Do Fathers Matter?: What Science Is Telling Us About the Parent We've Overlooked (21 page)

Empathy is another important characteristic that we hope our teenagers will develop, and fathers seem to have a surprisingly important role here, too. Richard Koestner, a psychologist at McGill University in Montreal, looked back at seventy-five men and women who had been part of a study at Yale University in the 1950s, when they were children. When Koestner and his colleagues looked at all the factors in the children’s lives that might have affected how empathetic they became as adults, one factor dwarfed all the others: how much time their fathers spent with them. “We were amazed to find that how affectionate parents were with their children made no difference in empathy,” Koestner said. “And we were astounded at how strong the father’s influence was.”

Melanie Mallers, a psychologist at California State University, Fullerton, also found that sons who have fond childhood memories of their fathers were more likely to be able to handle the day-to-day stresses of adulthood. Around the same time, a team from the University of Toronto put adults in an fMRI scanner to assess their reaction to the faces of their parents, and how that might differ from their reaction to the faces of strangers. The brains of the subjects responded differently to mothers and to fathers. Mothers’ faces elicited more activity in parts of the brain associated with face processing, among others. But the faces of fathers elicited activity in the caudate, a deep brain structure associated with feelings of love.

The importance of fathers in ensuring the health of their offspring extends beyond their own children. As we’ve seen, imprinted genes, which carry a chemical stamp marking which parent they came from, have consequences not only for children but also for grandchildren. These are the genes that engage in a tug-of-war at conception and must be kept in balance to assure children’s health. Imprinted genes that children receive from their mothers and fathers affect what kind of parents they themselves will be when the time comes—a finding that raises the stakes on everything fathers do for their children.

EIGHT

Older Fathers
: The Rewards and Risks of Waiting

Stroll through parks and playgrounds in many parts of the country these days, and you’re likely to see a lot of older men pushing strollers. You know who they are—you hesitate before starting a conversation, because you don’t know whether you will be talking to dad or grandpa.

This confusion was wonderfully captured by the writer and director Nora Ephron in
You’ve Got Mail
. Joe Fox, played by Tom Hanks, and a boy and girl walk into the bookshop owned by Kathleen, played by Meg Ryan. The girl, Annabel, refers to Tom Hanks as “my nephew,” and Kathleen says, “Oh, I don’t really think that’s your nephew.” But it’s true. And the boy, Matt, tells her that Joe is his brother. Joe says that’s right. “Annabel is my grandfather’s daughter. And Matt is my father’s son. We are an American family.”

The Foxes might not be a typical American family, but it’s not that unusual for older men to become fathers, as I found out when I became an older father myself. My wife, Elizabeth, was forty when our first son was born. We knew about the things than can go wrong in the children of older mothers. First, we worried about whether she’d be able to get pregnant. Then, when she did, we worried that she might have a miscarriage. And we worried about Down syndrome, more common in the children of older mothers. Elizabeth had all the tests to rule out Down syndrome and some other possible genetic abnormalities. The tests were normal. That wasn’t a guarantee that the baby would be okay, but it was reassuring nonetheless.

The day after our son was born, while we were still bleary-eyed from the late-night delivery, we were aimlessly flipping channels on a television bolted to the wall of Elizabeth’s hospital room when we caught part of a news report about an increased risk of autism in the children of older fathers. Until then, all we’d thought about, and worried about, was Elizabeth’s age. Now I was hearing that
my
age could pose a risk to our baby, too. I was fifty-five. The report we were seeing on the television applied to us. We had never heard anything like this before. I mumbled something about the unfortunate timing of that report, when it was too late for us to do anything about it, and we flipped to another channel. We didn’t talk about it; I hoped Elizabeth would fall asleep and forget it. I hoped I would, too.

But I couldn’t forget it. When we got home a couple of days later, I looked up the report. Researchers were explaining that the children of fathers forty and over had a sixfold increase in the risk of autism compared to kids whose fathers were under thirty. I found the study on the Web. It said children of fathers over fifty had a tenfold greater risk of autism. And there was more bad news. “Advanced paternal age,” as researchers called it, has also been linked to an increased risk of early-onset bipolar disorder, birth defects, cleft lip and palate, water on the brain, dwarfism, miscarriage, premature birth, and “decreased intellectual capacity.”

What was most frightening to me, as someone with mental illness in the family, was that older fatherhood was also associated with an increased risk of schizophrenia. The risk rises with each passing year. The child of a forty-year-old father had a 2 percent chance of having schizophrenia—double the risk of children whose fathers are under thirty. A forty-year-old man’s risk of having a child with schizophrenia was the same as a forty-year-old woman’s risk of having a child with Down syndrome.

Because I was over fifty, the risk that our son would develop schizophrenia was even higher—3 percent. The illness usually appears in the late teens or early twenties, and there’s no way to know who will develop it until then. It will be two decades before we know whether either of our two young boys is affected. Assuming we both survive, I’ll be in my seventies, and Elizabeth in her sixties. That’s a long time to wait before exhaling. (More recent research, as we’ll see, has told us even more.)

The study seemed to me to raise a disturbing question: Why didn’t we know this? The female biological clock is talked about so often that it’s become a sitcom cliché. Why do we hear so little about these biological clocks in men? Here was evidence of a very important contribution that fathers make to their children—a potentially harmful one.

I wondered how many American children had older fathers, and whether the number of older fathers was increasing, as it seems to be. I called the U.S. Census Bureau. The bureau, it turns out, does not count older fathers. This seemed a surprising admission by an agency that counts all fathers (70.1 million), the number married with children under eighteen (24.4 million), single fathers (1.96 million), and even the number of sporting goods stores where you can buy dad a fishing rod for Father’s Day (21,418). As for the number of older fathers, Robert Bernstein, a public affairs specialist at the bureau, told me, “We tried to collect this information many years ago, and the reporting on men was not so reliable, so we stopped asking.” The reason this was too tough to do, according to an anonymous e-mail I received later from the Census Bureau, was that “a lot of women get pregnant and don’t know who the fathers are—or the fathers don’t care.”

Information is available from birth certificates, however, and it’s collected by the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That data shows that the number of births to men forty to forty-nine nearly tripled between 1980 and 2004, rising from 120,702 to 328,465. (The numbers have risen only slightly since then.) Much of the jump was due to an increase in the overall population. But there has been a shift, over the past generation, toward more men becoming fathers when they are older—a trend beyond what can be accounted for by the growth in population. Birthrates for men in their forties (a number that takes population growth into account) have risen by up to 40 percent since 1980—while birthrates for men under thirty were falling by as much as 21 percent.

This represents a sharp change from earlier decades. The number of older fathers in the 1940s and 1950s was even higher than it is now, but for a different reason: most men started out as young fathers, but families were larger, and many dads slipped past forty before they had their last child. The number of older fathers fell through the 1960s, and began to climb again after reaching a low in 1975, when women began entering the workforce in larger numbers.

While this was happening, men and women were increasingly delaying marriage. In 2011, according to the Census Bureau, the median age at first marriage for men was almost twenty-nine, up from twenty-five in 1980. The Census Bureau doesn’t collect data on the age at which fathers have their first child, but Matthew Weinshenker, a sociologist at Fordham University in New York, used a variety of surveys to estimate that the percentage of fathers who are having their first child after age thirty-five rose from 2 percent in the 1970s to nearly 17 percent in the 1990s. “The percentage of first-time fathers who are older has exploded over the past few decades,” he said.

Changes in the workplace have made childbearing decisions more difficult for many couples. As we’ve seen, many employees are now subject to far more demands from their employers than in the past. Changes like these make it harder for people to carve out time for their children. And most feel they can’t refuse to do what their employers ask. “Among more highly educated people, I think you see them trying to get their careers established so they can have more flexibility when they have children,” said Ellen Galinsky of the Families and Work Institute. “I hear all the time that people want to feel that their employer knows they’re valuable, so they’ll have the flexibility they want when they have kids—taking leave, taking time off.”

The medical risks associated with being an older father might be partly offset by the commitments that many older parents make to their children. Brian Powell, a sociologist at Indiana University, studies the social, cultural and economic resources that parents devote to their children. When he began his research, he expected to find a mixed picture in older parents. “We assumed there would be trade-offs, that older parents might have more economic resources, but the trade-off would be less personal involvement, less involvement with the schools—less energy.” Their research proved that assumption to be wrong. Older parents were deeply involved in school, ballet classes, piano lessons, their children’s friends—and they devoted more economic resources to all these things. “It turns out, the older the parent, the better it is for the child,” Powell said.

Another reason for the increased number of older fathers is the high prevalence of divorce and remarriage, said Linda J. Waite, a sociologist at the University of Chicago. While men in first marriages are typically one and a half to two years older than their wives, men in second marriages are, on average, fifteen years older than their wives. “About half of marriages end in divorce, so remarriage for men is pretty common. They tend to marry someone younger, and often that person hasn’t had kids and wants to have kids,” she said.

*   *   *

The idea that a father’s age could affect the health of his children was first hinted at a century ago by an unusually perceptive and industrious doctor in private practice in Stuttgart, Germany. Wilhelm Weinberg was a loner who devoted much of his time to caring for the poor, including delivering some 3,500 babies during a forty-year career. He also managed to publish 160 scientific papers, without the benefit of colleagues, students, or grants. His papers, written in German, didn’t attract much attention initially; most geneticists spoke English. It wasn’t until years later that some of Weinberg’s papers were recognized as landmarks.

One was a 1912 study noting that a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia was more common among the last-born children in families than among the firstborn. Weinberg didn’t know why that was so, but he speculated that it might be related to the age of the parents, who were of course older when their later children were born. Weinberg’s prescient observation was confirmed decades later when research showed that he was half right: the risk of dwarfism rose with the father’s age but not the mother’s.

Since then, about twenty ailments have been linked to paternal age, including progeria, the disorder of rapid aging; neurofibromatosis, once known as Elephant Man’s disease; and Marfan syndrome, a disorder marked by very long arms, legs, fingers and toes. More recent studies have linked father’s age to prostate and other cancers in their children.

Columbia University researchers showed that women whose partners are thirty-five or older have three times as many miscarriages as women with partners under twenty-five. This is true no matter what the woman’s age is. And the research confirmed that older men—just like older women—are at increased risk of fathering children with Down syndrome.

As researchers cataloged these ills, they found themselves increasingly puzzled by what was going on. How could sperm deteriorate with a man’s age if they were always newly made? Perhaps the problem was mutations in the sperm-making machinery; but no one could be sure. There the matter rested, until research into the causes of schizophrenia unexpectedly began to point to older fathers.

*   *   *

Dolores Malaspina was in college when her sister, Eileen, who was two years younger, began behaving in ways the family couldn’t explain. At first, Malaspina recalls, Eileen seemed like she was going through the usual problems of adolescence. She stopped doing her chores on the weekends, even though she had always pitched in before. She was tired and seemed depressed. At the time, Malaspina and her parents were not terribly concerned. “Many people who turn out perfectly well have lots of symptoms and struggles and conflicts during adolescence,” she said. Soon, however, Eileen’s behavior became harder to overlook. Malaspina’s mother would wake up at night and discover that Eileen had strung scarves all through the house and set rules for the rest of the family about where in the house it was okay to walk, and where it wasn’t. By then, the conclusion was inescapable: Eileen had serious problems. Eileen was finally hospitalized for the first time during her last year of high school. She was soon diagnosed with schizophrenia.