Part of the frustrating part about digging through the Father's Day stories is that I haven't had time to tackle last week's publication in The Lancet this study on male postpartum depression (reg. required) that found that at least 4 percent of men suffer from it. The really jaw-dropping stat is that kids whose father suffered from postpartum depression are twice as likely to have behavioral problems at three to five years of age, a finding that was especially strong in boys.

This is all interesting research, but what was more significant, in my mind, was the journal's call to arms with regard to research on fathers that centers on us as caregivers. Here's the conclusion to the editorial by Tytti Solantaus and Saara Salo that accompanied the original article:

Fathers are naturally motivated to have a meaningful relationship with their infant. ...

Fathers are sometimes kept away from the nursery (and from developmental theories) by the argument that men lack '?maternal instinct', understood as an inborn quality, which supposedly makes mothers more sensitive to their babies than fathers are. Feldman showed that fathers and mothers are equally capable of engaging in second-by-second synchrony in interaction with their infant. This finding is supported by Braungart-Rieker et al. Ramchandani and colleagues' study adds to this knowledge by suggesting that infants are also sensitive to their fathers. There is no longer any excuse to exclude fathers from mainstream research into infant development and psychopathology.

(Full disclosure: Greg at Daddy Types was all over this way before I was.)

Tags: dads depression medical fathers