Becoming a dad changes men's brains (opens in new tab)

Exaggerating a bit, I felt like my old self was dead and I just happened to somehow have inherited his memories.

But a more concrete thing: While before I might have been saddened about bad things happening to kids, like any normal person would, after having kids myself I experience an stronger reaction:

I get almost physically ill when I hear about kids getting harmed.

As a dad, I have a strong compulsion to tell (bad) dad jokes. Ideally puns. All the time. I didn't used to be this way.

Becoming a dad made me a sensitive snowflake crybaby :)

There were a lot of days on which I cried more than the baby. Diagnosed with anxiety disorder, but then they said it comes with ADHD and probably has little to do with the baby.

> As many as one in 10 men will experience paternal postnatal depression or anxiety. The symptoms often look different in dads—anger or sudden outbursts

Oh well.

Fascinating how things that are most relevant to continuing your species are the things with the hardest coded behaviors.

Becoming a dad simultaneously made me more empathetic (seeing a little person from the beginning for all they are) but also more impatient (fewer hours in the day), but beyond that not much. Given the notoriety about some of the techniques referenced in this article [0] curious if others notice anything more consistent.

0: https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/140/8/e53/4032512

I have 3 teenagers and this claim seems plainly obvious to me.

Do any of these studies account for new parent sleep deprivation?

The first born defenitely changed me somehow. As if some evolution gene was suddenly ordering me "You will protect this with everything in your power!" The second born, not so much. Perhaps the brain was already settled in the right configuration :)

Read the whole article expecting it to explain how it would have changed, was disappointed to not read that.

Becoming a new parent I knew I'd sleep less and be tired all the time but what I didn't know was simultaneously how much energy I'd have to keep going. It's almost like low grade, months long adrenalin rush. Very strange.

learning or doing anything "changes your brain". that's how learning works.

i hate this phrase and how it's generally used for scare-mongering headlines.

the only thing that I noticed that changed in me was my sudden understanding of what "fear" really is.

I had not experienced fear prior to becoming a father. The thought of one of my children being ... i'm not even going to say anything more. Use your imagination. That kind of thing scares me so much more than it did before I was a father.

About 2-3 months after the birth of my first child, I started “seeing” the baby’s face vividly whenever I would close my eyes, when I was falling asleep but other times during the day as well. It was not a conscious-voluntary imagination, more like an artifact of my brain rewiring priority numero uno. Our second child is now 3 months old and I have not experienced similar, perhaps because the brain changes already settled down before his birth.

Iliza Shlesinger has a great bit about how men discover that "woman is person too" when they have a baby daughter.

Best not go overboard on this whole thing about fathers and increased empathy. Elon Musk has a father, after all. So did Donald Trump.

The Roblox CEO has children. Magical universal father empathy is clearly not working out there, or he would shut down his business and give any remaining money to charities.

A previous discussion on this topic which doesn't require a subscription to read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47820046

No wonder Magnus lost 4 times in a row.