The Guardian had an article that caught my attention – LINK>Men are spending more time looking after their children – and it’s not just cultural, it’s in their genes by Jonathan Kennedy. (blogger’s note – I have only excerpted, you can read the entire interesting article at the link.) A great deal has changed in the past 50 years. In the 1970s, a young father would go straight from the labor ward to the pub to wet the baby’s head and be back in the office first thing the next morning.

Now fathers tend to be much more involved in looking after infants than previous generations. Women still have primary responsibility for looking after infants in most heterosexual relationships. The average dad in the 70s did just 22 minutes of childcare a day. Today, the figure is up to 71 minutes. For moms it is still much higher at 162 minutes. Fewer than a third of eligible fathers take the two weeks of paternity leave they are entitled to. Underpinning these disparities is the deeply entrenched belief that it is natural for men to go out to work and women to look after the children. The latest scientific research, however, demonstrates that we must rethink this assumption.

According to a certain understanding of evolution, the most selfish, competitive and even violent males are more likely to survive long enough to pass on their genes to the next generation. Over millions of years, less belligerent, more caring males have been eliminated by natural selection. From a biological perspective, it seems that human women are uniquely suited to looking after babies. They gestate, give birth, and breastfeed; and these processes cause hormonal changes that enhance mothers’ ability to care for their offspring. Oxytocin stimulates contractions during labour and the let-down reflex in breastfeeding, and the “love hormone” also helps mums bond with their babies. Prolactin – the “mothering hormone” – enhances empathy and nurturing instincts in addition to milk production.

However, research shows that men can be remarkably caring parents. (blogger’s note – I have definitely seen this up close with both of the fathers of my children.) In the mid-20th century, Margaret Mead concluded that “motherhood is a biological necessity, but fatherhood is a social invention”. And Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has written that “although there are obvious biological differences between men and women, we have almost the same genes and very similar brains. Consequently, men’s bodies retain the potential to do things typically associated with women, and vice versa.”

Interesting is a man’s hormonal response to fatherhood. When dads have prolonged periods of intimacy with babies, their bodies react in similar ways to new mums. Prolactin and oxytocin levels rapidly rise. Levels of testosterone – the male sex hormone – fall.

Human fatherhood is not this full-on, but when culture, choice or happenstance gives men caring responsibilities for infants, it triggers a similar endocrine response to mothers. Oxytocin and prolactin course through the brain, enhancing the father’s emotional wellbeing and social connections. For many fathers spending time with their baby, sharing the burden with their partner, or doing their bit to bring down the patriarchy is enough of a reward. 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 take on primary responsibility for childcare, are natural and immutable. We now know that biology can, in fact, free women and men from these binary straitjackets.