Lesbian Marriage and Single Mums: No father transforms children’s brains: Study
A new study shows that growing up without a father not only affects behavior – it transforms children's brain structure. That's the verdict reached by the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Center and recently published in the journal Cerebral Cortex . Researchers studied the behavior and brains of Californian mice who, like humans, are monogamous and raise their children as a unit. Mice separated from their fathers showed greater aggression, anti-social behavior , and “abnormal social interactions” than those raised with both parents. “The behavioral deficits we observed are consistent with human studies of children raised without a father,” said Dr. Gabriella Gobbi, the report's lead author. However, more groundbreaking was their finding that the behavior was not the only thing affected by the lack of a father. Mice raised by one parent had a misshapen prefrontal cortex, the portion of the brain associated with behavior, decisi