Free Do Fathers Matter?: What Science Is Telling Us About the Parent We've Overlooked by Paul Raeburn Page B

infancy. It seems that biology has assigned the principal responsibilities to mothers during those months. But biology has a role for fathers to play during pregnancy, too. And it involves changes in their bodies, just as it does in those of their partners. The physical and psychological changes women undergo during pregnancy are paralleled by similar changes in their partners. And there is an important connection between fathers’ behavior during pregnancy and their later involvement with their children: what happens to a father before his child’s birth can affect the kind of father he will be for years to come.
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    Philip A. Cowan and his wife, Carolyn Pape Cowan, of the University of California, Berkeley, were among the first to study fathers during their partners’ pregnancy. The study was prompted, in large part, by their own experience. They married young—Carolyn was nineteen and about to start her first full-time job as a teacher. Philip was twenty-one and still in college. They had both worked while in school as teenagers, so they felt equipped to able to enter the adult world, including getting married.
    Two years after they married, they began trying to start a family. Carolyn was ready, but she admits that she pushed Philip. Their first daughter, Joanna, was born healthy, and so were their next two, Dena and Jonathan, born two and four years later. This was in the early 1960s, when most women stayed home to take care of the kids. Carolyn quit her teaching job and became a full-time mother.
    When their first child was two and a second was on the way, they moved from Canada to California, where Philip had a new job. The stress of the move, away from family and friends, was far greater than they had anticipated. With Philip working and Carolyn at home, they began to feel more distant from each other. Differences and conflicts over parenting were driving them apart. It was, you might say, their first fight—their first real fight, with potentially grave consequences.
    “We hadn’t anticipated that having a baby could revive long-buried feelings of gratitude or disappointment about how loved we had felt as children, or realized that our disagreements about whether the baby needed to be picked up and comforted or left alone to ‘cry it out’ would actually have more to do with our own needs than they did with the baby’s,” they recalled in their book When Partners Become Parents: The Big Life Change for Couples . “Not only were we unprepared for these conflicts inside or between us but we found ourselves unable to talk about them productively once they surfaced,” they reported. Their ten-year marriage was suddenly and unexpectedly in trouble.
    They weren’t the only ones struggling. Friends in similar circumstances were separating or divorcing all around them. Most of those couples had wanted to have children and had been excited at the prospect of starting a family. And yet the responsibilities of raising children, it seemed, were almost more than they could handle. “Almost all of us could trace the beginning of our difficulties back to those early years of becoming a family,” Carolyn and Philip wrote. The phenomenon has been found in all kinds of families in multiple studies across the country and around the world. The Cowans and their friends couldn’t understand it: What, they asked, is wrong with us?
    As it happens, the Cowans had moved to California because Philip was offered a position as a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, where he ultimately became a professor of psychology. In the 1970s, prompted by curiosity and self-preservation, Philip began working with Carolyn, who had since become a psychologist, to prepare for what would be a fifteen-year study of ninety-six couples that would become a landmark in social science research—the Becoming a Family Project. Finally they would be able to investigate the reasons behind their own marital difficulties,