An Anthropologist Discovers that Men are Wired for Nurturing Children

By Don Hubin, Ph.d.

This won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. But those who are interested in the evolutionary bases for human behavior might find this of interest.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is a world renowned anthropologist and primatologist who has made important contributions to evolutionary psychology and sociobiology. Much of her work has focused on the evolution of maternal behavior. Her best known popular writings are Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection and Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. The first examines the biological and genetic foundations of maternal behavior. The second explores the role that the need for long periods of child rearing played in developing the human capacity for understanding others.

I had correspondence with Professor Hrdy a quarter of a century ago after I heard her on a radio show say, contrasting maternal and paternal behavior, “we see fathers more interested in making their car payments than in paying their child support.” Not surprisingly, this raised my hackles. It led me to send her a polite but detailed letter calling her out for this unwarranted broad brushed slur on fathers. I have lost her response but I recall that it was not only polite but conciliatory.

Despite my taking offense decades ago at Professor Hrdy’s off-hand comment in a radio interview, I have always thought highly of her work. When I learned that she had published a book, Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies, on the evolutionary basis of paternal behavior, I was eager to read it. And, when I did, I wasn’t disappointed.

It’s an excellent book. For those interested in how evolution honed men to be nurturing fathers, I know of no better summary of the research from multiple disciplines bearing on this question. 

Nurturing behavior in fathers is not an oddity. As Hrdy summarizes in her introduction:

Radiant new fathers deeply involved in the care of their offspring do not appear to be going sullenly “against nature.” In fact, their responses are profoundly biological with more than culture at play, as scientists discovered when they began to examine what happens to the bodies and brains of men intimately involved with babies. Endocrinologists documented changes in hormone levels that resembled those in mothers, and as neuroscientists started to scan the brains of primary-caretaking men, they found that their brains as well responded the same way as a mother’s would. (pp. 1-2)

Hrdy quotes approvingly NPO Holstein award-winning researcher, Michael Lamb saying:

[W]ith the exception of lactation, there is no evidence that women are biologically predisposed to be better parents than men are. Social conventions, not biological imperatives, underlie the traditional division of parental responsibilities. (p. 18)

Hrdy also recognizes the advancement in attachment theory criticizing the older view of the theory, which focused only on an infant’s attachment to its mother, saying:

This extreme view persists even as developmental psychologists, possibly taking a cue from evolutionary anthropologists, are increasingly aware that babies evolved to become attached to multiple responsive caretakers, including male ones. (p. 292)

And Hrdy concludes with an appeal to change our thinking about fathers and mothers:

It’s time to set aside misguided notions about nurturing responses being the exclusive preserve of mothers. (p. 316)

And, with that, it’s now time for me to write again to Professor Hrdy, this time to thank her for a terrific exploration of the biological foundations of nurturing paternity, ignorance of which has contributed to fathers being sidelined in their children’s lives, especially when domestic relations courts see themselves in the business of choosing “the best parent”. Science is catching up with common sense: the best parent is both parents.