Traditionally, raising and caring for children has been one of those areas associated with the feminine : in this case, more specifically, with the mother’s role. The realm of the maternal seems to encompass everything that is relevant to us during the first months of our life. A mother provides warmth, nourishment, affection and the first contact with language (even before she is born, her voice is audible from the womb).

Going a little further, we could argue, as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan suggested, that the gaze that a mother directs at us is in itself the mirror before which we forge a very primitive idea of our own “I”. In this sense, the germ of what will one day be our identity is thrown towards us by a loved one.

Male parenthood

Although it is not unusual for psychoanalysts like Lacan to emphasize the figure of the mother, it is surprising to see the extent to which the conception of the maternal as something sacred is rooted in the depths of our culture . And yet, the adult males of our species show themselves to be perfectly capable of raising and educating their offspring, (and even adopted children). This is also true in cases where the traditional model of a nuclear family, with a father, mother and offspring, is not present.

Furthermore, we have long realized that the human being is a unique case of parental care among all life forms . This is basically because in most animals in which sexual reproduction takes place the role of the father is quite discreet. Let’s look at it.

Evolutionary Rarity

Firstly, the normal situation in vertebrates is that the reproductive role of the male is limited to the search for a partner and copulation. Obviously, this means that the moment of “parenting” and the birth of the offspring occurs in two distinct phases. By the time the poor offspring have come into the world, the male parent is far away, both in time and space. The role of the “father who goes to buy tobacco” is perfectly standardised in the genetics of the animal kingdom .

Secondly, because, if we look at other branches of the evolutionary tree in which we are included, we will have many opportunities to see the following scheme applied:

1. One strongly cohesive pair formed by the female and the calf .

2. A father figure, whose role is quite secondary , in charge of making sure that the relationship maintained in the female-breeding dyad can last long enough to raise an adult organism with full capacities.

In those cases where the male is actively concerned about the safety of his young, his role is usually limited to that, trying to ensure the survival of his young in the face of any threat. It could be said, for example, that for a great Dorsican gorilla, being a father means trying to squeeze out anything that might disturb his offspring.

As a consequence, there are very few species in which the functions between males and females in terms of the care of the offspring are close to symmetry . Only in birds and in some mammals in which the degree of sexual dimorphism* is low, the paternal-philial bond will be strong… and this happens very rarely. Moreover, at least in the rest of animals, a strong paternal role is synonymous with monogamy**.

The funny thing about this is that these conditions are rare even in animals as social as apes. The closest non-extinct evolutionary relatives whose males care for their young are the gibbons and the siamang, and both are primates which do not even belong to the hominid family, to which Homo sapiens belongs. Our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees and the bonobos , are not monogamous and the relationships between the males and their offspring are weak. The case of humans, moreover, is special, because it seems that we tend towards monogamy only partially: ours may be social monogamy, but not sexual monogamy.

Breaking the paradigm

Be that as it may, in the modern human being we find a species that presents little sexual dimorphism and a tendency, at least statistically, towards social monogamy. This means that participation in childcare is similar in fathers and mothers (although it is very debatable whether this involvement on both sides is equal or symmetrical).

This being the case, it is possible that whoever reads these lines is wondering in what exactly is the basis of the attachment that men feel for their children and everything related to their parental behaviour (or, in other words, the “parental instinct”). We have seen that, most likely, social monogamy is a choice that has been made recently in our chain of hominid ancestors. It has also been pointed out that a genuinely paternal role is rare in the evolutionary tree, even among the species most closely resembling our own. It would therefore be reasonable to think that, biologically and psychologically, women are much better equipped to raise children, and that parental rearing is a circumstantial imposition to which men have no choice but to conform, a last-minute “botch” in the evolution of our species.

To what extent is parental care of offspring central to men’s behavior? Is the brain of all Homo sapiens prepared to adapt to the role of father?

Although establishing a comparison between the suitability of male and female psychology for the role of father or mother would give rise to an eternal debate, there is scientific evidence to sustain that, at least in part, fatherhood changes the structure of men’s brains, something that also happens to women with motherhood . During the first months of postpartum there is an increase in the grey matter present in areas of the male brain that are important in the processing of social information (prefrontal lateral cortex) and parental motivation (hypothalamus, striatum nucleus and amygdala). At the same time, brain reconfiguration affects other areas of the brain, this time reducing its grey matter volume. This occurs in the orbitofrontal cortex, the insula and the posterior cingulate cortex. In other words, the repertoire of new behaviors that parenting entails is matched by a repertoire of physical changes in the brain.

All this leads us to think that, for more or less genetic, more or less social reasons, the adjustment of man’s behaviour to his new role as a caregiver is strongly based on the biology of his own brain. This explains why, as a general rule, all humans can adapt to the new responsibilities involved in having a son or daughter.

Moral tints

However, it could be said that the question of whether the interest shown in children has the same nature in men and women is tinged by a moral, emotional or even visceral component . The apparently aseptic question “can fatherhood be comparable to motherhood” is transformed into “do men have the same capacity to give themselves to a noble and pure love for children, as clearly occurs in women? This question, though perfectly legitimate, is difficult to answer.

We know that reality is something very complex and that it can never be covered by each of the investigations that are carried out daily. In a certain sense, translating a topic that generates personal interest into a hypothesis that can be approached from the scientific method involves leaving elements of reality out of the research***. We also know that, since reality is so complicated, within the theoretical body provided by science there are always gaps of uncertainty from which it is possible to reconsider the conclusions of an investigation . In this sense, the scientific method is both a way of generating knowledge and a tool for systematically testing what seems obvious to us. For the case at hand, this means that, for the time being, the honorability of the paternal role may be safe before common sense…

However, someone could suggest, for example, that the interest in the offspring shown by the males of some species (and their corresponding neuroanatomical adaptation) is only a strategy to closely monitor the offspring and the female with whom they have procreated, even to the point of self-deception about the nature of their feelings; all this to ensure their own genetic continuity in time. It should be noted, however, that the nucleus of this problem is not only a question of differences between the sexes, but also depends on our way of understanding the interaction between genetics and our affective relations . Feeling attachment to one’s offspring for exclusively biological reasons is something that females could also be suspected of.

Some people believe, not without reason, that intense and too continuous scientific speculation can be discouraging. Fortunately, along with purely scientific thinking, we have the certainty that our own feelings and subjective states of consciousness are genuine in themselves. It would be a pity if a radically physicalistic conception of human psychology were to ruin a paternal-philial experience.

Author’s notes:

* Differences in appearance and size between male and female

** There is, however, a very curious case in which the male takes care of the offspring apart from the female. In the fish of the family of the signátidos, to which they belong for example the seahorses, the males are those in charge to incubate the eggs in a cavity of their body. After the eggs hatch, the male expels the young by a series of movements similar to convulsions, and then he discards them – or at least those he has not eaten by then. In short, this is not a particularly endearing case and it is better not to draw parallels between this and what happens in humans.

*** In philosophy of science, this dilemma is approached from a position called reductionism and from the philosophical approaches opposed to it.