Caring, confident dads have structurally different brains

We found that dads who have more positive attitudes about their parenting abilities, and about fatherhood in general, show differences in their brains to those who don’t.

Our findings revealed that dads’ and their kids’ brains were more in sync during puzzle solving when dads scored higher on the first questionnaire—how strongly they believed they were good fathers. We also observed that, in the same (50 out of 66) fathers, brain anatomy, and specifically the size of the hypothalamus, was associated with dads’ caregiving beliefs: the higher fathers scored on the first questionnaire, the larger was their hypothalamus volume. Furthermore, dads’ hypothalamus volume was also positively related to how much they reported to enjoy interacting with their kids.