How the Paternal Brain Is Wired by Pregnancy

June is Men’s Health Month.

Each year we are reminded of the importance of exercise, healthy eating, cancer screenings, blood pressure checks, and regular medical care. These are all important. Men continue to die younger than women and experience higher rates of many serious health problems.

But what if one of the most powerful interventions for men’s health costs nothing? What if one of the most important factors affecting men’s health is something we rarely discuss?

What if it is simply being seen?

Not being noticed for what a man produces. Not being valued for what he provides. Not being appreciated only when something breaks and needs fixing. But being seen as a human being whose wellbeing matters in its own right.

Many men grow up absorbing a simple message:

Provide. Protect. Perform. Work hard. Solve problems. Take care of others.

These expectations are not entirely negative. In many ways, they help create responsible fathers, dependable husbands, loyal friends, and productive citizens. The willingness of men to shoulder responsibility has helped build families, communities, and nations.

Yet there is a hidden danger when a man begins to believe that his worth depends entirely on his usefulness.

Over the years, I have sat with countless men who felt valued for what they provided but rarely valued simply for who they were. They were appreciated when they solved problems, earned a paycheck, fixed something that was broken, or carried a burden that others preferred not to carry. Yet many struggled to believe that they mattered apart from those contributions.

One of the healthiest messages a man can hear is this:

You have value not only in your doing, but in your being.

Your worth is not limited to what you produce, provide, fix, earn, or accomplish. You matter because you are a human being. Simple as that.

Ironically, when men lose sight of this truth, the very qualities that make them valuable to others can begin to damage their health. The man who prides himself on being dependable postpones medical care. The man who always puts others first quietly moves himself to the bottom of his own list of priorities. The man who never wants to be a burden carries struggles alone long after he should have asked for help.

Over time, this pattern can become dangerous. Many men delay seeking help, ignore symptoms, and continue carrying burdens long after they should have asked for assistance. Not because they are foolish or incapable of expressing emotion, but because responsibility has become so central to their identity that caring for themselves begins to feel selfish.

The irony is that many of the qualities we most admire in men can also become health risks: duty, sacrifice, persistence, self-reliance, and endurance. These qualities build strong families and strong communities. Yet when taken too far, they can contribute to burnout, isolation, chronic stress, and declining health.

This is one reason loneliness has emerged as such an important public health concern.

When people think about men’s health, they often imagine heart disease, cancer, or diabetes. Far fewer think about loneliness. Yet loneliness affects physical health, emotional wellbeing, sleep, stress levels, and even longevity.

A man can be surrounded by people and still feel unseen. He can be appreciated for what he does while feeling invisible for who he is. He can spend years helping others while quietly wondering whether anyone would notice if he needed help himself.

As a therapist, I have often been struck by how many men carry tremendous responsibility while receiving very little emotional support. They are expected to be strong, yet even the strongest men are strengthened when someone recognizes that they are valued not only for what they do, but for who they are.

The encouraging news is that offering this kind of support does not require special training, expensive programs, or professional expertise. Some of the most powerful interventions are available to all of us.

A phone call. A conversation. An invitation. A friendship. A community group. A neighbor who checks in. A son who asks his father how he is really doing. A wife who notices her husband’s burdens. A friend who reaches out after a divorce, a job loss, or the death of a loved one.

These moments may seem small, but they communicate something profoundly important:

You matter.

Not because of what you provide. Not because of what you accomplish. Not because of what you can do for others. You matter because you are a human being.

During Men’s Health Month, we should certainly encourage men to exercise, eat well, get checkups, and take care of their bodies. But perhaps we should also remember something equally important.

People thrive when they feel seen. People thrive when they feel valued. People thrive when they feel connected.

And sometimes the best intervention for men’s health is simply helping men know that their wellbeing matters too.

So here is a simple challenge.

Today, let a man in your life know that you value him for more than what he does. Not simply for the paycheck he earns, the problems he solves, or the responsibilities he carries.

Let him know that his presence matters. That his life matters. That he matters.

You may never fully know the impact of those few words. But for some men, hearing them may be far more powerful than you imagine.

Men Are Good.

In the first two parts of this series, we looked at how victim thinking begins inside the individual and then expands into group identity. But what happens when entire institutions begin to organize themselves around victimhood?

That’s where grievance becomes power.

1. The Moral Economy of Victimhood

In the modern West, compassion has quietly become a form of currency.

Institutions, universities, NGOs, the media, and even governments, now operate within what might be called a moral economy of victimhood.
In this new economy, empathy and funding flow toward those who can most convincingly demonstrate oppression.

The logic is simple: the more you suffer, the more moral authority you hold. The more powerless you can portray your group to be, the more influence you gain in return.

You can see this dynamic play out in grant proposals, corporate campaigns, and media coverage. Funding often depends not on measurable solutions but on the ability to frame problems in moral language, highlighting disparity rather than achievement, grievance rather than growth.

The result? Victimhood becomes not just a feeling, but a strategy.
Suffering increasingly serves as a source of both moral status and political influence.

2. Academia and the Reward System of Grievance

Nowhere is this more visible than in academia, the place where our culture’s moral vocabulary is often created.

For decades, research funding and prestige have favored studies that interpret outcomes through a single lens: oppression.
Complex human realities - biological, psychological, or cultural, are reduced to a simple moral story of oppressor and oppressed.

Entire academic fields, such as gender studies and critical race theory, were built upon this. Once that framework takes hold, questioning it becomes taboo.

Imagine a young researcher who dares to suggest that both sexes face unique disadvantages, or that cultural differences, not just power structures, shape human experience. She might find her proposal quietly rejected, her reputation marked by whispers of insensitivity.

In such an environment, victimhood isn’t healed; it’s institutionalized.
Students absorb the message that identity determines virtue, and that moral worth depends not on integrity or truth, but on the ability to claim injury.

A university should be a place of inquiry. But recently it has lost that focus and has instead become a place of orthodoxy—where compassion is regulated by ideology and empathy is distributed according to approved categories.

3. The Media’s Addiction to Outrage

If academia produces the ideas, the media amplifies them, because outrage sells.

The attention economy rewards stories that trigger moral emotion: anger, fear, and compassion. Nuance doesn’t do it; indignation does.

Algorithms are designed to feed us what keeps us engaged, and nothing engages quite like outrage.
Stories of cooperation or quiet heroism ​can’t compete with the tales of harm and injustice​ that flood our feeds.

Open your phone and you’ll see it: every scroll brings a new crisis, every headline a new wound. The world begins to look like a place where kindness is rare and cruelty is everywhere.

The result is a distorted picture of reality, one where suffering feels everywhere, danger feels constant, and grievance becomes the default tone.

What we call “news” has become a daily reminder of victimhood, both ours and everyone else’s.

The tragedy is that people begin to mistake being informed for being outraged. And outrage, unlike understanding, never satisfies, it only hungers for more.

4. Politics and the Management of Grievance

Politicians have learned the same lesson the media did: grievance wins.

If you can persuade people they’ve been wronged, you can promise to make it right.
Grievance creates loyalty; resentment keeps voters engaged.

A politician tells a group, “You’ve been ignored, disrespected, treated unfairly, and I’m the only one who truly sees you.” It’s a powerful seduction because it flatters pain and transforms anger into belonging.

The problem is that actual solutions end grievances, and grievances win elections.
So the incentives are backward. Leaders talk endlessly about oppression but rarely about empowerment.

Programs that teach responsibility, resilience, or reconciliation don’t attract headlines because they reduce the drama that keeps power flowing. It’s much easier to promise protection than to foster strength.

Grievance politics is emotional theater. Everyone plays their part: the savior, the villain, and the wounded crowd that must never fully recover.

5. The Bureaucracy of Suffering

Billions of dollars circulate each year through organizations devoted to “awareness,” “equity,” and “inclusion.”
Much of this work began with compassion. But bureaucracies, once born, have only one instinct: survival.

And survival depends on the continued existence of victims.

Consider a government department or NGO whose mission is to “end inequality.” If inequality were ever truly solved, its funding would disappear. So the structure itself quietly depends on the persistence of the problem it claims to fight.

The logic is tragic but predictable: progress is never acknowledged because acknowledging it would dissolve the moral and financial justification for the institution’s existence.

It’s why so many awareness campaigns never seem to conclude, because closure would mean unemployment for the cause.
And so, the machinery of compassion becomes the machinery of dependency.​ Groups are continually forced to find new ways of being oppressed. Think feminism.

6. Cultural Fragility and the Loss of Dialogue

When victimhood becomes institutionalized, even ordinary disagreement is reinterpreted as violence.

In universities, students are taught that words can wound like weapons.
Media outlets describe emotional discomfort as “harm.”
Corporations issue apologies not for actions, but for feelings, often their own employees’ feelings about what someone else said.

I recently spoke with a professor who described how his classroom discussions had changed. “Ten years ago,” he said, “a controversial topic was an invitation to think. Now it’s an invitation to panic.”

That’s the new mindset: being offended is seen as caring.

The result is a culture of moral hypersensitivity. Dialogue disappears because truth is no longer the goal; moral innocence is.
People now seem more concerned with avoiding offense than helping those who suffer.

And when a society becomes more afraid of words than of lies, conversation itself begins to die.

7. Reclaiming Resilience

There’s another way, and it begins with remembering what resilience actually is.

Resilience isn’t hardness; it’s flexibility. It’s the ability to bend without breaking, to learn from challenge rather than be defined by it.
When people are taught that they are capable rather than fragile, they rise.

In therapy, I’ve seen men and women rediscover strength by reframing their pain: not as evidence of unfairness, but as proof of their own strength and endurance. Societies can do the same.

The goal is not to give up on empathy. It is to remember that compassion works best when it is balanced with accountability, and justice works best when it leaves room for forgiveness.​

It’s time to reward growth again. To celebrate not who has suffered most, but who has healed best.
To honor the people and institutions that lift others into agency rather than locking them into helplessness.

Closing Reflection

Victimhood once served as a cry for justice. It awakened conscience, stirred compassion, and helped societies correct real wrongs.

But today it has evolved into a system of rewards, emotional, social, and financial. The wounded are now measured, not mended.
And as any therapist will tell you, you can’t heal by staying inside the story of your wound.

The danger is not the wound itself. The danger is becoming so identified with it that we can no longer imagine life beyond it. A culture that keeps replaying its injuries can’t discover what health feels like.

The way forward is not to silence victims, but to remind them, and all of us, that we are more than what hurt us.
Agency is the antidote. Gratitude is the medicine.
And truth, even when uncomfortable, is the only lasting cure.

Because in the end, a healthy society is not one without pain, but one that knows how to grow through it.

Men Are Good.

 

For many years, people have asked me essentially the same question:

“Where can I find a simple explanation of how men heal?”

The answer has never been easy.

Over the last three decades I have written books, articles, blog posts, newsletters, and given countless interviews and workshops. The ideas are scattered across many places.

Recently I decided it was time to gather them into one place.

Today I’m pleased to introduce a new website:

TheWayMenHeal.com

The site is not a blog and it is not a therapy website.

Instead, it is an attempt to clearly explain many of the core ideas that have emerged from my work with men, women, boys, girls, grief, trauma, and healing over the past 35 years.

You’ll find sections on:

• Why men’s emotions are often difficult to see

• Action-oriented emotional processing

• Shame and dignity

• Solitude

• Grief

• The masculine side of healing

• Research related to men’s emotional lives

• A glossary of important concepts

• Frequently asked questions

One of the things I have learned over the years is that many people genuinely care about men but often misunderstand how men experience emotional pain.

Men’s healing frequently occurs in ways that are easy to overlook. We tend to notice tears, talking, and emotional disclosure. We are less likely to notice action, responsibility, service, problem solving, solitude, ritual, and purpose.

Yet these pathways are often central to men’s emotional lives.

My hope is that this site will serve as a practical and accessible resource for anyone who wants to better understand men, whether that person is a therapist, parent, spouse, partner, teacher, researcher, or simply someone trying to make sense of their own experience.

The site is still growing and will continue to expand over time.

I invite you to explore it and let me know what you think.

TheWayMenHeal.com

I hope it proves useful.

Here’s an excerpt from the boys and play sectionn
— Tom

Boys, Play, and Development

Research on play, movement, and rough-and-tumble interaction helps explain why boys often need active, physical, socially negotiated forms of learning and emotional regulation.

Many boys learn through their bodies before they learn through words. They move, chase, wrestle, compete, test limits, take small risks, laugh, fall, get back up, and negotiate rules in the middle of action.

To adults who are uncomfortable with active boyhood, this can look like disorder. But research on play suggests that physical play is not merely noise, chaos, or pre-aggression. It can be a crucial part of development.

Rough-and-tumble play, recess, movement, and active peer interaction help children practice self-control, read social signals, manage intensity, test boundaries, and learn how to stay connected while excited.

When normal boyhood energy is treated as a problem, boys may lose one of the natural pathways through which they learn regulation, relationship, and resilience.

Rough-and-Tumble Play Is Not the Same as Aggression

Researchers have long distinguished rough-and-tumble play from real aggression. Rough-and-tumble play may include chasing, wrestling, mock fighting, tumbling, laughing, fleeing, returning, and exaggerated physical movement. Aggression, by contrast, is marked by intent to harm, distress, coercion, or domination.

This distinction is essential.

When adults cannot tell the difference between play fighting and real fighting, boys’ normal play can be misread as dangerous or disruptive. That misreading may lead to unnecessary discipline, restricted movement, and the loss of important developmental experience.

Good supervision matters. Children need boundaries. But eliminating rough play entirely may remove opportunities for boys to learn how to manage strength, excitement, consent, restraint, and repair.

What Boys Learn Through Active Play

Active play teaches lessons that are hard to deliver through lectures.

Through physical play, boys often learn:

• how hard is too hard,

• when another child is no longer having fun,

• how to stop,

• how to re-enter play after conflict,

• how to manage winning and losing,

• how to read faces and body language,

• how to negotiate rules,

• how to take turns leading and following,

• and how to keep excitement from becoming harm.

These are not trivial skills. They are social and emotional regulation skills.

In other words, active play may be one of the ways boys learn empathy, self-control, boundaries, and connection.

Movement as Regulation

Many boys regulate emotion and attention through movement. Sitting still for long periods may be especially difficult for boys who need active engagement in order to organize themselves.

Recess, outdoor play, physical education, and unstructured movement are not luxuries. They can be part of how children reset attention, discharge tension, build social competence, and return to learning.

This connects strongly to the broader theme of action-oriented emotional processing. For many males, from boyhood into adulthood, movement helps emotion and stress become manageable.

Play and the Social Brain

Jaak Panksepp emphasized the importance of play systems in mammalian development. His work suggested that rough-and-tumble play is rooted in ancient brain systems and helps young mammals develop social subtlety, self-regulation, and sensitivity to others.

This perspective is important because it frames play not as an optional extra, but as a biological and social need.

Boys who are drawn to rough physical play may not simply be acting out. They may be seeking developmental experiences their brains and bodies need.

When Schools Misread Boys

Schools often reward quiet, verbal, compliant, sedentary behavior. Those are useful capacities. But when they become the only accepted model of maturity, many boys are placed at a disadvantage.

Boys who need movement may be viewed as disruptive. Boys who learn through action may be viewed as inattentive. Boys who enjoy rough play may be viewed as aggressive. Boys who compete may be viewed as insensitive.

Some boys do need help learning restraint, empathy, and self-control. But those capacities may develop better through guided play than through constant suppression.

When normal active development is treated primarily as pathology, boys may begin to experience themselves as problems.

The Link to Male Emotional Development

Boys’ play is not separate from men’s emotional lives. It is one of the roots.

If boys learn to regulate emotion through movement, competition, risk, humor, physicality, and shared action, then we should not be surprised when adult men continue to process emotion through action, work, exercise, solitude, problem-solving, and side-by-side activity.

The adult masculine side of healing may have developmental roots in boyhood patterns of learning through the body.

This does not mean boys should be left unmanaged or that all rough behavior is healthy. It means boys need adults who can distinguish development from disruption and energy from aggression.

A Humane Interpretation

Boys need language. They need empathy. They need self-control. They need emotional awareness. But they may not always acquire these capacities through stillness and verbal instruction alone.

Many boys need movement, play, risk, contact, competition, laughter, boundaries, correction, and freedom.

A culture that misunderstands boys’ play may later misunderstand men’s emotional lives. The same boy who once needed to run, wrestle, build, and test limits may become the man who needs to walk, work, repair, exercise, drive, or create in order to process emotion.

When we understand boys more accurately, we begin building a more humane understanding of men.

References

• Pellegrini, A. D. (1989). Elementary school children’s rough-and-tumble play. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 4(2), 245–260.

• Scott, E., & Panksepp, J. (2003). Rough-and-tumble play in human children. Aggressive Behavior, 29(6), 539–551.

• Flanders, J. L., Simard, M., Paquette, D., Parent, S., Vitaro, F., Pihl, R. O., & Séguin, J. R. (2009). Rough-and-tumble play and the regulation of aggression: An observational study of father-child play dyads. Aggressive Behavior, 35(4), 285–295.

• Panksepp, J. (2008). Play, ADHD, and the construction of the social brain: Should the first class each day be recess? American Journal of Play, 1(1), 55–79.

• Smith, P. K. (2023). Play fighting (rough-and-tumble play) in children. International Journal of Play, 12(1), 1–20.