Study confirms that fatherhood reshapes male brains to allow for softer caregiving approach

When first-time fathers view videos of their own infants, certain brain regions activate differently than when they see unfamiliar babies—or even their pregnant partners. A new study suggests that fatherhood reshapes the brain to support sensitive caregiving, surprisingly regardless of whether they are the primary caregiver or not. The findings shed light on how areas tied to social understanding, emotion regulation, and reward processing respond to the unique importance of one’s own child.

While previous studies have shown that parents react more strongly to their own children than to unfamiliar infants, most research has centred on mothers. Much less is known about how fathers’ brains adapt to caregiving demands. The new study was published in the Human Brain Mapping journal, with their findings being featured on the PsyPost publication.

Philip Newsome, an incoming third-year PhD student at the University of Southern California, and Anthony Vaccaro, a research professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill aimed to address that gap.

The research involved 32 first-time fathers in the US, who underwent functional MRI scans roughly eight months after their child’s birth. During the scans, they watched short videos featuring either their own baby, an unfamiliar baby, their pregnant partner, or an unfamiliar pregnant woman. Fathers also rated the emotional tone of each video to confirm engagement.

Earlier, these fathers had completed questionnaires assessing prenatal bonding, postpartum bonding, parenting stress, and bonding difficulties. The team explored whether brain responses to the videos aligned with these self-reported experiences.

“For a little over 20 years, scientists have been studying how mothers’ brains respond to viewing their own infant as a way to understand how biology supports the social and emotional demands of parenting. But compared to mothers, far fewer studies have looked at fathers,” said Newsome, who works in the Neuroendocrinology of Social Ties Lab, directed by Darby Saxbe, the paper’s senior author.

Results showed that fathers exhibited stronger activation when watching their own baby compared to unfamiliar infants in several regions. These included the precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex—linked to social cognition and self-referential processing—as well as the orbitofrontal cortex and inferior frontal gyrus, which are involved in emotion and reward.

Fathers who reported stronger prenatal and postpartum bonding, and lower parenting stress, showed greater activation in the precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex when viewing their own infant. This indicates that neural responses may mirror not just social or emotional processing, but also the depth of a father’s psychological connection to their child.

Unexpectedly, brain activation was not tied to the amount of time fathers spent as the infant’s primary caregiver or the infant’s age during the scan.

“We were somewhat surprised that fathers’ brain responses weren’t linked to their caregiving experience, like time spent as the primary caregiver,” Newsome told PsyPost. “Notably, it’s possible that our relatively small sample limited our ability to detect such associations.”

By Nazrin Sadigova