How To Successfully Raise Intelligent Children
Many parents, especially fathers, question their ability to be good fathers and raise them properly.
But no gender is born with the ability to raise children. Instead, they both learn along the way.
However, there are biological changes in both parent's brains.
Biological fathers drop in testosterone and will never get back to the high levels as those who are fatherless.
Biological fathers also produce dopamine and oxytocin just like the mother. But also beta-endorphins which is the love hormone, when playing with his child.
I will also explain that it's not the mother that is the focal point when it comes to educating the child to be a social human being, but the dad's role throughout the world.
Unfortunately, society and women tend to focus only on the mothers and have a weird view of believing that it's the mother that is most important.
Don't get me wrong, she is important.
However, recent longitudinal research from Canada shows that leaving children at a daycare center hurts the child.
Focusing on her career and being a mother seems to damage the child when left during the first few years of infancy.
Bad communication will hurt the child
Fathers have higher empathy than non-fathers.
An aggressive mother might hurt the child indirectly.
Postnatal depression (PND) happens to both parents.
A mother who refuses to understand that the father is the one teaching the child will hurt the child's social and cognitive abilities.
Parents who don't play and solve problems with their children together in a sensitive manner will reduce the child's total brain volume.
It doesn't mean that children will end up in jail or become addicts because they might have the protective genetic makeup that makes them great people regardless of their upbringing.
But there are a few genes to look out for.
Let's dive in.
Communicating and respecting each other's roles is imperative
When future parents get along and set up and accept each other's roles during and after pregnancy.
The child will develop a healthy attachment style where it is normally curious about the world and strangers.
But if future or current parents fail to respect each other's roles.
Mothers – nurturing, caretaking, and protector
Father – protector, wage-earner, playmate and teacher
The child will either have an avoidant, resistant, ambivalent, or disorganized attachment style.
In case of avoidance, resistance, or ambivalence. The child will have a hard time leaving mother and father and is too scared to explore the world on its own. It's also common for the child to punish the parents when they reunite again after time apart.
In the case of the disorganized attachment style, the child takes on way too much risk and does not listen to instructions from the parents.
They have no problem being alone since they do not have a healthy, secure attachment style to their parents.
I have worked with a few of those.
Sensitive parents during play and joint problem-solving
When mothers don't let the father play with the child or shut down the dad's rough and tumble play it reduces the child's total brain volume.
If the father engages in rough and tumble play with the child sensitively and the mother, is cooperative.
As well as if the parents join in to solve problems together in a sensitive way.
It facilitates the child's development of white and grey brain matter.
That means the child will develop more brain cells and axons that connect them.
This means that the parents can directly impact the child's brain development by being sensitive in play and solving things together.
I would suggest that you pick your partner carefully.
Especially in the West, where men and women differ two standard deviations in terms of personality.
A consequence of equality by the looks of it.
Unhealthy mother-daughter attachment
In cases where an unhealthy attachment between the mother and daughter develops, the father can alleviate it.
The father steps in to take over the role of the mother to cover all the required roles – nurturer, caretaker, wage-earner, playmate, and teacher.
He does this to make sure all the survival and developmental bases are covered. The same goes for gay men adopting children.
It's the versatile dads who act as the primary caregivers and take over all the roles a healthy mother would ordinarily provide.
Just like in the case of gay men having children, so does the brain of the father in that his brain reshapes to nurture the child.
Something mothers do not seem to be capable of doing as far as is known and proven.
Fathers vs non-fathers
Jennifer Mascaro, Patrick Hackett, and James Rilling from Emory University recruited 88 heterosexual couples, biological fathers, and 50 non-fathers.
They took blood samples to check their baseline for testosterone and oxytocin.
Then they put them in an fMRI scanner to see what parts of the brain activated when shown pictures of adults and children with a range of emotional expressions.
They found that only images of children triggered the brain and not adults in the area of processing empathy.
They also found that Testosterone levels were lower than non-fathers but a third higher in oxytocin than non-fathers.
Even though men who become fathers get emasculated in that, they stop becoming attractive to other women through a reduction in testosterone.
They also become empathetic fathers due to becoming biological fathers.
The same does not happen in non-biological fathers.
Becoming a parent is biological for both genders.
What about antisocial behaviors and genetics
Between 40-80 percent of antisocial behavior is genetically determined and is due to parental antisocial behavior and the dopamine receptor gene (DRD2). DRD2 comes in both a risk and non-risk form. If the child has the risk version of DRD2 then the probability for antisocial behavior, and addictions, including alcohol and heroin dependency is high.
Risk-version of DRD2 alone does not do anything for daughters, but if the father has a criminal record, then there is a significant likelihood that the African American Teenage daughters have contact with the police for violent and serious delinquency.
What about alcoholics and genetics
It turns out that alcoholism is also linked to genetics.
If the biological father of a girl has been an alcoholic and she has the risk version of the dopamine transporter gene, DAT1.
The daughter is at an increased risk of becoming an alcoholic. The same is not true for boys.
This is regardless of whether the biological father living with the child or not.
Postnatal depression happens to both parents
It is easy to focus on the mother when we talk about depression since men and women see men as perpetrators and women as victims.
In parents, about 10 percent of fathers get prenatal depression, and 14 percent of mothers get it. That is comparable to an average of 7 to 8 percent of non-fathers according to Karen-Leigh Edward.
Remember
Both parents must find a suitable partner who can communicate and understand that the hardest relationship is between women and men.
By the looks of it.
Both genders seem to not understand that men and women have different brains that focus on different things and therefore have completely different schemas.
It led to cognitive friction in most dialogs. Understanding that you see the world differently and respecting that will go a long way.
Also knowing that you play completely different roles as parents is crucial for the development and mental health of your future children.
Mothers need to understand that the father plays a crucial role in children becoming good social human beings with the ability to form good relationships as adults.
If we take this evidence into the workplace, we can see that fathers are just as important as mothers to their children.
We can also sort of infer that children who do not have secure attachments to their parents are more likely to be bad managers, aka toxic managers.
That's it for this week's "Feedback Loop" newsletter.
See you next Saturday.
More resources
“Why We Love” by Dr. Anna Machin
“The Life Of Dad” by Dr. Anna Machin
“The Master and His Emissary” by Dr. Iain McGilchrist
“The Matter With Things” by Dr. Iain McGilchrist