A load of bollocks?

Could there be a link between the size of a father's testicles and how active he is in bringing up his children?

A new study reported by the BBC has found that men with smaller testicles were more likely to be involved with nappy changing, feeding and bath time.

Researchers at Emory University in the States studied 70 men who had children between the ages of one and two. The research is based on evolutionary theory about trade-offs between investing time and effort in mating, or putting that energy into raising children. Larger testicles, linked to the hormone testosterone, are thought to suggest greater commitment to creating more children over raising them. In the animal kingdom, it's the males with the biggest nuts who tend to mate with the most partners.

In the study, men at the smaller end of the spectrum were more likely, according to interviews with the man and the mother, to be more active in parenting duties. Presumably those with balls like spacehoppers just shoot their load and are barely seen for dust.

The researchers also found differences in brain scans of fathers looking at images of their child, linked to testicle size. Those with smaller testicles tended to have a greater response in the reward area of the brain.

For me, one of the most interesting aspects is that MRI scans showed a three-fold difference between the volumes of the smallest and largest testicles in the group. Three fold!! And if you're a Dad, they could be shrinking: researcher Dr Rilling said "We know that testosterone levels go down when men become involved fathers." Further studies, analysing the size before and after becoming a father, are needed.

I suspect this is just the latest study in a long line of research comparing markers of testosterone with personality and behaviour. For example, I would have thought there has been research on 'digit ratio' and fatherhood. There are likely to be lots of other factors involved, and it's hard to imagine the study having much practical impact, other than lots of men today comparing the size of their bollocks while swapping stories about how involved they are with their kids. As Dr James Rilling told the BBC: "It tells us some men are more naturally inclined to care-giving than others, but I don't think that excuses other men. It just might require more effort for some than others."

Lessons from nature

If you've had a summer of your children constantly demanding food - I'm led to believe the appetite of a teenager can be particularly voracious - then you may or may not like to consider this parenting strategy from the animal kingdom.

Burying beetles occasionally punish young who nag for food by eating those who pester them most, according to Edinburgh University research.

It encourages the larvae to plead more honestly according to how hungry they are and not try to outdo their siblings by pestering their mother for food.
It also helps the mother beetle to maintain a degree of control over how she feeds her squabbling offspring.

Yes, I know it's the wrong kind of beetle.

Dr Clare Andrews, of the University of Edinburgh's school of biological sciences, said: "We already knew that larvae beg more if they have been deprived of food but we had not known whether this is because they are informing their parents how hungry they are or whether they are simply squabbling with each other to get their parents' attention.
"Our study shows that if you're a baby beetle it doesn't pay to pester your mother for food unless you're really hungry.

Too young to be a Dad?

On my holiday I read a very interesting piece from Yvonne Roberts in The Observer magazine. It points out that 'no statistics are kept on the number of "young fathers" – classified as anyone becoming a dad under the age of 24, and often much younger'. There are interesting contributions from Shane Ryan of Working With Men:

Ryan says many of the young men he works with are already marginalised, from ethnic minority groups or less affluent backgrounds; some may have come from families with a history of abuse or mental health issues, or have been in trouble at school. "Once they become dads, too often that pattern of exclusion begins again. They are expected to fail when they have assets and love to offer. Some teenage mothers, support services and grandparents can make it extremely difficult for them to gain a foothold in their children's lives."

There are some really touching contributions from young fathers, and links to other resources. For me, this is the nub of it:

Mark S Kiselica writes in When Boys Become Parents, "For too long our culture has treated boys who become fathers… as detached misfits who are the architects of many of our nation's problems, rather than seeing these youth for who they really are: young men trying to navigate a complex array of difficult life circumstances that place them at a tremendous disadvantage." Investment in high-quality compulsory relationship education in schools and a national holistic service for young parents would benefit children, mums and dads. It would save the taxpayer money in the long run, since absent and neglectful dads also exact a cost, as many of the young fathers interviewed testified about their own childhoods. "They can become the men they want to be," says Shane Ryan.

The issues are also covered in more depth in this article on disadvantaged young fathers-to-be.
 

'Who lets their eight- to ten-year-old children out alone?'

It's the summer: cue the annual debate about how children should be spending it, and all the nostalgia for long 'Swallows and Amazons' type holidays of unsupervised play. This article in particular caught my eye, from Barbara Ellen in The Guardian.

A report from the Future Foundation says that the average amount for eight- to 10-year-olds playing unsupervised in the summer holidays has fallen from 55 "occasions" in the 1950s and 1960s to 24 now. Cue parental nostalgia for their own unsupervised summer holidays.
I'm amazed by those figures. Who is letting their eight- to 10-year-olds go out alone 24 times during summer? And when would it be convenient to send the social services around?
I had those textbook childhood summers: running around, picking berries, making dens. Think Famous Five, only without the money or the casual racism. All of us went out in the morning and weren't expected back until … well, you just weren't expected back, except when driven home by hunger. Some would call it priceless formative freedom, others outright neglect; it didn't matter because everyone did it.
But that was then and this is now.

That's very much my own recollection of childhood… when we weren't on a family holiday, from an early age I would be out on the estate or further afield and I wasn't expected back in a hurry. Now with my own kids, aged 6 and 9, they tend to be on day trips with my wife or myself (or both), or at the childminders, or at some holiday club or other. They have not yet been out unsupervised.

I know plenty of boys from my nine-year-old's class who do go down the park on their own, and I'm certainly not about to send social services around. But I can't quite put my finger on why I haven't yet afforded my own son that opportunity. I know he must be on the cusp of it, and I know it's not 'increased traffic' or 'stranger danger' that are putting me off.

Maybe if he was pushing for it more himself I would be forced into a decision. But for now he seems more than happy hanging about with us 'old and boring, increasingly superfluous' folks.

Perhaps that's not the point, and that I need to cut the apron strings for his own good. Barbara Ellen concludes:

Whenever people trot out their lists of what children need (security, self-expression, discipline etc), there's never mention of one of the most important – privacy. Basically, there's too much parental ego flying around. Modern parents need to learn that it is not all about them, centre-stage, being great hands-on parents. Sometimes, it is about parents butting out. 

What do you think? At what age and in what circumstances is it best to butt out?

Improvised weaponry

Listening to the Frank Skinner show on Absolute Radio, I was amused to hear about his Dad's habit of carrying salt in his pocket, to throw in the face of a would-be attacker. Even more amusing was one of the listeners who remembered an eccentric Dad who used to keep a three-year-old egg in his house, claiming it could 'blind an elephant'. Apparently, 'if you ever knocked at his door after 9pm he'd have it in his hand'.

The show's hosts mused that this 'might be a regional Dads thing'. I'm hoping it's just a Dads thing: I'm all for anything which embarrasses the kids.

So have you ever improvised weaponry, to the amusement / embarrassment of your children?

Dad song #10

Dads: don't neglect your other halves, or this is what will happen.

This song was written by Dolly Parton but recorded and released first by Emmylou Harris. Emmylou's own father went missing in action during the Korean War.

Sergeant Major Dad

I haven't posted for a few weeks, mainly because I've been too busy being a Dad to write about it. But I've certainly been reflecting on it, and something has been bothering me.

My wife went away for a few days, and I had the boys to myself. When I see Mums on the school run at times like this, they tend to ask 'How's it going?', with a worried look on their face. I tend to reply, rather too enthusiastically, 'Brilliant!' Because the honest truth is that I find lone parenting absolutely fine, and in some ways easier than sharing the duties. I like to do things my way, and I'm confident I'm doing a good job. We do things, stuff gets done, she comes back, everybody's happy.

But there is one aspect of my parenting that I suspect might be different when she's not around. She sometimes says I can slip into 'Sergeant Major mode', i.e. things need to be done, they need to be done my way and they need to be done NOW. I think I might do this even more in her absence.

Take one example, which has been bugging me. My six-year-old had been chucking his bottle of squash around at his gym competition, and after we drove on to a festival down the road I realised we no longer had it. When I asked him where it was, he didn't display the necessary level of concern regarding its whereabouts. I blew my top, and marched us all a few hundred yards down the road in the searing heat to go and reclaim the bottle, barking at him to keep up.

I was hard on him, but deliberately so. I thought I was teaching him a lesson: that I work hard to ensure that he has 'things', and that he has no right to be so offhand about them. This was something that he seemed to be increasingly prone to, and I felt I needed to nip that growing sense of entitlement in the bud, to teach him that 'Mum and Dad will sort it' is not always the answer. Take responsibility.

I still think that's right, but on the other hand it was a £1 bottle and we could have all done without the walk back and the black cloud descending.

Are you a Sergeant Major Dad?

Then last week I was at a conference in Stockholm, and I met a lawyer from the US. We got chatting about fatherhood, and I recorded what he had to say. When we parted I realised to my horror that it hadn't recorded. If you're out there, I'm really sorry not to give you due credit and to do justice to your insightful and eloquent comments.

The gist of what he said was that he enjoyed being a Dad more when he stopped treating every interaction with his children as an opportunity to teach them a lesson, to build their character. In fact, he realised that he needed to learn from them. They are the future, literally, and they know far more about what to wear, how to act etc than we do.

He gave me the example of receiving a late night phone call from a girlfriend of one of his sons. He launched into the typical Dad diatribe, do you know what time it is, etc etc, and then slowly realised that this girl was, in a very responsible manner, asking him to come and pick his son up because he had had too much to drink. 'Here she was doing the grown up thing, being responsible, and I would have got in the way.'

But don't they sometimes need to learn those lessons, I asked? 'Life does a pretty good job of teaching them', he replied. 'If you do it, do they just learn that they do that thing and Dad gets mad?'

Relax, he said, and learn from them.

As I say, this guy had much more wisdom to impart than I can. I'm sorry I didn't get his name, but I'm going to learn from him and relax.

P.S. Another thing about the bottle incident… I felt really bad about it. Do other Dads out there think that a sense of guilt is a decent indication that your parenting has gone awry? Or is it not as simple as that?

P.P.S. Actually, thinking about the bottle incident even more… maybe I felt particularly guilty because deep down I knew I couldn't be 100% sure that it wasn't me that put the bottle down somewhere. All in all, the whole kerfuffle was definitely not worth the effort.