SOFTLY, SOFTLY … HE’LL FINALLY UNDERSTAND THE OPPOSITE SEX
TIRED of trying to get your man to understand your feelings? Having a daughter could finally help him to see life from your point of view.
Whether it’s a boy or a girl, becoming a father reshapes a dad’s brain. When a mewling newborn is placed in their arms, men experience a sharp dip in their levels of the male hormone testosterone and a hike in the female bonding hormone oxytocin.
But that ‘softening’ effect is prolonged and intensified if the little baby in his arms is a girl, as he spends more time talking to and trying to interpret the emotions of his daughters.
In a study last month, more than 50 fathers were given digital recording devices to track their interactions with their toddler sons and daughters. When the conversations were analysed, it was found that dads with daughters spent about 60per cent more time responding attentively to their girls than they did to boys.
They also spent five times as long singing and talking more openly about emotions such as sadness, according to the research in the journal Behavioural Neuroscience.
Psychotherapist Phillip Hodson explains: ‘As a male, you have to learn a different script when you have a daughter. Girls push a different set of buttons in a man.
‘While fathers may get locked in physical power struggles with their boys, they have to learn to negotiate with daughters.’
When a man becomes a father to a girl, he learns much more about what it means to be a woman, according to family psychologist Emma Citron.
‘A daughter teaches a man about what it means to be a girl in a way that a sibling, wife or mother doesn’t,’ she says. ‘Even if you’re in a relationship with a woman, it’s not the same as having a vulnerable little girl who relies on you for everything.
‘With a son, a father might be more inclined to treat him like a mini-me. But when he has a daughter, a man has to step outside himself.
‘He’s got to change his perspective and outlook. It challenges him to step outside the male norms he has been brought up with.’
RELAX, SHE’LL TAKE GOOD CARE OF YOU
You may feel that your teenaged daughter’s moodiness and mind games are taking years off your life. But according to a study of parents in Poland, dads end up living longer if they have daughters.
According to research, published in the American Journal of Human Biology, a man’s life expectancy increased by six months for every daughter he had, while having sons made no difference.
This was probably due to girls being more attentive carers in old age than boys.
Phillip Hodson says: ‘It may be that having a daughter is a de-stressor or relaxant.
‘As target-driven as fathers tend to be with boys, having girls may give dads time to enjoy the moment, rather than seeing everything as a means to an end. So their hearts could come under less pressure.’
Mums, however, lose around seven months for every son or daughter they have, because of the physical toll motherhood takes on them.
YOU’LL BE A MORE GENEROUS BOSS
If YOU’RE an employee hoping for a pay rise, you’d better hope your boss has a daughter. Having a girl makes male executives less stingy than if they have sons.
The bad news is that all bosses tend to tighten their belts after becoming parents, according to a study in the journal Administrative Science Quarterly.
researchers tracking the pay given out by male chief executives at more than 10,000 Danish firms found that they paid £70 less on average to their workers after becoming fathers.
This is probably because men unconsciously felt they needed to tighten their company’s — and their own — purse-strings to provide for their own dependants first.
However, when the scientists looked more closely, they found that most of the cuts were made by fathers of boys.
Dads who had daughters didn’t actually drop wages. Instead, they kept them level, possibly because having girls led them to develop more ‘care-taking tendencies’.
And if you are a woman looking for a new job, find yourself a boss who is a father to girls.
When CEOS have daughters, researchers have found that women’s wages rise more in line with those of men.
If a male boss’s first child is a girl, the gender pay gap closes by 2.8per cent. If a second daughter comes along, it narrows a further 0.4per cent. However, having boys didn’t make any difference to the pay gap, according to the study by Aalborg university in Denmark.
When there are pay rises to be dished out, better-educated women have been found to benefit the most, probably because they’re the sort of women the male bosses want their own daughters to become.
Leadership psychologist Averil Leimon of White Water Women, which has researched how females are treated in top corporate environments, says that having a daughter can help men see where there has been inequality in the workplace in a way they didn’t before. ‘Having a daughter, and seeing life from her point of view, may help some men see what is invisible until then.’
SHE COULD EVEN SWING YOUR VOTE
THINK you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Tory? If you become a dad to a daughter, you could find that your sympathies start swinging the other way.
According to research by the university of Warwick, dads who have girls are more likely to start voting for Left-wing parties almost as soon as their daughters are born.
The study, published in the review of Economics and Statistics, was based on data from the British