Good Fathers Make Better Mothers

Early life experience, in the form of care received from parents, has been shown to contribute to lifelong changes in offspring’s future behavior. Using a biparental rodent model, we investigate the stability of the dyad’s parenting across time, the relationships between mother and father’s parenting behavior, and the impact early life care has on the future care of an organism’s own offspring. We provide evidence that naïve mothers parent more than experienced mothers, but fathers remain stable in the amount of care they provide to their offspring. We also show that naïve mothers’ parent like their fathers, but experienced mothers adapt their parenting to their partner’s parenting.