Attention, future dads — your stress levels can impact your kids before they are even born.
We all know that parents’ stress impacts their kids once they are born, from the environment it creates in the house to how much time they spend together. But recent evidence shows that there may be much more to the story. The stress that parents experience before their children are born also has a knock-on effect on the lifestyle of future generations.
Yet stress helps us survive.
Acute stress is the fight or flight reaction or your immune system’s response to an infection. Developed by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, acute stress helped our ancestors survive in the face of simple stressors such as predators hunting them or viral infections. Once our ancestors would get away safely or heal, they experienced post-stress relief that allowed their body and mind to rest and relax again.
In today’s world, acute stress can be a response to anything from email notifications from an angry boss to heavy traffic on your way to work — most of which are recurring. What this means for a lot of people is that they no longer experience the post-stress relief which causes chronic stress.
Stress spills over into the next generation.
There is well-known evidence on the impact chronic stress has on parents’ physical and mental health. However, its impact on their future kids’ health risks is less known. Neuroscientist Tracy L. Bale and her team at the University of Pennsylvania have shown how stress spills over into the next generation (Link). It is not through the parents’ DNA but by molecular changes to the DNA in response to various life experiences, also referred to as epigenetics. Epigenetic changes don’t change the DNA itself, but they have the power to affect the way our genes work. Going back to our ancestors, epigenetic changes in response to stress helped their children survive.
More importantly, their work highlights the importance of fathers’ well-being before conception. Stress experienced before conception changes the sperm epigenetically in such a way that it affects the future child’s response to stress (Link).
What kind of risk does this pose to future generations’ health?
Research on epigenetic changes in sperm points towards increased risk of behavioural and metabolic changes in how children respond to stress themselves (Link). For example, the children of fathers who had experienced the Holocaust war during the Khmer Rouge period in Cambodia were more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression (Link). This research showed that depression-like symptoms could be inherited through the sperm of stressed fathers (Link).
It’s not about avoiding stress. It’s about developing a holistic approach to managing stress for both partners of the couple before conception. Pressure before a deadline can help us get that presentation done in time, but long-term stress can sabotage both our own health as well as our future generations’ health.
