The role of fathers on HPA-axis development and activity across the lifespan: A brief review

Abstract

Copyright: © 2021 Wood EE, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Humans are within the rare 5% of mammal species that have paternal investment [1]. The quantity and quality of paternal investment is facultative on environmental and social context [1-3]. Because paternal investment is facultative in nature, father presence is not necessarily critical for survival [4-6]. However, the presence and involvement of the father can provide sociocompetitive advantages, and indicate valuable information about the safety and predictability of the environment that can have many downstream effects on development and health [7,8]. The safety and predictability of the environment is particularly critical in early childhood during the calibration of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA-axis) and can shape sensitivity to stressors as children age, as discussed below [9-13]. Because fathers are shown to provide unique context to environmental conditions that are important for shaping mental and physical health, more research is needed examining the role of fathers on child development outcomes to provide better accuracy in predicting developmental trajectories [7].