What's different about being a dad │ How Love Makes Us Human with Dr Anna Machin

Fathers taking care of their offspring are a very rare thing in nature. And that’s not the only thing that makes them special.

The evolutionary origins of love rest with the mother-infant relationship, but where dads invest, there is a father-infant love too.

Now, for both parents, mum or dad, the foundation of that love is the same. It is based on empathy, which is the ability to understand your child's emotional needs, and nurture, the ability to take care of them. But the attachment a child builds with their dad and their mum is very, very different. I'd say that the mum-baby bond is based on nurture and is inward-looking.

It is exclusive between the mother and the child. The focus is very much on developing a secure base, based on nurture.

Now, the dad’s is also based on nurture, but has an element of challenge. I'd describe it a bit like the father turns the child to the world and says, “this is the world and I'm going to teach you skills to be able to survive and thrive within it”. So, dad's attachment is about having a secure base, based on nurture, but also, the confidence to go out into the world and explore it, safe in the knowledge that you can always return to dad for a hug. And these differences in attachment are seen in the brain.

When we look at the brains of a mother and a father when they are interacting with their child, we see different things. So, for example, in the mum's brain the peak in activation is in the core of the brain, the unconscious limbic area, where nurture and risk-detection sit. For dads, the peak in activation is in the outer areas of the brain, the neocortex, and particularly the prefrontal cortex, which is where your social cognition is. And this reflects the fact that fathers tend to have that challenging role to try and push their children into the world. Because of these differences that we see, how we assess the attachment between child and parent differs.

For mum, it is all about the introduction of a stranger; understanding how the child reacts with that stranger and then how they react when mum leaves them and reunites with them. This is known as the strange situation. However, when we want to assess how a child is attached to their father, we add an extra element to try and reflect how they deal with that challenge, which is an integral part of the father attachment. So, as well as our stranger, we have a flight of stairs. And it's how the child uses the secure base of the father to navigate the stairs that tells us about their attachment. How parents build their bonds with their child are also different.

It's fair to say that mums do get a head start. Pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding are full of floods of hormones which give you a head start in bonding with your child: oxytocin, dopamine and beta-endorphin. Because dads don't experience childbirth, they have to build their bonds through interaction. And in the early days of a child's life, this can be pretty tricky because newborn babies don't actually do very much. And it can be hard for a dad to find a way in, to build that interaction. Because of this, dads can often experience a delay in bonding. Something that we need to prepare them for. And at six months when the child is developmentally ready enough, the most important form of bonding behaviour occurs, and that is play. In particular, rough and tumble play.

Now, we can probably all recognise this form of play. We have seen a father do it. It's very, very fast, it's very exhilarating, there's often lots of throwing in the air, running around, giggling, laughing and jumping up and down on the furniture. It's fast and it's furious. And it works well because it's a fast track to forming a bond. It releases increased floods of beta-endorphin, oxytocin and dopamine for child and for father. And we know that children get a particular hit from playing with their fathers. In a time-poor world, rough and tumble play is the accelerated way of building a bond.

In the next episode, we’ll take a leap from parental to parasocial love, that’s love for media figures and celebrities. To put it simply: is this really love?

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