We all know that women’s bodies
change when they are pregnant but how about men’s? I got a really wonderful
email from a guy who writes:
Dear Mr. Dad, my wife is
pregnant and I’ve started putting on weight to. I have also been having
nose bleeds and headaches, what’s wrong with me?
Well in a word there is really
nothing wrong with you. Given that you’re not pregnant a lot of what you
are going through when your wife is expecting is going to be completely
psychological. But as you found out there are some occasional physical
symptoms to. In fact according to some studies as many as 90% of dads to be
in this country experience what is called Couvades syndrome, it comes from
the French word to hatch.
Some people also call is
sympathetic pregnancy and the symptoms are often pretty much the same as
those that your wife has been experiencing for the last few months. Mood
swings, food cravings, weight gains but some are a little bit stranger
especially for guys like toothaches or headaches or itching or nose bleeds
or sometimes even cysts.
Couvades symptoms or the sympathy
pregnancy symptoms usually start cropping up somewhere around the third
month of pregnancy or so and they taper off a little bit and then they can
also pick up right again a month or two right before the baby is born.
Almost always, almost always, they mysteriously disappear as soon as the
baby is born.
No one is really quite sure why
guys get these symptoms but there are a lot of theories out there. The
first one is that as men we are programmed socially or biologically, you can
take your pick, to try to protect our families and to keep them from harm –
it’s that old provider, protector thing and since we can’t really do a whole
lot to ease the discomfort and pain that are wives are experiencing during
pregnancy our brains come up with this really great idea of trying to ease
her pain by taking some of it on ourselves.
This is especially true for
expecting dads that feel kind of responsible for maybe kind of getting her
into all of this in the first place. Another theory is that some expectant
dads who develop Couvades are feeling jealous and left out and are kind of
subconsciously trying to get people to pay attention to them.
It’s also possible that expectant
dad symptoms are a way of announcing to the world that they are of a father,
hey hey pay attention to me to. Some recent researches has shown that there
may actually be some hormonal reasons for men’s pregnancy symptoms – we all
know about how women’s hormones go up and down in the course of the
pregnancy, right?
Well a fascinating from Canada
show that husbands of pregnant wives that their hormones are moving up and
down exactly in tandem with their wives. This can explain I think a lot of
why expectant dads find themselves paying a little bit more attention to
children in the months before there are born. It also explains why there is
a huge drop in testosterone right after the birth.
It’s the same thing that happens
to women, they have a drop in testosterone as well. That is a kind of thing
that maybe its mother nature’s way of keeping us a little bit closer to home
so we can establish a bond with our kids.
If you’ve got a comment or
question that you would like to get the dad’s perspective about you can drop
me a line through the Baby Talk Radio.com website or you can visit my
website,
http://www.mrdad.com. You can send me email from there and you can find
out about the various books that I’ve written starting with the Expectant
Father going onto the first year and the toddler years. I’ve got a podcast
for dads, a daily podcast called The Daddy Cast and a brand new DVD that’s
called Toolbox for New Dads. You can also subscribe to my monthly
newsletter, the Mister Dad.com newsletter. You can do all of that at
http://www.mr.dad.com.
