How Becoming a Father Rewires Men - Season 1, Episode 6

Becoming a father for the first time is likely to change any man's life.  Listen in on how lifestyle and attitudes change once you cross the line from Man to Daddy!

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:06

Welcome to the Quiet Strength Podcast. Fathers in a Failing World. I'm Giacomo Knox. We live in a time when the role of fathers is often misunderstood, sometimes ignored, and occasionally even ridiculed. Yet throughout history, strong fathers, sometimes loud but often quiet, have held families, communities, and entire civilizations together. This podcast explores acquired strength. Each episode brings together thoughtful conversations about fatherhood, responsibility, faith, forgiveness, and the challenges men face in raising the next generation. Some of these conversations are inspired by research, history, and emerging technology that helps us explore important new ideas in new ways. This is an independent production built by people who believe that strong families and strong fathers still matter. As the show grows, we are always interested in connecting with organizations and partners who want to help us support meaningful conversations about fatherhood and legacy. But at the heart of every episode is a simple question. This is a Quiet Straight the podcast. Let's begin.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

They are inexplicably gaining weight, they're complaining about severe brain fog, and and they're even waking up with sudden bouts of morning sickness. Oh wow. Right. Now, naturally you are picturing an expecting mother, but what if I told you we aren't talking about the pregnant mother at all? We're actually talking about her partner.

SPEAKER_02 2:12

You know, it it honestly sounds like a tired trope from like a 90s sitcom. Bumbling husband who is somehow feeling the pregnancy too, just playing it up for laughs. Society tends to dismiss it as just sympathy pains or, you know, a bid for attention.

SPEAKER_01 2:27

Right, like he's making it about him.

SPEAKER_02 2:29

Exactly. But looking at the clinical data, that assumption is entirely backward. We tend to think of pregnancy as this biological event that happens to one person in a vacuum.

SPEAKER_00 2:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:39

But human physiology and psychology, they simply do not operate in isolation like that.

SPEAKER_01 2:44

Aaron Powell, which perfectly brings us to the stack of sources we've curated specifically for you today. We've pulled medical research from the Cleveland Clinic and the University of Michigan. We've dug into historical data on hospital birth practices from the History News Network.

SPEAKER_02 2:58

Aaron Powell It's a really diverse stack.

SPEAKER_01 3:00

It is. We're also looking at a massive longitudinal mental health study out of Australia. And uh we're rounding it all out with some deeply personal essays on the emotional evolution of modern men.

SPEAKER_02 3:13

Aaron Powell And the scope of this research is intentionally broad, you know, spanning biology, history, psychology, and just the plain old reality of human experience.

SPEAKER_01 3:23

Aaron Ross Powell Because the mission of this deep dive is to unpack something that often goes completely unnoticed.

SPEAKER_02 3:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:29

The hidden, profound transformation of becoming a father, we treat fatherhood like it's just this purely social milestone.

SPEAKER_02 3:36

Aaron Powell Right, like a checklist.

SPEAKER_01 3:37

Trevor Burrus, Exactly. You get a card, you buy a crib, boom, you're a dad. But looking at the evidence in front of us, it is so much more than a title change. Oh, absolutely. It is a massive biological, historical, and emotional rewiring. Okay, let's unpack this. Starting with the sheer biology of what happens to a man before the baby is even born.

SPEAKER_02 3:57

Aaron Ross Powell The transformation absolutely begins long before that first diaper change. I mean, you mentioned those physical symptoms at the top, the weight gain, the nausea.

SPEAKER_01 4:04

No, my no-sickness thing.

SPEAKER_02 4:06

Right. The medical establishment actually recognizes this as a legitimate condition. It's outlined by the Cleveland Clinic as Cuvade syndrome or sympathetic pregnancy.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

Aaron Powell And the word Cuvade, it actually comes from the French verb couvert, which literally means to incubate or like to sit on eggs.

SPEAKER_02 4:23

I love that visual.

SPEAKER_01 4:24

It's so strange. And the physical symptoms are wild. It is not just feeling a little tired after a long day at work.

SPEAKER_02 4:29

No, not at all.

SPEAKER_01 4:30

The Cleveland Clinic lists abdominal pains, severe bloating, leg cramps, constipation, and get this, even phantom toothaches.

SPEAKER_02 4:39

Which is just bizarre.

SPEAKER_01 4:40

Right. And we aren't talking about a rare one in a million medical anomaly here. One comprehensive 2007 review noted that Couvaid syndrome affects up to 97% of non-pregnant partners worldwide.

SPEAKER_02 4:51

Which is an incredibly high number.

SPEAKER_01 4:53

97%. It spikes during the first and third trimesters, which perfectly mirrors the most physically taxing parts of the actual pregnancy.

SPEAKER_02 5:02

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 5:02

Furthermore, the research points out this applies to same-sex partners as well.

SPEAKER_02 5:06

And see, the inclusion of same-sex partners reveals a lot about the underlying mechanism of how this works. Yeah. It tells us CUVAid isn't just, you know, some quirk of male biology triggered by a female partner's pheromones or something. Right. It's actually a deeply psychosomatic response. The brain's empathy centers are firing so intensely that they trigger a cascade of physical stress responses in the body.

SPEAKER_01 5:31

So the empathy is essentially making them physically ill.

SPEAKER_02 5:35

Basically, yeah. For instance, heightened anxiety about the impending life change causes cortisol to spike.

SPEAKER_01 5:41

Which is the stress hormone.

SPEAKER_02 5:42

Exactly. That sudden rush of stress hormones directly impacts the digestive system, which explains the nausea, the bloating, the weight fluctuations. The mind-body connection essentially just goes into overdrive. The partner is preparing for parenthood, and their body literally absorbs the ambient stress of the pregnant partner. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 6:02

And it goes even deeper than just stress responses, right? We are talking about fundamental rewiring at the hormonal level. We are. There's this fascinating study from the University of Michigan that tracked 29 first-time expectant couples. Researchers took saliva samples continuously throughout the pregnancy to map their hormone levels. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 6:20

It's a lot of saliva.

SPEAKER_01 6:21

A lot of saliva, yeah. Obviously, the women's hormones were skyrocketing to sustain the pregnancy, but the men's hormones were shifting dramatically as well.

SPEAKER_00 6:30

Right.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

Specifically, the expectant men experienced a distinct prenatal drop in both testosterone and estradiol.

SPEAKER_02 6:37

Aaron Powell While their cortisol, again, the stress hormone and their progesterone remained completely unchanged. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 6:43

It's like the male body is downloading a massive software update for parenthood before the hardware even arrives.

SPEAKER_02 6:48

That is a great way to put it.

SPEAKER_01 6:50

It's physically preparing them to be less aggressive and more domestic. But but here is where I want to push back on the research a little bit.

SPEAKER_02 6:57

Okay, go for it.

SPEAKER_01 6:58

I fully understand the drop in testosterone. Testosterone is linked to aggression and risk-taking, so dialing that down makes perfect evolutionary sense when you're about to handle a fragile newborn.

SPEAKER_02 7:09

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 7:10

But the study specifically states that estradiol is a hormone linked to caregiving and bonding. So wait, if estradiol is associated with bonding, why does it drop along with testosterone?

SPEAKER_02 7:21

It seems backwards, right?

SPEAKER_01 7:23

It feels completely counterintuitive. If the body is supposedly preparing to bond with the baby, why lower the bonding hormone?

SPEAKER_02 7:30

What's fascinating here is that researchers have debated that exact biological paradox.

SPEAKER_01 7:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:35

And the leading theory from evolutionary biologists provides a really compelling mechanism.

SPEAKER_01 7:40

Okay, what is it?

SPEAKER_02 7:41

They suspect that this simultaneous drop in estradiol might actually serve to prevent overattachment to the romantic partner during this highly vulnerable window.

SPEAKER_01 7:50

Oh, so it's about shifting focus.

SPEAKER_02 7:53

Exactly. By dialing down the hormonal intensity of the romantic bond, the male brain is essentially forced to redirect its protective focus and its bonding capacity entirely toward the incoming newborn.

SPEAKER_01 8:05

Because there's only so much bonding bandwidth to go around.

SPEAKER_02 8:08

Right. Hormones exist in a very delicate zero-sum balance. Right. So lowering estradiol in relation to the partner creates a biological vacuum that gets filled by the immediate needs of the child.

SPEAKER_00 8:20

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 8:21

It proves that the physiological transition into fatherhood begins months before the actual birth.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

Well, if men's bodies are this deeply wired to experience pregnancy, the way the medical system historically treated them makes absolutely no sense.

SPEAKER_02 8:35

It really doesn't.

SPEAKER_01 8:36

We see this undeniable biological reality men are physically, hormonally, and psychologically tuned in, yet for decades they were banished from the room where it actually happened.

SPEAKER_02 8:46

It's a massive historical contradiction. If we look at the historical data from the History News Network, we see a radical shift in how the medical establishment actively engineered the separation of fathers from the birth process.

SPEAKER_01 8:57

And this was during the mid-20th century.

SPEAKER_02 8:59

Yeah, mid-20th century.

SPEAKER_01 9:00

So if you're listening to this and you've ever had a kid, or you know, planned to, imagine the scenario for a new father in 1955.

SPEAKER_02 9:09

It was grim.

SPEAKER_01 9:10

By that year, 95% of American babies were born in hospitals. The intimate family-centered home birth was essentially erased.

SPEAKER_02 9:18

Just gone.

SPEAKER_01 9:19

But this shift to hospitals came with a rigid, almost industrial approach to childbirth. Hospitals in the post-war era were obsessed with efficiency and sterility. Exactly. Women were placed on what the historical sources literally describe as a conveyor belt of care. They were prepped, shaved, heavily sedated, and left completely isolated in sterile labor rooms.

SPEAKER_02 9:41

Birth was treated as a surgical procedure rather than a natural life event.

SPEAKER_01 9:45

Right. And the medical justification at the time was infection control and streamlined workflow. Doctors viewed fathers not as partners but as unsterile emotional liabilities who would just get in the way of a medical procedure.

SPEAKER_02 9:56

Which is wild to think about now.

SPEAKER_01 9:58

So men were strictly segregated. They were sent to all male waiting rooms at the far end of the hall. They were expected to just pace the floors, smoke endless cigarettes, and anxiously wait for a doctor to eventually emerge and deliver the news. It's wild to think of the mid-century hospital as an exclusive club where the bouncer is an obstetrician actively keeping the dad out of his own life-changing events.

SPEAKER_02 10:25

Right. The doctor says you're not on the list.

SPEAKER_01 10:27

Exactly. He has all these hormones shifting, his empathy centers are firing, he might be physically recovering from Cuvade syndrome, and he is told to go sit in a smoky room and read a magazine while his entire world changes down the hall.

SPEAKER_02 10:40

But you can only compress a spring so much before it snaps back.

SPEAKER_01 10:43

Very true.

SPEAKER_02 10:44

By the late 1940s and through the 1950s, men started to actively rebel against this medical authority. The tension in those waiting rooms was palpable.

SPEAKER_01 10:53

There is an incredible quote in the history source about that.

SPEAKER_02 10:56

Oh, the hatchet quote.

SPEAKER_01 10:57

Yes. From a father during this era who was so desperate to be involved that he said he wanted to quote, grab hatchets and shock through the partition that was separating him from his laboring wife.

SPEAKER_02 11:10

You can just feel the visceral desperation in that quote.

SPEAKER_01 11:13

So intense. And they didn't just complain in the waiting rooms, they forced the system to evolve. We can trace a very clear decades-long timeline here.

SPEAKER_02 11:22

Yeah. So in the 50s and 60s, men successfully lobbied to get into the labor rooms.

SPEAKER_00 11:27

Step one.

SPEAKER_02 11:28

Right. They weren't delivering the baby, but they were finally present rubbing backs, playing cards, keeping their partners anchored during the long hours of early labor.

SPEAKER_01 11:36

And then in the 1970s, they pushed their way past the final doors into the actual delivery rooms.

SPEAKER_02 11:42

Yep. And by the 1980s, their constant presence had completely transformed the hospital landscape. It forced the creation of the comfortable home-like birthing rooms that are standard today.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

They really completely changed the architecture of birth.

SPEAKER_02 11:55

If we connect this to the bigger picture, this decades-long fight wasn't just a squabble over hospital floor plans or visiting hours.

SPEAKER_01 12:02

No, it was way bigger.

SPEAKER_02 12:04

This was arguably the first major step in modern men redefining their domestic roles. They were actively fighting the medical establishment to reclaim the shared intimacy of childbirth.

SPEAKER_01 12:15

Demanding to be seen as partners.

SPEAKER_02 12:16

Exactly. They demanded to be seen not as passive bystanders or, you know, unsterile liabilities, but as essential partners from the very first moment of life.

SPEAKER_01 12:26

Men literally broke down the physical walls to get into the delivery room. But once they got in there, they hit a completely different kind of wall. A psychological one.

SPEAKER_02 12:35

Ah, yes. The mental load.

SPEAKER_01 12:38

Right. What actually happens inside a man's mind as he crosses that threshold into fatherhood? We have an article here from Psychology Today that maps out the psychological fracture.

SPEAKER_02 12:48

And then this is based on clinical interviews done in the third trimester.

SPEAKER_01 12:51

Right. Psychologists break an expectant father's transition into four distinct stages.

SPEAKER_02 12:57

The framework they use is incredibly revealing about the hidden mental load of fatherhood.

SPEAKER_01 13:01

Walk us through it.

SPEAKER_02 13:02

So the first stage is identified as the trigger moment. This is the exact second when the baby stops being an abstract biological concept and becomes undeniably real.

SPEAKER_01 13:12

Oh man, if you're a dad listening to this, you probably remember your exact trigger moment.

SPEAKER_02 13:16

Totally. For some men, it's seeing the first anatomy scan on the ultrasound monitor. For others, it's the late night conversation where they finally lock in a name.

SPEAKER_01 13:25

It represents a profound psychological tipping point where the abstract becomes concrete.

SPEAKER_02 13:30

Exactly. Then the second stage that follows is the sudden crushing awareness of responsibility.

SPEAKER_00 13:36

The panic.

SPEAKER_02 13:37

The quiet financial panic. It is the sudden urge to fix every loose hinge in the house. It is essentially the male neurological version of nesting.

SPEAKER_01 13:46

Gotta fix the sink before the baby gets here.

SPEAKER_02 13:48

Even though the baby won't use the sink for years.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

Right, exactly. So what's stage three?

SPEAKER_02 13:52

Stage three is the literal transition to fatherhood at birth, crossing that physical threshold we just talked about.

SPEAKER_01 13:59

And then stage four.

SPEAKER_02 14:00

Then there is stage four, defined as emotional conflict. It is described as an intense internal balancing act between immense excitement and frankly terrifying anxiety.

SPEAKER_01 14:12

That sounds exhausting.

SPEAKER_02 14:14

It is. And the psychological literature explicitly notes that if a man copes with this complex conflict by emotionally distancing himself, it can severely harm his long-term attachment to the child.

SPEAKER_01 14:25

But emotional distancing is the default coping mechanism society has traditionally handed to men, right? Suppressing complex feelings rather than processing them.

SPEAKER_00 14:34

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 14:35

So that brings up a massive assumption I want to challenge here.

SPEAKER_00 14:37

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 14:38

When you map all of this out on paper, the trigger moments, the crushing awareness of financial responsibility, the sleep deprivation, the internal emotional conflict, it sounds like a recipe for a breakdown.

SPEAKER_02 14:49

Does sound like a lot.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

It feels incredibly counterintuitive. Usually, when you introduce immense stress, financial panic, and sudden identity shifts, mental health plummets. With all this talk of emotional conflict and crushing responsibility, you'd assume men's mental health must absolutely tank during this period. What is the psychological counterbalance keeping these men afloat?

SPEAKER_02 15:13

This raises an important question, and it's one that researchers have rigorously tested to see if that assumption holds true. To find the answer, we have to look past small clinical interviews and examine hard longitudinal data. The Oxford Academic Journal published findings from the Hilda study.

SPEAKER_01 15:29

Which is the Household Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia survey.

SPEAKER_02 15:33

Yes, and the scale of this research is staggering. They tracked 349 new fathers over ten distinct waves of data collection.

SPEAKER_00 15:42

Wow. Over what time period?

SPEAKER_02 15:44

Spanning a full decade from 2001 to 2010, they measured their psychological distress at a baseline before the pregnancy, then during the anxious months of the pregnancy, and then track them continuously through their first year of fatherhood and beyond.

SPEAKER_01 15:56

Ten years of continuous data is the gold standard for this kind of thing. So when they looked at the timeline, did the data show a massive spike in psychological distress during that transition year?

SPEAKER_02 16:06

Surprisingly, the data showed absolutely no significant increase in psychological distress for expectant or new fathers.

SPEAKER_00 16:13

None at all. Even factoring in the sleep deprivation and the financial anxiety we just talked about?

SPEAKER_02 16:18

None. In fact, what the researchers observed over that decade was that many of these men actually showed a measurable improvement in their baseline mental health during the transition to fatherhood.

SPEAKER_00 16:28

Wait, really? It got better.

SPEAKER_02 16:30

It got better. The mechanism behind this comes down to how the human brain processes purpose.

SPEAKER_00 16:35

Okay, unpack that.

SPEAKER_02 16:37

Yes, there is sleep deprivation. Yes, there is daily friction. But stepping into the role of a father often provides a neurological anchor. It changes the brain's framing of hardship.

SPEAKER_01 16:49

Because it's not just suffering for no reason anymore.

SPEAKER_02 16:52

Exactly. Lack of sleep is no longer just meaningless suffering, it is a necessary sacrifice for a clear, profoundly meaningful goal.

SPEAKER_01 17:00

The psychological weight of the responsibility doesn't crush them, it organizes their priorities and grounds them.

SPEAKER_02 17:05

It anchors them completely.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

Well, here's where it gets really interesting because we can take that massive clinical data set, that proof of purpose acting as a buffer against stress, and map it directly onto the lived experience of modern fathers.

SPEAKER_02 17:19

Right, from the data to the real world.

SPEAKER_01 17:21

Exactly. We have three deeply personal essays in our stack that illustrate exactly what this psychological anchoring looks and feels like on the ground.

SPEAKER_02 17:29

The piece from HuffPost UK by Ashley Mills is a perfect starting point here.

SPEAKER_00 17:34

Such a powerful essay.

SPEAKER_02 17:35

It really is. He paints a very vivid, raw picture of his upbringing. He grew up as a mixed-race kid in 1980s Yorkshire.

SPEAKER_01 17:44

Which is a tough environment.

SPEAKER_02 17:45

Very in his environment, survival meant adopting a very specific version of masculinity where strength was defined entirely by silence. You survive by suppressing fear, suppressing sadness, and projecting invulnerability.

SPEAKER_01 17:58

He writes very candidly that showing emotion in his neighborhood was an open invitation to be targeted, so he locked all of it away behind a wall. But then he describes the moment he held his daughter for the very first time. She's half British Jamaican, half Swiss-Italian. He writes that the moment he held her, the noise of the world just fell silent. The word father stopped feeling like an empty or painful concept and suddenly felt whole. He experiences this realization that completely shifts his worldview, writing, and it this is a quote: presence isn't measured in hours, it's measured in attention.

SPEAKER_02 18:32

It's a beautiful distillation of how that psychological anchor of purpose actually manifests. The insights from the Becoming Mental Health Counseling source echo this perfectly. Their work specifically deals with therapy for new dads, and they point out that the daily reality of fatherhood actively dismantles those inherited narratives of stoic, silent masculinity.

SPEAKER_01 18:54

You can't be silent with a baby.

SPEAKER_02 18:55

Exactly. Men are suddenly handed a fragile life that requires them to be highly attuned, gentle, and emotionally literate.

SPEAKER_01 19:03

I love how the counseling literature frames this evolution. It isn't about losing your masculine strength, it's about fundamentally expanding it.

SPEAKER_02 19:10

Expanding is the perfect word.

SPEAKER_01 19:11

Think about the metaphors we use. For generations, masculinity was treated like a load-bearing wall. It had to be rigid, impenetrable, and unmoving to hold the house up.

SPEAKER_02 19:22

Right. And if it bent, the house collapsed.

SPEAKER_01 19:24

Exactly. But fatherhood requires a man to be a shock absorber. You can't be rigid. You have to be flexible enough to absorb the child's emotional bumps and the daily chaos without breaking.

SPEAKER_02 19:35

That's a great analogy.

SPEAKER_01 19:36

For generations, men were taught that showing emotion was like showing a chink in their armor. But fatherhood reveals that they were wearing the wrong armor all along. Vulnerability actually is the strength.

SPEAKER_02 19:48

And redefining what it means to be a protector changes the entire trajectory of a man's life.

SPEAKER_01 19:53

It changes everything.

SPEAKER_02 19:54

The essay by Tim Shawhan from Unassailable Gospel tackles this exact redefinition of purpose, using a very specific piece of pop culture as a framing device.

SPEAKER_01 20:05

Oh, the movie Mr. Holland's Opus. Yeah. Such a great film. Richard Dreyfos plays a composer who reluctantly takes a job as a high school music teacher just to pay the bills.

SPEAKER_02 20:13

Right, it's supposed to be temporary.

SPEAKER_01 20:15

His entire goal is to buy enough time to write his great symphony, his magnum opus. But life happens. He has a family, he spends decades teaching ungrateful kids, and he reaches the end of his career feeling like a massive failure because he never became a famous composer. The big promotion.

SPEAKER_02 20:40

Exactly. Society teaches men that their opus, their great defining contribution to the world, must be a professional or financial achievement. Men are terrified of being what Shohan calls Mr. Irrelevant.

SPEAKER_01 20:53

Which is a reference to the joke title given to the very last pick in the NFL draft.

SPEAKER_02 20:57

Right. The fear of being irrelevant drives men to prioritize the office over the living room.

SPEAKER_01 21:01

But Shahan completely flips the script on that anxiety. He realizes that chasing career glory while neglecting your family is missing the entire point of the assignment. He argues that being present, guiding, and raising his children to be good people was his true magnum opus all along. There's simply no such thing as an irrelevant father. Whether a father is highly engaged or entirely absent, his impact on a child's life is massive.

SPEAKER_02 21:26

Synthesizing the clinical data with these personal essays reveals a very clear pattern. Being an engaged father today is, in many ways, an active process of repair.

SPEAKER_01 21:37

Repairing the past.

SPEAKER_02 21:38

Exactly. It requires the unlearning of the toxic, rigid myths of manhood that previous generations inherited. Men are taking the abscess, the silence, or the emotional distance they might have experienced from their own fathers, and consciously replacing it with emotional literacy and intentional presence.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

It is incredibly powerful to look at all of this evidence together. We've gone from the Wild psychosomatic realities of Cuvade syndrome.

SPEAKER_02 22:04

Where men's bodies literally mirror the physical toll of pregnancy.

SPEAKER_01 22:06

Right. To the evolutionary biology of dropping a stradiol, forcing the brain to bond with the newborn. We've tracked the historical rebellion men threatening to take hatchets to the waiting room walls just to reclaim their rightful place in the delivery room.

SPEAKER_02 22:18

A literal fight to be present.

SPEAKER_01 22:20

We've broken down a decade of hard Australian data proving that the massive life shift of fatherhood doesn't break a man's mental health, but actually anchors it through purpose. And finally, we've seen how this journey rewires the very definition of masculine strength, replacing the rigid, load-bearing wall with the flexible shock absorber of vulnerability.

SPEAKER_02 22:43

It is a complete multi-layered metamorphosis. The transition into fatherhood alters a man on a cellular, societal, and deeply psychological level.

SPEAKER_01 22:53

So, what does this all mean for you? Whether you are a dad yourself, whether you are a partner to one, or whether you are just someone fascinated by the hidden mechanics of human nature, understanding this transformation fundamentally changes how we view the men in our lives.

SPEAKER_02 23:06

It really does.

SPEAKER_01 23:07

We have to stop looking at fathers as just the helpers in parenthood, you know, the secondary characters who assemble the crib and wait in the wings.

SPEAKER_02 23:14

Yeah, that outdated sitcom trope we talked about.

SPEAKER_01 23:16

Exactly. Their research proves that they are completely reshaped by the process of having a child. They are co-experiencing the genesis of a new life in ways science and society are only just beginning to truly appreciate.

SPEAKER_02 23:29

Taking all of that evidence seriously leaves us with a rather profound question to consider.

SPEAKER_00 23:34

Okay, lay it on us.

SPEAKER_02 23:35

If science, history, and psychology all definitively prove that men are biologically and emotionally wired to be profoundly transformed by early fatherhood, how drastically would our society change if we finally offered fathers the exact same length of paid parental leave as mothers, treating them as equally essential caregivers from day one?

SPEAKER_01 23:56

That is a brilliant question to end on, and exactly the kind of thought we want you to take away from this. Thank you so much for joining us on this deep dive. Until next time, keep questioning, keep learning, and we'll see you on the next one.

SPEAKER_03 24:08

Thank you so much for listening to our podcast. For more information or to become a sponsor, please go to our website at www.newberryfilmworks.com. We'll get right back to you. Stay tuned for the next episode, coming up very, very soon.