I love all of this! So cool to learn about your work. My husband read some books by Sarah Hrdy, so it’s fun to see her showing up in your writing. Thanks for sharing Darby Saxbe!
Fatherhood as a facultative adaptation does something useful here: it dissolves the false choice between fatherhood as biology and fatherhood as culture.
The flexibility is not a weakness in the biological story. It may be the biological story. A paternal nervous system that shifts with proximity, responsibility, and the demands of care is not less real for being context-sensitive. It is real partly because it is context-sensitive.
And the implication runs past fatherhood. We tend to speak as though adult identity is already formed and care is then added to it as a role. But care may be one of the conditions through which identity, attention, and even the body's priorities get reorganized. The father does not bring a fixed self to the child; in some real sense the child becomes part of the environment that changes what kind of self can be sustained.
That is what keeps this work from being either sentimentalized or reduced. It makes fatherhood a living instance of biology and social life continuing to make each other.
I love all of this! So cool to learn about your work. My husband read some books by Sarah Hrdy, so it’s fun to see her showing up in your writing. Thanks for sharing Darby Saxbe!
Thank you for a morning dose of positivity about parenting, and the surprise cute fluffy animals
Wonderful research and love the prairie voles!
Fatherhood as a facultative adaptation does something useful here: it dissolves the false choice between fatherhood as biology and fatherhood as culture.
The flexibility is not a weakness in the biological story. It may be the biological story. A paternal nervous system that shifts with proximity, responsibility, and the demands of care is not less real for being context-sensitive. It is real partly because it is context-sensitive.
And the implication runs past fatherhood. We tend to speak as though adult identity is already formed and care is then added to it as a role. But care may be one of the conditions through which identity, attention, and even the body's priorities get reorganized. The father does not bring a fixed self to the child; in some real sense the child becomes part of the environment that changes what kind of self can be sustained.
That is what keeps this work from being either sentimentalized or reduced. It makes fatherhood a living instance of biology and social life continuing to make each other.