In my recent article, “The Evolution of Manhood and the Emergence of Compassionate Warriors,” I introduced you to the work of Dr. Sarah Hrdy, an anthropologist and primatologist and one of the world’s leading experts on the evolutionary basis of female behavior in both nonhuman and human primates. Dr. Hrdy has recently turned her attention to men. In “Father Time: How Dad’s Are Being Called to Change the World for Good,” we go deeper in exploring the ways dads today are nurturing young children.
Here we’ll explore what Dr. Hrdy describes as “a new kind of father,” hands-on dads who are leading the way to a better future for their own children and changing the evolutionary future of humankind.
In introducing her colleague, Dr. Ruth Feldman, Dr. Hrdy says,
“Born to an illustrious rabbi, Ruth Feldman was a precocious child, beginning to talk by eighteen months. What a shame, a colleague of her father’s once remarked, that his unusually bright daughter was not a son. Among Orthodox Jews, traditionally, it is sons who become scholars. Daughters do other things. Reminiscing years later, Feldman attributed her father’s decision to break with such tradition and promote his clever daughter’s intellectual development to their unusually close relationship. It planted her a powerful drive to succeed.”
Like Dr. Hrdy, Ruth Feldman began her illustrious career exploring the importance of mothers to the life of her children. But then she became interested in the specific ways that fathers contribute to the wellbeing of children and society. Together with Eyal Abraham and others, Feldman’s team decided to study the changes going on with men who were becoming hands-on parents, involved with their wives in providing care for children beginning at birth. They included a subset of men who were even pairing up with other men to start a family as a same-sex couple. Some were adopting babies, others contracting with surrogates, then nurturing the babies right from birth with no mother involved.
As Dr. Hrdy reminds us,
“For over 200 million years that mammals have existed, exclusively male care of babies from birth onward has never happened before. Yet, something’s happening now that has never occurred before.”
As CBS News reported in 2024,
“When it comes to handling a pair of toddlers, Pete Buttigieg, the unflappable Secretary of Transportation, may appear a little jet-lagged. Pete and his husband, Chasten Buttigieg, raise their two-year old twins, Penelope and Gus, in Traverse City, Michigan, where they recently moved full-time from Washington to be closer to family. The kids call Pete ‘Papa,’ and Chasten ‘Daddy.'”
Pete Buttigieg and his husband Chasten may be a most well-known pair raising their children from birth with only male parents, but they are certainly not the only ones. What we are learning about the male father’s brain is illuminating for all of us.
Hrdy reported that the Feldman team recruited 89 couples in stable relationships who were first-time parents with babies between 12 and 18 months old. 48 of the couples were same sex-partnerships of two men, while 41 were heterosexual parents living in “traditional” families where the mother acted as primary caretaker (and, in most cases, breastfed), with the father merely helping her out.
Later, as parents lay inside a magnetic resonance machine watching videos of themselves interacting with their babies, Feldman and coworkers scanned their brains. In the secondary caregiving men from “traditional” family contexts, neural circuits in the cortical region of their brains important in social discrimination and decision-making really lit up. These were the areas that helped me, as a new dad, figure out what my newborn son needed and think through various options — was he hungry, cold, wet, excited, tired, etc. — and act appropriately.
The biggest surprise, however, was what happened in the brains of the unusual, first-of-their-kind men acting as primary caretaker for a baby with no woman involved. (This is what went on in my brain when my wife had left me in total care of our infant son when she took a two-week break to go off with her girlfriend when Jemal was a year old.)
“In their brains,” Hrdy reported Feldman’s findings, “emotion-processing networks involving the amygdala and hypothalamus were stimulated as well. These ‘ancient’ networks dating back to the first mammals, and even further, to their vertebrate precursors. They derive from the same highly conserved neural networks that for 200 million years helped hypervigilant mammalian mothers keep their babies safe.”
“Now, these same limbic system areas were being activated in the brains of men — but only when the baby’s safety and well-being had become those men’s primary concern day after day.”
When my wife was away and I was alone with our son, I was aware of every sound that might indicate danger or that our son needed something. Once those circuits become activated, they stay active forever.
When we adopted our daughter, Angela, I was often on duty at night when my wife was asleep. It was me who often heard her whimpers and instantly awakened at the first sign of something amiss.
In more and more families today we have men and women working together hand-in-hand to raise children. As Dr. Hrdy and Feldman point out, males and females often parent children differently — men tend to be more active and risk-taking with small children, throwing them up in the air and catching them (much to the horror of moms who worry that we may drop them). But the children love it and good fathers, like good mothers, never drop their infant babies.
Through evolutionary history mothers have learned to keep their babies safe and alive. What Hrdy, Feldman, and others have shown is that men have the same capacity built into our brains. We can keep our babies safe, but men also can introduce babies to new experiences and that is important too. Good parents, whatever their sexual orientation, learn to be partners in working together.
Dr. Feldman says that she likes to think about good parenting as 12 bar blues where your left hand is playing that 12 bar blues again and again and it’s predictable and safe. The right hand can improvise, come up with exciting new riffs. The mothers provide the safety and the fathers provide the risk-taking variety. Both are needed.
In this short video, Dr. Feldman describes what her studies have taught us about the male brain and how it works to provide the vital functions that children need right from the very beginning of life. She also emphasizes that fathers and mothers don’t always realize how vital a father’s involvement is with their babies right from the beginning of life. Men often need encouragement and support to let them know they can trust their own parental instincts just as mothers learn to do.
I was fortunate to have a wife who was an involved mom from the beginning, but also knew she needed time to herself after the baby was born and trusted me to step in. I was terrified at first, but once I was on my own, I realized I wasn’t really on my own. Even though my wife was gone for two weeks, I learned that my one-year-old son, Jemal, was right there with me. He knew what he needed and he taught me to trust my instincts. We made a great team which continues to serve us well. Jemal is now 53 years old. He and his wife have a child of their own and he tells me I was a great role-model for him about how to be a good dad.
Our daughter, Angela, is 51, and has four children. She, too, credits me with being an involved, hand-on Dad and her experiences with me have offered a model of what a good parent must do in order to give our children and future generations the best change for a good life.
I hope all men can learn how vital we are to the wellbeing of our children and that women can learn to trust that fathers can be as good parents to the children as mothers can. Our children, grandchildren, and future generations need us now more than ever.
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