Nobody's ever wondered who Clark Griswold was before Ellen, before Rusty and Audrey, before the 25,000 lights and the non-nutritive cereal varnish. The guy who mapped out every family road trip on a legal pad and used the punch set from Wally World for the Christmas nog, that guy doesn't feel like a before-and-after story. He feels like a finished man.
But he wasn't always Dad. He became Dad. How did that happen?
We put that question to Darby Saxbe, a psychology professor at USC and author of the new book Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men's Lives. Her core argument is one most men never hear stated out loud: your brain is not done when you become a father. It is still forming. And the thing that reshapes it is the act of parenting itself.
Here's the part we can't stop thinking about. Saxbe doesn't talk about good parenting as something you either have or don't. Good dads are built.
"I want to emphasize this idea of being a great parent as a skill, not a trait," she told us. "We get good at it when we get to know our kids and learn what they need."
Read that twice. It's not about being a generic parent. It's about being a parent to your kid. It's specific to the one kid in front of you, the one who needs something different than his brother did, different than she needed last year, different than the parenting book says.
You're not learning fatherhood. You're learning your child.
And those learnings add up. We say it all the time because it's so true especially for men today: Confidence is built. One rep at a time. And the reps here look quite different. Diapers. Bedtime. The 4am feeding. The unglamorous Tuesday-night stuff that doesn't look like progress because it never looks like anything.
"Those little moments are all forms of practice," Saxbe said. "They create opportunities for neuroplasticity and help dads become experts in their own children."
Experts in your own children. We'd never heard it put that way, but it feels right. And the benefit of becoming that expert isn't limited to knowing your kid's moods better than anyone alive. Saxbe's research found those same moments fine-tune the parts of your brain responsible for empathy, for emotion regulation, for figuring out which signals in a room actually matter.
You're not just learning your kid. You're rebuilding the parts of yourself that do the noticing.
Which brings us to the part of her work that explains why some dads thrive in this and others just show up. Saxbe's research on meaning-making found that fathers who treated becoming a dad as an identity shift, not just a life event that happened to them, had measurably better outcomes.
A well-lived life, she said, comes from "feeling like we are moving in the right direction and that there is a larger purpose to our actions."
The dads who let fatherhood become part of who they are, instead of a distraction from who they already were, get more out of it. We've all seen both guys.
And, her research proves, we could scan their brains and actually see a difference.
Fair warning, this finding is going to sound counter-intuitive until you hear it explained: New fathers' brains actually lose gray matter.
That sounds like a problem. It isn't.
"You could think of a fast-moving river versus many little tributaries that branch out in multiple directions," Saxbe told us. "The single river might take up less space but it also carries water more quickly."
Then she said it more clearly. "In the book, I use the analogy of a long, rambling director's cut versus the more tightly edited theatrical release."
You're not losing material. You're losing what wasn't working.
Clark Griswold was a punchline in 1989. The guys at the office called it.
But Saxbe's research says something different is true now. "Today's contemporary dads are actually increasingly likely to say that fatherhood is central to their lives and rate parenthood as a key source of identity," she told us.
Clark wasn't the joke. He was the preview. The modern version is still the guy obsessed over the lights, the family dinner, the theme park, but now he also has eleven tabs open comparing rental cabin reviews.
And the lesson is the same: it's never going to be perfect, but each thing a guy does for his kids, is making him a better man. That's the whole science, condensed into one guy in a station wagon. He never nailed it. He never stopped trying. Every single vacation.
We Asked a Psychologist to Diagnose Clark Griswold's Brain.
Nobody's ever wondered who Clark Griswold was before Ellen, before Rusty and Audrey, before the 25,000 lights and the non-nutritive cereal varnish. The guy who mapped out every family road trip on a legal pad and used the punch set from Wally World for the Christmas nog, that guy doesn't feel like a before-and-after story. He feels like a finished man.
But he wasn't always Dad. He became Dad. How did that happen?
We put that question to Darby Saxbe, a psychology professor at USC and author of the new book Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men's Lives. Her core argument is one most men never hear stated out loud: your brain is not done when you become a father. It is still forming. And the thing that reshapes it is the act of parenting itself.
Here's the part we can't stop thinking about. Saxbe doesn't talk about good parenting as something you either have or don't. Good dads are built.
"I want to emphasize this idea of being a great parent as a skill, not a trait," she told us. "We get good at it when we get to know our kids and learn what they need."
Read that twice. It's not about being a generic parent. It's about being a parent to your kid. It's specific to the one kid in front of you, the one who needs something different than his brother did, different than she needed last year, different than the parenting book says.
You're not learning fatherhood. You're learning your child.
And those learnings add up. We say it all the time because it's so true especially for men today: Confidence is built. One rep at a time. And the reps here look quite different. Diapers. Bedtime. The 4am feeding. The unglamorous Tuesday-night stuff that doesn't look like progress because it never looks like anything.
"Those little moments are all forms of practice," Saxbe said. "They create opportunities for neuroplasticity and help dads become experts in their own children."
Experts in your own children. We'd never heard it put that way, but it feels right. And the benefit of becoming that expert isn't limited to knowing your kid's moods better than anyone alive. Saxbe's research found those same moments fine-tune the parts of your brain responsible for empathy, for emotion regulation, for figuring out which signals in a room actually matter.
You're not just learning your kid. You're rebuilding the parts of yourself that do the noticing.
Which brings us to the part of her work that explains why some dads thrive in this and others just show up. Saxbe's research on meaning-making found that fathers who treated becoming a dad as an identity shift, not just a life event that happened to them, had measurably better outcomes.
A well-lived life, she said, comes from "feeling like we are moving in the right direction and that there is a larger purpose to our actions."
The dads who let fatherhood become part of who they are, instead of a distraction from who they already were, get more out of it. We've all seen both guys.
And, her research proves, we could scan their brains and actually see a difference.
Fair warning, this finding is going to sound counter-intuitive until you hear it explained: New fathers' brains actually lose gray matter.
That sounds like a problem. It isn't.
"You could think of a fast-moving river versus many little tributaries that branch out in multiple directions," Saxbe told us. "The single river might take up less space but it also carries water more quickly."
Then she said it more clearly. "In the book, I use the analogy of a long, rambling director's cut versus the more tightly edited theatrical release."
You're not losing material. You're losing what wasn't working.
Clark Griswold was a punchline in 1989. The guys at the office called it.
But Saxbe's research says something different is true now. "Today's contemporary dads are actually increasingly likely to say that fatherhood is central to their lives and rate parenthood as a key source of identity," she told us.
Clark wasn't the joke. He was the preview. The modern version is still the guy obsessed over the lights, the family dinner, the theme park, but now he also has eleven tabs open comparing rental cabin reviews.
And the lesson is the same: it's never going to be perfect, but each thing a guy does for his kids, is making him a better man. That's the whole science, condensed into one guy in a station wagon. He never nailed it. He never stopped trying. Every single vacation.