my neighbor giggled when I told him I planned to take six months off work to help care for my newborn daughter. In the 1970s when he was a young father, he told me, men would go straight from the delivery room to the bar to wet the baby’s head and be back in the office first thing the next morning.
Much has changed in the last 50 years. Now fathers tend to be much more involved in the care of babies than previous generations. And yet women still have the primary responsibility for caring for babies in most heterosexual relationships. The average dad in the 70s just had 22 minutes of childcare per day. Today the figure is up to 71 minutes, although mums are still much higher at 162. And less than a third of eligible fathers take the two weeks of paternity leave to which they are entitled.
At the root of these inequalities is the deep-rooted belief that it is natural for men to go out to work and women to take care of the children. However, the latest scientific research shows that we need to reconsider this assumption.
According to a certain understanding of evolution, the most selfish, competitive and even violent men are more likely to survive long enough to pass their genes on to the next generation. Over millions of years, natural selection eliminated less belligerent, more caring males. It turns out to be true Homo sapiens‘ close family. For chimpanzees, childcare is an exclusively female affair. Chimpanzee fathers, on the other hand, are more prone to cannibalize babies born to rival males than to cherish their own.
From a biological perspective, it appears that human women are uniquely suited to care for infants. They give birth, give birth and breastfeed; and these processes cause hormonal changes that improve mothers’ ability to care for their offspring. Oxytocin stimulates contractions during labor and the let-down reflex during breastfeeding, and the “love hormone” also helps moms bond with their babies. Prolactin – the “mothering hormone” – increases empathy and nurturing instincts in addition to milk production.
All of this is intellectual catnip for anyone who wants to use biology to fight against the breakdown of what they see as traditional gender roles, but it clashes with reality: research shows that men can be remarkably caring parents.
The prize for the world’s most attentive fathers goes to the Aka people, nomadic hunter-gatherers who live in the forests of central Africa. According to American anthropologist Barry Hewlett, Aka dads spend about half of their time within arm’s reach of their babies, a significant portion of which involves hugging and kissing. They even soothe crying babies by letting them suckle on their nipples.
Although the Aka are exceptional, they are not unique. Other anthropologists see how men in some societies are heavily involved in the care of babies. Historians note that British fathers spent more time with their children before the Industrial Revolution ripped them away from family life. The rise of working from home in the past few years, man’s alienation from his children has been undone.
In the mid-20th century, Margaret Mead concluded that “motherhood is a biological necessity, but fatherhood is a social invention”. The idea that humans have the unique ability to rise above animal instincts and create a more just society has been incredibly influential over the past 75 years. But it is now becoming clear that biology and culture interact in stranger, more interesting ways than Mead ever imagined.
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, another great American anthropologist, shows in her recent book Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies that although there are obvious biological differences between men and women, we have almost the same genes and very similar brains. As a result, men’s bodies retain the potential to do things typically associated with women, and vice versa.
A striking example of this is men’s hormonal response to fatherhood. When fathers have extended periods of intimacy with babies, their bodies respond in similar ways to new mothers. Prolactin and oxytocin levels rise rapidly. Levels of testosterone – the male sex hormone – drop.
This is the biochemical basis of the philosopher Roman Krznaric’s observation that fatherhood increased his emotional range “from a meager octave to a full keyboard of human feelings”. Less poetically, this is why I feel ecstatic when my toddler poops and bursts into tears when Clay Calloway walks on stage at the end of Sing 2.
The maternal endocrine response – the hormone changes women experience during and after pregnancy – originates in the subcortex, the part of the brain common to all vertebrates that has remained largely unchanged for millions of years. Hrdy argues that the evolutionary origins of this response can actually be traced back to male fish.
Fish mothers tend to lay their eggs and then forage in preparation for producing more eggs. This won’t surprise anyone who watched Finding Nemo that fish fathers often hover near nests to nurture and protect eggs they have fertilized. In nature, mothers are not always the primary caregivers; in many cases it is the father’s role.
The prize for the best fish daddies in the world goes to species from the Syngnathidae family. Female seahorses, pipefish and sea dragons inject their eggs into the male’s brood pouch, where they are fertilized and incubated. Papa Syngnathidae not only give birth and give birth, but the hormones involved are very similar to those that regulate human pregnancies. Prolactin promotes the enzyme that breaks down the egg membranes, creating a nourishing fluid that the embryos feast on; and labor is stimulated by the fishy equivalent of oxytocin.
Human fatherhood is not so abundant, but when culture, choice, or chance gives men caregiving responsibilities for babies, it causes a similar endocrine response in mothers. Oxytocin and prolactin run through the brain, improving the father’s emotional well-being and social connections. For many fathers, spending time with their baby, sharing the burden with their partner, or doing their part to destroy the patriarchy is reward enough. But now we know there is another benefit: access to a part of the human experience that until recently was assumed to be closed to men.
For too long, simplistic interpretations of biology have been used to argue that traditional gender roles, in which women assume primary responsibility for childcare, are natural and immutable. We now know that biology can in fact free women and men from these binary straitjackets.
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Jonathan Kennedy teaches politics and global health at Queen Mary University of London and is the author of Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History
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