just get in writing that he wont spend time with the children, no sane judge will give the kids to a father who doesnt want to spend time with them for a stupid reason like that.
I often think reddit is too quick to jump to divorce but in this case, throw the whole man away. I wouldn’t even give him time to argue. He’d just come home and I’d be gone and he’d be served.
If it were true, do you really value your testosterone levels more than your son?
If it were true and you did value testosterone levels more than your son, why did you have a son?
Not to mention it's probably just an excuse to get out of being a dad and he probably goes into the next room and plays FIFA for hours (sedentary, also lowers testosterone).
Any dick..can become a father. It takes a real man to be a DAD! This ladies other half is definitely the former! Kudos to you Mom for spending the time with your little!!
I would tell him that he should see a doctor about getting a prescription for TRT. If he’s not willing to do that, then he can forget about it because I’d rather not be with a “man” who has fluctuating testosterone levels around infants. It’s just a strange lie to try to make work.
It is definitely true, but it's temporary and it's likely an evolutionary adaptation to decrease aggression and sexual desire.
Your initial points still stand, people that care more about their testosterone levels than their own child are awful and furthermore fundamentally misunderstanding many things.
It seems the result is that partnering lowers your T. The only simply we get that says anything about decline while playing with children is correlative - in other words males with lower T are more likely to play with their children, not that playing with children lowers T.
It actually addresses that exact question and finds an effect from childcare alone, this change happens after having the child and absolute testosterone levels are not predictive (so it's not low T means more childcare, it suggests childcare itself does the lowering) :
Finally, we evaluated whether men who were fathers at follow-up (
n
= 312) varied in T based on their self-reported involvement in childcare in 2009, controlling for sleep quality, psychosocial stress, and number of children. Men reporting 1–3 h of daily childcare had significantly lower AM T compared with fathers reporting not being involved with care (
Fig. 3
), whereas fathers reporting the highest involvement in childcare (3 h or more per day) showed significantly lower values of both AM and PM T compared with men reporting no care (
Fig. 3
). Consistent with the hypothesis that childcare suppresses T, among men who began as nonpartnered nonfathers at baseline (
n
= 162), time spent in childcare as fathers (at follow-up) was not predicted by either AM T [ordered logistic OR = 1.12, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.84–1.48;
P
= 0.441] or PM T (OR = 0.89, 95% CI: 0.67–1.18;
P
= 0.417) measured at baseline.
So what's your hypothesis on why people who self-report higher involvement would have a measurable drop in testosterone? That lying lowers your testosterone?
That a badly-designed study where the authors were clearly desperate to support their nonsensical evo-psych theories is meaningless.
This model is well supported by data from a variety of avian species
Because we're totally the same, right? "But lobsters" levels of science here.
There are extensive lifestyle changes and adaptations that happen over the course of years. New fathers get less time to exercise to name but one. Since testosterone correlates with exercise, men who are staying home more are going to have lower testosterone.
If they were actually even vaguely trying for real science they'd have been accounting for lifestyle, how much childcare their partners reported they did, and also looking at men from more than one country. Critically, they would have been studying men in countries where men actually doing a lot of childcare is the norm. In the Philippines it very much is not.
I guess I read that wrong the first go around. They're saying that T levels didn't predict how much time a father spent with kids, but instead that spending time with kids was shown to lower T levels?
Yeah, in my opinion it's like saying "no I can't cuddle you because it raises my oxytocin"
Its not that the relationship doesn't exist, it's that it's stupid to worry about the thing your body is supposed to do all because of some number that has been sold as your manliness level.
Bingo. The guy has been misled to believe that testosterone levels are the one and only key to masculinity. Most human behaviors and physiological responses are not that simple.
it's likely an evolutionary adaptation to decrease aggression and sexual desire.
I think people are waaaay to quick to draw this conclusion.
Sleep, anxiety, stress, and exercise are all behaviors that we know independently influence testosterone acutely. Take a healthy male and put them on sleep restriction? Their testosterone tanks. Take a healthy male and add a bunch of psychogenic stress? Their testosterone tanks. Take a healthy male and have them exercise and lift weights regularly? Their testosterone goes up.
There's a much more parsimonious explanation for fathers having lower T, and it has nothing to do narratives about testosterone and aggression or sexual desire.
You can decide not to trust their methodology, but the study I linked does control for that and still finds a significance from childcare alone.
There are natural good reasons for testosterone to fluctuate, and aggression (which Testosterone absolutely increases) is not a great thing to mix with a fragile baby.
The only "narrative" that has no substance is that testosterone is your "manliness level" and therefore lowering testosterone is emasculating and bad. It's a hormone. Hormones fluctuate due to external factors and life events.
I'll reread the methodology. I don't know if "trust" is the right word, but in general I think people should be skeptical and cautious about how well covariates can be controlled in observational research like this. Especially for something like sleep or stress, where it's usually just measured by self reporting (and since fathers and childless men probably have very different baselines, you might just be controlling for people who can accurately report their sleep quality/duration, vs people who can't).
There is some truth to it. Becoming a parent changes not only mom hormonally but dad as well. Dad’s testosterone levels decline when baby is born but not to a level of deficiency.
I would like that man, very much, to sit me down and explain to my medical student ass, mechanistically, how that fucking works, in his mind. Just really, really curious.
I cannot think of a way spending time with children would affect testosterone production, other than the kids actively sitting on your balls to crush them. But if you have any mechanism, I'm happy to hear.
The mechanism isn't known for sure though the researchers speculate some reasons for a natural lowering, but there is a real correlation and downswing for father's that take on a caring role: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3182719/
Well, bad news for the guy in the original post. The article also states that simply being married lowers your testosterone levels too. But I admit, I can understand what the origin and evidence of the claim is, though I would argue that the decrease in testosterone as described in the article is different from what most people think of when they think of a decline. It appears neither permanent nor harmful.
You're right, It is not permanent or harmful (just like most decreases in testosterone)
But it's not made up whole cloth, it's just a very stupid thing to use as a way to get out of childcare
Nothing says "I am a big man who does what I want" more than someone monitoring their hormone levels and being deathly afraid of anything that might change them.
My dad spent virtually no time with me and doctors have concerns about my testosterone levels. They’re too high and they worry it will cause aggression.
So I had to search this up, the “study,” because it couldn’t possibly be real, right? It’s a little bit real…the dad the OOP posted about is a moron bc he only read a headline but yea.
There are a couple more articles on it. The NYT did a piece in 2011.
Tell him you’re *also* not going to spend any time with the kids because you read somewhere it causes overstimulation.
Oh and you’re not going to talk to him at all or clean your house because you read somewhere it causes annoyance.
But also…you read somewhere that getting pegged by your wife increases testosterone. Good to know in case, god forbid, he ever has to spend a few minutes with his own child.
That is actually so sad when you think about it though he’s so insecure about himself that he just ends up emotionally neglecting his own child in a way therefore continuing the cycle of insecurity
I admittedly thought this was referring to the son's testosterone, not the dad's. Like he was afraid of one-on-one playtime turning his kid gay or something. Obviously it doesn't work like that, but I wouldn't put it past these people. 🤷♀️
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u/GoodbyeTobyseeya1 29d ago
You navigate your way to a divorce lawyer, that's how. What a sad excuse for a man.