How Modern Fatherhood Is Changing Men’s Brains

In the following excerpt, Derek and Darby Saxbe investigate the ways that fatherhood has changed over the course of human history and specifically over the past few decades.

Derek Thompson: I sometimes hear from critics, sometimes conservative critics, that we need to return to “traditional fatherhood.” That when we look at, say, hunter-gatherer tribes to understand the origin point of parenting styles, can we say there that there exists one traditional style of fathering that we can return to?

Darby Saxbe: Right. I mean, quite to the contrary, I think the history of fatherhood is a history of adaptation and variability. So dad’s role has always changed according to cultural context, according to the local demands of the environment.

And even just the fact that humans are involved in fatherhood is unusual. Most mammals don’t have male, hands-on—or I guess paws-on—caretakers. So we’re already in this kind of weird territory of having these extra caregivers.

And part of the reason that we have these extra caregivers—not just fathers but also extended family—is because our human babies are extremely hard to raise. They require intensive care. And in most species, if something takes mom out, whether disease or malnutrition, the baby will be out of luck. In our human worlds, we have all these stopgaps and layers of care that allow us to ensure an infant’s survival.

And so fathers are part of that picture, but the specific role they play depends on what the resource demands are of their context. So in hunter-gatherer societies where you’re foraging, women actually produce a lot of calories for the tribe. And there’s a lot of “man the hunter.” People get really excited about big chunks of meat. Protein’s great, but actually the majority of calories are brought in by foraging. And so you need the economic labor of women, many of whom are mothers.

And so there is a sort of trade-off of economic production roles. And in the book, I talk specifically about the Aka, which is a hunter-gatherer society where the mode of resource gathering is cooperative net hunting. And so it’s often done in couples; men and women work together.

And so as a result, you actually don’t want a super-specialized dynamic where the baby or young children are only cared for by one gender. It’s much more adaptive to have men and women both participating in economic activity. And as a result, dads are really hands-on and involved. And one statistic suggested that men are within arm’s reach of their baby 47 percent of the time.

So that’s one society, but there are also societies where resource gathering is riskier, where it requires physical strength, upper-body musculature. It makes a lot more sense for males to do the calorie gathering and for women to be more involved in home production and caretaking.

And agricultural societies, which are sort of the mode from which our contemporary cultures have evolved, are stable. You gather wealth; you need to hoard wealth; therefore, wars; therefore, banks. And so you end up with more specialized roles.

At the same time, subsistence farms involve women participating in dairy work, livestock maintenance. There’s a lot of economic activity that happens on a family farm.

And so for 95 percent of human history, we operated as hunter-gatherers, subsistence farmers, or perhaps small business owners, and men and women both had roles to play in maintaining our livelihoods.

So it’s only really after the Industrial Revolution that we get this really sharp divide between the household sphere and the workplace sphere. And all of a sudden, it’s like men are off to the office, and women are home with babies.

And we think of that as this natural way of being, but it’s actually kind of this blip in our lengthy human history. And sociologists have written about: The 1950s was this postwar exception to the rule of how there was enough wealth that women could stay home and take care of kids almost exclusively.

So that’s not natural at all. And I think if you really look at how fathers have participated in care throughout history, they’ve occupied a huge variety of roles.

Thompson: There’s so much in that answer, and I want to make sure that listeners heard what I heard there, which is that it might be unfair to say that all mothers are the same. In fact, it would definitely be unfair to say that all mothers are the same.

But it might be accurate to say that mothering is more similar as we look around the world and as we look back through history, because there are certain aspects of mothering that are simply biologically necessary for these helpless babies that are born.

But fathering is more contingent on local customs, on local economies, on local availability of calories. Essentially, the context creates fathers, whereas it is biology that creates mothers.

And so you brought us up to the 1950s, where a very particular context, the post-industrial world, created a world where fathers were more likely to work and therefore mothers were more likely to be at home caring for children. And this is the world that sometimes conservative critics will point to when they say, “Let’s get back to traditional family values.”

Your point is: If “traditional family values” describes a 120-year blip in history between the late 1970s, or sorry, excuse me, the late 1700s and the mid-1900s, well, that’s not traditional. That’s just, again, a blip of post-industrial history, and the broader history is one of extraordinary variety in fathering styles.

This theme that fathering changes when local context changes is also one that pertains to the last 60 years of fathering in the U.S. Can you describe a little bit about how being a dad, how fatherhood has changed in the U.S. in the last six decades?

Saxbe: Yeah. So we’ve been sort of part of this revolution in fathers’ roles.

As we know, women entered the workplace en masse mid-century. Of course, there were women even in the blip we just talked about who were working, so it was always a privileged position to be fully at home.

But once women started earning income, all of a sudden—and even in the ’80s, Arlie Hochschild was writing about the second shift and the idea that even when you have dual-earner families, mom is going home and is still charged with the household and the childcare, and we haven’t fully evened out those roles. I’m sure we’ll talk more about that. But all of a sudden, the onus is on men to broaden their roles beyond solely breadwinner.

And so the fastest-growing household configuration in the U.S. is equal incomes. Both men and women are earning similar amounts of money, and so fathers have to step up. And so we’ve seen this tripling of time with kids among millennial dads compared to their fathers and grandfathers.

And I think not just more hands-on time, time with kids, but also men themselves are saying that the fatherhood role is particularly meaningful to them. So fatherhood is a source of purpose and identity for men in a way that it’s maybe always been for women, but I think it’s sort of increasingly among men who become fathers occupying a larger role.

This excerpt has been edited and condensed.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Darby Saxbe
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman