millions and millions of years old. When we look at the dad’s brain, the peak activation is in the outer areas of the neocortex, which is much younger, related to social cognition. That’s pushing those social boundaries, pushing that resilience. When we see a gay family, in the primary caretaker we see both peaks happen. And, we also see a new neural connection between the two. So, these two sides of his parenting communicate with each other. I don’t study mothering, but I imagine the same happens in lesbian couples as well.”
Her recommendations to all families are to make sure there are strong male and female role models. And – importantly – to play with children. “A lot of fathers worry about the bond with children,” she tells me. “The advice I give is play: it’s the most powerful developmental tool a father has. If you’re not a rough-and-tumble Dad, and you want to do painting or go for a bike ride, that’s absolutely fine. But do play.” I never knew running round the kitchen chasing the children was so important.
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