Ordered logistic regression was used to predict men's self-reported hours spent in direct physical childcare (2009) from baseline T (z-scored) among men who were single nonfathers in 2005, with all models meeting the parallel regression assumption based on the Brant test. Multiple linear regression was used to predict ΔT based on partnership and fatherhood status changes between 2005 and 2009, controlling for sleep quality and self-reported stress, among men who were single nonfathers at baseline. Paternal caregiving was assessed via the question, "How much time do you usually spend providing physical care to your children on a daily basis?
Some fathers don't respond to parenthood with the same level of Testosterone suppression, which can lead to increased feelings of frustration and aggression toward the child. It would also be advantageous to consider these measures across a longer period of time to determine whether an alternate explanation is at work here—in particular whether the spillover identified was due to a stable or transient rise in testosterone among mothers. Including such families would add much to our knowledge regarding hormones and parent-child relationship quality. As a result the child who reports on parent-child closeness may be less informed of the problems the mother is having with the father, making the woman’s perceptions of the marriage weakly correlated with the child’s view.
In prior research conducted in two neighboring cultural groups in Tanzania, fathers in the population in which paternal care is the cultural norm had lower T, whereas this was not found among fathers in the group in which paternal care is absent (20). Together, these findings provide longitudinal support for the hypothesis that interacting with a dependent child suppresses T (20, 22, 24). Once these men entered stable partnerships and became new fathers, they subsequently experienced a large decline in T, which was greater than the comparably modest declines seen in single nonfathers during the same period. Partnered fathers are included for visual comparison but were not part of the regression analyses. (B) Between-group changes in AM and PM T values between 2005 and 2009 based on partnering and parenting status. We next tested whether men who became newly partnered new fathers during the period of follow-up experienced a greater decline in T relative to men who remained single nonfathers between baseline and follow-up. Consistent with the results presented below, a greater proportion of partnered men and fathers had T below the median.
Testosterone Levels depend on a wide variety of factors, such as age, activity level, diet, and lifestyle. Unfortunately, our data do not allow us to identify long-term patterns in hormone levels. Younger families are less stable (more likely to separate or divorce), have many more demands to cope with (infant and child care), and possess fewer resources (e.g. income and savings). These emotional attributes may make high testosterone women feel less capable in their motherly role and more vulnerable to outside influences—such as spillover—compared to low testosterone women. Youth Report of Father-Child Closeness as a Moderator of the Mother Testosterone - Mother-Child Closeness Linkages
We focus on within family processes such as the way particular family dyads, like the marital dyad, may affect the relationship between parents and their children or the way in which the father-child dyad affects the mother-child dyad. Because of this it is important to understand the extent to which children might be at risk for having poor relationships with their high testosterone fathers. And, when fathers report low levels of intimacy with their children, high testosterone women have a poorer relationship with their children. However, the association between mothers’ testosterone and mother-child closeness appears to be influenced by the quality of two other family relationships. Studies have shown that men with higher testosterone levels tend to be more involved in parenting activities, such as feeding, playing, and soothing their children. The paper, "The intersection between alexithymia, testosterone reactivity, and coparenting in fathers predicts child’s prosocial behavior," was authored by Osnat Zamir, Noa Oved, Ohad Szepsenwol, Roi Estlein, Jessica L. Borelli, Douglas A. Granger, and Dana Shai.
During pregnancy, reduced testosterone may lead expectant fathers to take better care of their pregnant counterparts, for example, by being physically gentle or creating comfortable places for their partners to rest. Researchers speculate that this decrease in testosterone leads to more caregiving behaviors during pregnancy and after childbirth. Programs like paid paternity leave fundamentally affect the amount of time fathers spend with their infants, which may have biological consequences. As of 2022, 63% of the world’s countries guarantee fathers the opportunity to take paid paternity leave (Peck, 2023); however, many countries, including the United States, still do not guarantee leave for either parent, let alone fathers. In addition, both mothers and fathers should be aware of the signs of postpartum depression and be willing to seek support and care, Saxbe said.
The Parenting Stress Index (PSI; Abidin, 2012) Role Restriction is a subscale of the PSI, a self-report measure of perceived stress from parenting. During the novelty task, an assistant wearing a costume (e.g., "Shrek," first parent-child interaction, "Sulley" from Monsters, Inc., second interaction) entered the room and gradually approached the child within 2 feet while delivering a standard script. During caregiving, parents were asked to undress the infant, change the infants’ diaper, and redress the infant. Across several samples of varying risk, ReACCT Noncompliance scores demonstrated reliability and correlated with measures of abuse risk (CAPI, AAPI-2) and harsh and abusive physical discipline (Rodriguez, 2016). Because the child may have been noncompliant, the parent can remain "stuck" in a scene until the child complies; thus, the parent provides 20 total discipline responses across the 12 scenes. Parents are asked to select from 16 possible options how they would respond to the child’s compliance or noncompliance; some parent responses are adaptive (receiving positive weights) versus maladaptive (receiving negative weights)—e.g., physical and psychological aggression. In each scene, the parent is told they provided an instruction to the child to get ready to leave home and the child is reported to be either compliant or noncompliant.
Understanding the effects of Testosterone on parenting habits can give us clues on how to improve father-child relationships. As a result, children with high testosterone mothers are more emotionally dependent on their fathers, in this case using them as a barometer to set the level of intimacy for the mother-child bond. Conversely, low testosterone mothers are able to maintain strong bonds with their child even when faced with negative marital or father-child relationships. That is, when fathers are not satisfied with their marriage, mothers with high testosterone have a poor relationship with their offspring (Figure 1). For example, younger children reported more intimate relationships with their fathers compared with older children, and boys reported being closer to their fathers than girls.
Additionally, the study design does not allow for definitive causal conclusions regarding the links between alexithymia, coparenting quality, and children’s prosocial behavior. Still, these longitudinal associations were evident only if fathers displayed average or high testosterone increases after a prenatal stressful parenting task," the study authors concluded. "The current study illuminates a mechanism by which the interplay between alexithymia and testosterone reactivity in expectant fathers forecasts the child’s prosocial behavior at the age of two years. For example, children experiencing harsh discipline with higher testosterone levels were more likely to engage in aggressive behavior (Chen, Raine, & Granger, 2018). Another potential direction for research pertains to intergenerational cycles of aggressive behavior, namely how parental testosterone levels may contribute to abuse risk that translates into more aggressive behavior in the next generation. Notable among our findings was a robust relation between the analog task of frustration tolerance and fathers’ testosterone levels nearly two years later, underscoring that constructs of interest in this field should develop additional indirect assessment approaches (Camilo et al., 2016).

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