For years, scientific inquiry has strongly suggested that women are the more caring and empathic sex, and that when they are in positions of power, they are more likely than men are to prioritize policy matters such as education, child welfare, public health, sustainable economic development, violence prevention, and environmental preservation.
In many ways, this makes sense. After all, as evolutionary anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has written, “For more than 200 million years the nurture of mammalian young has been the nearly exclusive preserve of mothers.” No wonder many have concluded that the world would be in better shape if women ruled it.
But that belief deserves to be interrogated as the science of what happens when men become fathers begins to be studied more carefully. We already know that most men are no longer clueless and frightened auxiliary parents. Fathers are, on the contrary, quite capable of nurturing their offspring, their children do better with their dads in their lives, and countless men find parenting to be a deeply satisfying and profoundly meaningful experience.
The reality is that while women continue to spend more time caring for children than men do, fathers are spending more time taking care of their children than their own fathers did. And men who care for children can be just as tender, just as patient, just as loving, and just as competent, as women.
But what we are also beginning to understand is that men, like women, undergo a range of neurophysiological changes when they become parents. Male nurturing is actually ancient and biologically pre-programmed, and reveals itself across numerous species in the animal kingdom.
And when it comes to homo sapiens in particular, we are learning that when men engage with children, not only does their psychological make-up change, their biochemical make-up changes, too.
While men do not experience physiological pregnancy, becoming a father triggers significant physiological and psychological changes within them. Given opportunity and support, a male’s biological response to having children can be virtually the same as the female’s.
We now know, for example, that gray matter in the anterior cingulate cortex of men who become fathers grows thicker, and remains that way, more than it does in the brains of men who never became fathers.
This sets into motion a virtuous, rather than a vicious, cycle—the more time men spend with children, the more that their latent tendency to be protectors rather than patriarchs becomes activated, which changes how they feel, think, behave, and prioritize. This makes them better fathers, who in turn raise healthier children, who in turn might lay the groundwork for a healthier planet.
The paternal brain has the potential to be more like the maternal brain than we ever imagined. Fathers can be, and so often are, emotionally nourishing parents because they are just as evolutionarily pre-programmed to do so as are mothers.
The possibility of a nurturing masculinity that is both “new” and very, very old has profound implications.
Because for some, social conservatives especially, the feared disappearance of stereotypically patriarchal nuclear families in which the man is the breadwinner and the woman is the “trad-wife” is a catastrophe that tears apart our cultural fabric and must be averted at all costs.
What I am suggesting, though, based on what we are learning about male parents, is that when egalitarian societies provide diverse personal options for both genders and support more flexible family configurations, the resultant changes liberate both men and women, and help us to collectively understand the transformative power of human fathering, which is the most challenging yet elusive task a man can undertake.
Japanese engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi was one of the few individuals who survived the atomic bombing of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Unsurprisingly, he became a vigorous proponent of nuclear disarmament and at one point urged that only a “nursing mother” should ever be in charge of a country with nuclear weapons.
This is a touching and meaningful sentiment, but not a realistic one, at least not at this point in human culture. For the foreseeable future, national and international leadership cannot exclusively rely on mothers.
So on the heels of Father’s Day, let’s remember that we might be at the beginning of a new natural order, and that balancing gender roles and supporting fathers does not go against human nature at all—it is, in fact, the nature of human nature.