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"SCIENCE confirmed last week what A. J. Jacobs had already feared. "I knew that my testosterone was at a low point when I found myself wearing my wife's polka-dotted breast-feeding pillow strapped around my waist in an attempt to feed a bottle of milk to my infant son," said Mr. Jacobs, a writer who lives in Manhattan with his wife and three young children. He and new fathers everywhere were calibrating the state of their manhood after the release of a much-discussed study of 600 men that indicated that testosterone - the defining hormone of maleness - drops after a man becomes a father. If that were not enough, the study seems to suggest that practice actually makes imperfect when it comes to the hours men spend in rearing children. It found that the more time a man spends each day, say, strapping Crocs onto his toddler's feet or helping her off the monkey bars, the more the hormone flags. In a Mr. Mom era, where society encourages (and family schedules often demand) that men enthusiastically embrace a 50-50 split of every parenting duty short of breast-feeding, the question on many fathers' minds is whether all of their efforts to be the ideal contemporary man are also making them less of one. "