What Monkeys Can Teach Us About Fatherhood

The evolution of male parenting

In my last post, I confessed to being a father who is short-tempered and a terrible cook, so why not continue the schedaunfraude?

My wife and I got married very young, and we were fortunate to be able to have children right away, so I became a father at that period of wizened maturity known as “22.” Like all 22-year olds, I had a deep well of wisdom, pooled over many years of experience, to draw from when we welcomed our first born into our world and home. Rather than a casual decision—“Yeah, we’ve been married for less than a year, why not?”—I entered fatherhood after sober reflection and consideration, deliberately choosing to forfeit the independence of youth and to restructure every aspect of my life to protecting, providing, and caring for a helpless infant who would come to call me “Dad.”

Of course, none of the above is true, except that I was indeed 22 years old when Dorothy was born, and I did enjoy a deep well of wisdom, though it was only in how to find a free copy of the New York Times on campus, not to, you know, raise up the next generation and all that.

Janelle and I became parents in the middle of December, right after she finished her very last semester of college (and I mean right after—she took all of her finals in one day and checked into the hospital that night). At the time, we were renting a basement apartment with living-room windows the size of license plates.

Going from being a full-time student to a full-time mother, in the middle of a Utah winter, living in little more than a Cold War bunker, would have been challenging for any new mother, and Janelle managed incredibly well, but “being married to 22-year old Dallin Lewis” was no doubt the cherry on top—except the “cherry” here is one of those pitiful imitation cherries they inflict on sundaes, and what it is “on top” of is a pile of dirty cloth diapers that will mushroom inside any such Cold War bunker when it does not include a washer-and-dryer.

While I have several happy memories in that first year of fatherhood, I can still remember vividly, painfully, several moments of new-parent ineptitude. The first time Janelle left me at home with Dorothy so she could go out with friends, only to have me call her on multiple occasions to troubleshoot my own child (“What do you do if she’s crying?”). The time I stayed extra late on campus to watch Jimmer Fredette go 4-11 in the First Round of March Madness, only to have Janelle explain to me when I finally got home, in the kindest but firmest way possible, the frustration that can well up when only one partner in this marriage enjoys such freedom of movement. The time I tried to make a chocolate cake for Valentine’s Day while Janelle napped, only to wake her up—again, on multiple occasions—to troubleshoot her gift (“What do you do if it doesn’t taste good?”).

Looking back now, I attribute my poor performance to my 22-year old assumption that infant care was something Janelle, by sheer virtue of being not male, would take to like a duck in water, while my sex was doomed to Homer Simpson-level incompetence. I deferred to her on every major child care decision. As far as I knew—and I really did think this—Janelle had been prepared for nursing and sleep training and all other mothering activities through years of church youth classes, where, I assumed, they had mentored her in how to tap into her maternal instinct (what else did they have to talk about?). As for me: I was to provide (well, in theory, I was still an undergrad) and protect (also in theory) and let her handle the rest.

In short, there is a great deal that I wish I had known at that time. I also wish I could have read Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies. The author, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, complicates the assumptions that, as a male parent, I was naturally deficient compared to my wife, and that my main job was to sit back and not muck things up. Instead, as Hrdy’s book argues, attentive male parenting, rather than being a social fad fighting against the current of evolution, taps into some of men’s deepest and most primal instincts, and is far more “natural” than I might have expected.

I first discovered Hrdy by listening to an interview with her on the Art of Manliness podcast. Based on that episode (which I recommend, probably even more than the book), I assumed that Father Time was focused on contemporary anthropological studies of fatherhood. Instead, I discovered that she wasn’t kidding around about the “natural history” part of the subtitle. The vast majority of the book walks through evidence, gleaned from neuroscience, primate studies, and psychobiology, suggesting that male parental instincts traces back to the earliest reaches of evolutionary time.

Of course, my naive, 22-year old assumption was not without reason: it is pretty obvious that the biology of childbirth will lead men and women to experience reproduction and caregiving in radically different ways. While women can only pass along their genes periodically, at great pain and exposure, men are much less tied down. They can walk away from parenting in ways women cannot. Consequently, women are more directly connected with infant care than men ever could be. This difference is a defining characteristic not just of the human species but of all mammals: “Of some 5,400 species of mammals in the world, direct male care of babies occurs in only some 5 percent of them. Furthermore, none of the males among our closest ape relations routinely take care of new babies, nor do men in any of hundreds of human societies.” As the early anthropologist Margaret Mead put it, “motherhood is a biological necessity, but fatherhood a social invention.”

According to Hrdy’s story, this thinking was so entrenched that when, in the second half of the twentieth century, scientists discovered that mammalian fathers experienced decreases in testosterone and increases in prolactin, they dismissed such evidence as mistaken or inconclusive. But more evidence, including from neuroscience, pushed scientists to rethink their priors. Studies suggested that the brain composition and neural activation of fathers differed between childless men and fathers—and differed further between fathers who were secondary caregivers versus those who were primary caregivers. Specifically, these male allomothers activate not only “newer cortical networks,” used for cognitive decision-making, but also more “ancient, subcortical networks…producing more nearly automatic brain responses typical of mothers.” Scientists began to suggest that “human parenting may have evolved from an evolutionarily ancient alloparenting substrate that exists in all adult members of the species and can flexibly activate through responsive caregiving and commitment to children’s well-being.” In other words, members of both sexes share the evolutionary makeup necessary to care for infants, and that that “alloparenting substrate” could be activated as necessary, depending on how much caregiving responsibility they assumed.

Hrdy draws on primate studies to suggest how alloparenting might have emerged as an evolutionary advantage. The violent tendencies of primate males, especially towards infants, would seem to work against the possibility of fathers ever becoming attentive parents. But Hrdy argues that it is precisely because of that violence that, in line with Hamilton’s Rule (“selfless-seeming helpfulness can evolve when the cost to the helper is less than the benefit to the recipient calibrated by how close a relative the beneficiary is”), male parents started hanging around their baby’s mama to protect their genetic offspring. Such males evolved other pro-social tendencies, like tolerance towards infants, even if they were rarely the primary caregiver. Female primates also pushed the process along in at least two ways: by encouraging interaction between her infant and the male primate best suited to protecting them, and by mating with multiple males even after she was pregnant, inducing all of her partners to believe that her infant was theirs.

Of course, primate males are still incredibly savage, so how, Hrdy asks, “could I explain the twenty-first-century descendants of these same apes who today routinely change diapers and rely on rubber-nippled baby bottles to nourish babies right from birth?” The answer lies in the brutal climatic conditions of the Pleistocene, a prehistoric period when, Hrdy argues, members of the genus Homo evolved to be more cooperative and flexible to secure enough scarce calories for them and their offspring to endure. And, as these primeval humans developed the capacity to imagine what other humans might be thinking, infants were able to attract attention not only of mothers, homoronally primed to care for them already, but also of fathers, drawing the males more into pro-social bonds.

Still, while evolution seems to have prepared men to take on the role of alloparent, whether or not they adopt that role will depend on the context in which their children are born. Because the bond between mother and offspring is much more constant, the degree to which fathers activate their biological potential for parenting will vary widely among cultures, climates, and societies. To explore these contexts, at the end of her book, Hrdy shifts from natural history to social history, describing in brief the evolution of fatherhood in Western culture. However, as Hrdy moves here beyond her expertise into the contemporary politics of fatherhood, the book because less illuminating and more polemic.

But the core insight of Hrdy’s argument is nonetheless persuasive: a “natural” capacity for parenting is more commonly shared between than sexes than is often thought. That capacity is like a bundle of electrical circuits lying dormant, waiting for the right conditions to switch them on. And while pregnancy and childbirth do so automatically for women, men who, by choice or necessity, invest themselves in infant care can draw on more untapped resources than my 22-year old self would have expected. Male parenting depends on what you make of it: “So far as man’s evolutionary birthright is concerned, protecting and caring for offspring is as much a part of it as is competing or fighting with rivals or infanticide. The hitch, of course, is that to be expressed in mammals, realizing this birthright requires special circumstances—circumstances that until recently men rarely encountered. Chance events over the course of primate evolution, hominin necessity, historically shaped circumstances, and key cultural innovations in modern humans had to realign the playing field first. Realization of this particular aspect of men’s birthright requires the stage to be set and the stars to align.” Something to remember for when the grandkids come along.