Traditionally, Raising and caring for children has been one of those areas associated with the feminine: in this case, more specifically, with the role of the mother. The realm of the maternal seems to encompass everything that is relevant to us during the first months of our lives. A mother provides warmth, food, 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 maintain, as the French psychoanalyst suggested Jacques Lacan, that the gaze that a mother directs towards us is in itself the mirror in front of 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.
Although it is not unusual for psychoanalysts like Lacan to emphasize the figure of the mother, it is surprising to see to what extent The conception of the maternal as something sacred is rooted in the depths of our culture And yet, the adult males of our species appear perfectly capable of raising and educating their offspring (and even adopted children). This is also true in cases where the traditional nuclear family model, with father, mother and offspring, does not exist.
Furthermore, we realized long ago that The human being is a unique case of paternal care among all forms of life This is basically because in most animals in which sexual reproduction occurs, the role of the father is quite discreet. Let’s see it.
Evolutionary rarity
First of all, Normally in vertebrates the male’s reproductive role is limited to finding a mate and copulating Obviously, this means that the moment of “being a father” and the birth of the offspring occurs in two very different phases. By the time the poor offspring have entered the world, the parent male is far away, both in time and space. The role of the “father who goes to buy tobacco” is perfectly normalized in the genetics of the animal kingdom
Secondly, because, if we look away to 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 responsible for ensuring that the relationship maintained in the female-calf dyad can last long enough to raise an adult organism with full capabilities.
In those cases in which the male is actively concerned about the safety of his offspring, his role is usually limited to that, trying to guarantee the survival of his offspring in the face of any threat. It could be said, for example, that for a great dorsal gorilla, being a father means trying to squash anything that might bother his offspring.
As a result of this, There are very few species in which the functions between males and females in terms of caring for young are close to symmetry Only in birds and in some mammals in which the degree of sexual dimorphism* is low, the parent-child bond will be strong… and this occurs on very rare occasions. Furthermore, at least in other animals, a strong paternal role is synonymous with monogamy**.
The curious thing about this is that these conditions are rare even in animals as social as apes. The closest non-extinct relatives to us evolutionarily whose males care for the young are the gibbons and the siamang, and both are primates that do not even belong to the hominid family, to which theHomo sapiens Our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees and the bonobos, are not monogamous and the relationships between males and their offspring are weak. The case of humans, furthermore, 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, toward social monogamy This means that participation in childcare is similar in fathers and mothers (although it is highly debatable whether this involvement on both sides is equal or symmetrical).
This being so, it is possible that whoever reads these lines is wondering What exactly is the basis for the attachment that men feel for their children and everything related to their parental behavior? (or, in other words, the “paternal instinct”). We have seen that, most likely, social monogamy is an option that has occurred recently in our chain of hominid ancestors. It has also been pointed out how rare a genuinely paternal role is in the evolutionary tree, even among species most similar to ours. Therefore, it would be reasonable to think that, biologically and psychologically, women are much better prepared to raise children, and that parenting by parents is a circumstantial imposition to which men have no choice but to conform, a “botched job.” ” breaking news in the evolution of our species.
To what extent is paternal care for offspring central to men’s behavior?Is everyone’s brain ready? Homo sapiens to adapt to the role of father?
Although establishing a comparison between the adequacy of male and female psychology for the role of father or mother would lead to an eternal debate, there is scientific evidence to support that, at least in part, fatherhood changes the structure of men’s brains. , something that also happens to women with motherhood During the first postpartum months, the gray matter present in areas of the man’s brain important in the processing of social information (lateral prefrontal cortex) and parental motivation (hypothalamus, striatum and amygdala) increases. At the same time, brain reconfiguration affects other areas of the brain, this time reducing its gray matter volume. This occurs in the orbitofrontal cortex, insula, and posterior cingulate cortex. That is to say: the repertoire of new behaviors that being a parent entails is matched by a repertoire of physical changes in the brain.
All this leads to think that, for more or less genetic, more or less social reasons, the adjustment of man’s behavior to his new role as 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 that come with having a son or daughter.
Moral dyes
Now, it could be said that the question of whether the interest shown towards children has the same nature in men and women is colored by a moral, emotional or even visceral component The seemingly antiseptic question “can fatherhood be comparable to motherhood?” becomes “do men have the same capacity to give themselves over to a noble and pure love for their children, as clearly happens in women?” This question, although 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 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 means leaving elements of reality outside 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 rethink the conclusions of an investigation In that sense, the scientific method is both a way of generating knowledge and a tool to systematically test what seems obvious to us. In the case at hand, this means that, for the moment, the honorability of the paternal role can be safe from common sense…
However, someone could suggest, for example, that the interest in offspring shown by 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 going so far as to deceive themselves about the nature of their feelings; all this to ensure its own genetic continuity over time. It should be noted, however, that the core of this problem is not only a matter of differences between sexes, but depends on our way of understanding the interaction between genetics and our emotional relationships Feeling attachment to offspring for exclusively biological reasons is something that females could also be suspicious of.
Some people believe, not without reason, that intense and excessively continuous scientific speculation can be discouraging. Fortunately, along with purely scientific thinking we are accompanied by the certainty that our own feelings and subjective states of consciousness are genuine in themselves. It would be a shame if a radically physicalist conception of human psychology ruined a parent-child experience.
Author 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 independently of the female. In fish of the syngnathid family, to which seahorses belong, for example, the males are responsible for incubating the eggs in a cavity in their body. After the eggs hatch, the male expels the young through a series of convulsion-like movements and then ignores them… or, at least, those that 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 philosophical approaches opposed to it.
