Father’s Day is this Sunday, and I found myself thinking about fatherhood, what I could share, not only from my own experience, but from the perspective of health and aging. So I went looking.
The Long Ride is built on a simple premise: before we tell readers how to think or feel about a particular aspect of aging, we consult the research, if any exists. Evidence before opinion. Data before sentiment. Science added to my personal experiences.
So when I decided to write something relevant to Father’s Day, I did what I always do — I went looking for the science. I expected to find very little. Maybe a few observational studies on parenthood and health, probably focused on mothers for the most part. Perhaps some data on stress and cortisol. Nothing that would surprise me after raising two boys of my own.
I was wrong. The research on fatherhood and health is more extensive than I anticipated, more nuanced than most Father’s Day content would have you believe, and in at least one finding, genuinely counterintuitive.
For men in their sixties and seventies looking back on their years as fathers and forward to their years as grandfathers, it is also worth understanding, and that’s where I sit today.
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Let me start with the finding that surprised me.
A 2024 study from Northwestern University and Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital, published in the American Heart Association’s journal, tracked 2,814 men aged 45 to 84 as part of the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis. It is among the most comprehensive investigations ever conducted into the relationship between fatherhood and men’s health. The finding it produced is a genuine paradox:
Fathers had worse cardiovascular health than non-fathers in older age. And yet fathers had lower all-cause mortality rates than non-fathers.
I read that twice to be sure: the same men whose hearts were in worse condition were living longer.
The researchers’ explanation is worth reviewing a little further. Fathers appear to benefit from two things that non-fathers are more likely to lack: a robust social support system and a future support person. When a father in his 70s and 80s needs to manage a chronic condition, attend medical appointments, or navigate a health crisis, he is more likely to have someone — often a child — who helps him do it.
The study also found that fathers had significantly lower rates of depressive symptoms than non-fathers. Mental health, it turns out, may be the mechanism through which fatherhood extends life even as it strains the heart.
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The cardiovascular finding deserves direct attention, because it is not what most people expect to hear on Father’s Day.
Fathers, on average, had worse heart health in older age than men who never became fathers. The researchers measured cardiovascular health using the American Heart Association’s Life’s Essential-8 Framework — a composite of diet, physical activity, smoking habits, weight, blood pressure, and metabolic markers. Fathers scored lower compared to men who were not fathers.
The explanation is not mysterious. Becoming a father, particularly in early adulthood, places significant demands on both parents, especially for men, who often face the added stress of being a provider, partner, caregiver, and breadwinner.
The psychological and financial stress of taking on all those roles at once, before most men have the resources or experience to manage them, appears to create a physiological toll that persists across decades. The study found that this effect was most pronounced in men who became fathers before age 25.
Men who became fathers between 30 and 44, by contrast, had better cardiovascular outcomes. A Finnish study tracking more than 30,500 men found that fathers in that age range had a 22 percent lower risk of mid-life death compared to those who became fathers very young. Later fatherhood, entered from a position of greater stability, appears to carry a different risk profile than early fatherhood entered under pressure.
That was me, 36 years ago, when my son was born. The full story is longer than I can share here, but over a 10-month period in 1989, I met a girl, started a new job, sold my condo, bought a house, married the girl, and had a baby. Not necessarily in that order, and not in a gradual ‘Hey, let’s take our time with this’. More like the Bullet Train entering a long tunnel.
I had no idea at the time how it would affect my health.
For most men reading this, the point is not to revisit choices made years ago. It is important to recognize that the need for cardiovascular vigilance is real. If you became a father young and carried heavy stress through your thirties, your heart may have taken more strain than you realize. That is reason enough to measure and monitor your blood pressure and take it seriously.
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The mental health finding is the one I find most relevant to readers of The Long Ride and resonates with me today, 35 years after becoming a father.
Across multiple studies, fathers consistently show lower rates of depression than non-fathers. The mechanism appears to be purpose: fatherhood provides a clear and enduring reason to get up, to keep going, to maintain health behaviours, and to remain engaged with the world.
That purpose does not disappear when the children grow up. It changes form — from active parenting to mentoring, to grandparenting, to the satisfaction of watching people you raised become people you respect in adulthood.
This matters directly to the loneliness research I wrote about recently. The men most vulnerable to the health consequences of social isolation are those with the thinnest support networks — men whose social identity was built almost entirely around work and who, after retirement, found very little when it ended.
Fatherhood, for the men who have it and have invested in it, is one of the most durable social structures available. It does not retire with the career. It continues, in different registers, for the rest of your life.
The Northwestern researchers put it simply: fathers may be more likely to have someone to help them attend medical appointments and manage treatments as they age. That is not a sentimental observation. It is a clinical one.
The presence of children invested in a father’s life is a measurable health resource. There will be variations of sentiment on this data point. I personally don’t think about my sons taking me to my medical appointments, but if I am still socially connected to them in my 80s and 90s, I’m all in.
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There is one more finding I want to share because it is so fascinating and resonates with those of us who now may think about grandchildren as much as we do our children.
Research from Northwestern University found that children born to older fathers inherit longer telomeres — the protective caps on chromosomes associated with slower biological aging and greater longevity. The older the father at the time of a child’s birth, the longer the telomeres passed on.
The researchers found this association was cumulative across generations: grandchildren of older fathers also showed the benefit.
The science behind this is still developing, and the researchers are careful not to overstate it. But the finding suggests something that feels intuitively right: the choices we make as fathers — when we have children, how we live, what we model — may leave biological traces in the people who come after us.
The long ride, it turns out, is longer than a single lifetime.
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My granddaughter Emilia turns one this week. I don’t yet know what I’ll pass on to her — not in the biological sense, since that chain runs through her father, my son, Matt. But in other ways, the things I may pass on that don’t show up in a study but accumulate quietly over years of being present. Like, the way her face makes me light up when I see her. I feel the bond when she watches me as I move around the room. The same way my Grandmother’s face lit up when I walked into her kitchen during my visits.
I hope Emilia’s face will light up when she finds me - maybe in my home office, typing on my laptop as I am now. Or maybe in my kitchen, making her favourite pasta dish.
Watching my oldest son become a father has transformed our relationship in so many positive ways. Parental guidance, often combative during the teen years, has morphed into a welcomed mentorship in early adulthood.
When I became a grandfather to his first child, it was more of a transition than a transformation. We became something closer to equals — two men who have now stood in the same place, holding the same kind of weight, felt the same specific terror and the wonder of being responsible for someone entirely new to the world.
He doesn’t need my guidance the way he once did. What he needs now, I think, is my company. And that turns out to be the better thing – for both of us.
That is the research I can’t quantify. But I’m working on it.
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Here is what I take from all of this, for Father’s Day and beyond.
Fatherhood is not simply good for your health. It is complicated for your health — demanding on the cardiovascular system, particularly when entered into young and under pressure, yet protective in ways that may matter most in the long run: purpose, connection, and the particular kind of social support that only comes from people who love you, not because of what you’ve built but because of who you are to them.
Research on healthy longevity consistently points to a handful of variables that separate those who age well from those who don’t: consistent movement, adequate sleep, good nutrition, managed blood pressure, and, as consistently as any of those, meaningful human connection.
For most of the fathers reading this, that last variable has quietly worked in your favour for decades, through the specific and irreplaceable connection of being someone’s father.
Don’t underestimate what it has done for you. And don’t stop investing in it - ever.
Happy Father’s Day to the fathers, grandfathers, stepfathers, and father figures reading this. The research confirms what most of us already knew: we mattered. We still do.
Research & sources referenced in this piece
Parker, J.J. et al. (2024). Fatherhood and Cardiovascular Health, Disease, and Mortality: Associations From the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis. American Heart Association. PMC11179579. Northwestern University / Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.
Parker, J.J. et al. (2024). Black fathers live longer than nonfathers, study finds. American Journal of Public Health. EurekAlert / Northwestern University.
Torche, F. & Rauf, T. (2021). The Transition to Fatherhood and the Health of Men. Journal of Marriage and Family, 83(2), 446–465. Princeton University.
Nissi, R. et al. (2015). Fatherhood at a young age is linked to a greater likelihood of midlife death. Finnish longitudinal study. ScienceDaily.
Eisenberg, D.T.A., Hayes, M.G. & Kuzawa, C.W. (2012). Telomere length and paternal age: offspring of older fathers inherit longer telomeres. Northwestern University. Medical Daily / ScienceDaily.
Northwestern University (2024). Fatherhood’s hidden heart health toll. news.northwestern.edu