Begetting: What Does It Mean to Create a Child?
Mara van der Lugt
Princeton University Press, $35 (cloth)
What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice
Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman
St. Martin’s Press, $27 (cloth)
Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother
Peggy O’Donnell Heffington
Seal Press, $29 (cloth)
Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Princeton University Press, $29.95 (cloth)
My grandmother was a good Catholic who didn’t go to college and had eight children. Her oldest child went to college and had one child, me. Your own family probably fits this pattern. In a decline that correlates with education and secularism, and is concentrated in the Global North, women across the world are having about half the number of children they had only fifty years ago.
The far right sees this choice as a specific kind of crisis. While anti-abortion, anti-immigrant nationalists like J. D. Vance might not use exactly fourteen words when they rail against “childless cat ladies,” they echo eugenicists like Madison Grant and Theodore Roosevelt in blaming female emancipation for “race suicide.” America was “great” when (white) families were large because (white) women were in the home having children, and (white) labor was cheap enough to make large-scale (nonwhite) immigration unnecessary. It does not mitigate the problem that about half of the current rate of population increase in the United States comes from new immigration; for them, that is the problem.
The liberal counternarrative tends to be a smaller story, about individuals choosing not to be parents. More people are making this choice, they concede, but the important question is whether people are choosing freely. Are those who never wanted children—especially women historically forced into childbearing—finally free to forgo them? Or are those who would want children choosing not to have them, for economic or cultural reasons, or out of anxiety about a war-ridden, warming world?
However strange it may sound to characterize the post-Roe present as overflowing with reproductive choice, the mainstream center-left tends to agree with the far right that this choice is a new phenomenon, and that our predecessors were spared the existential dilemma. As Dutch philosopher Mara van der Lugt writes in Begetting: What Does it Mean to Create a Child?, “Traditionally, and biologically, having children was not something that is decided upon, but something that occurs.” Likewise, in What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman assert that until fairly recently, having children was “not, as it is steadily becoming today, one possible path to take among several equally legitimate ones.” It was “just what people did.”
Books like these emphasize free choice by foregrounding a modern could-be parent (who happens to be the author, but might as well be the reader) struggling to make this incredibly consequential, and individual, decision, in the face of a society that would make that choice for her. Against her culture’s repository of inherited givens and traditional foreclosures, freedom is when she discovers, for herself, what that right choice is. Yet what happens to “society” when it becomes the name of this “modern” problem? What if the problem isn’t new? What if it isn’t a problem at all?
Begetting and What Are Children For? paint very different pictures of our societal backdrop. For van der Lugt, the individual faces an overwhelmingly—even oppressively—pro-natalist culture. As “people started having children all around me,” she writes, “the question of whether I myself would want to have children suddenly seemed to become very important to other people.” Because “few assumptions are so stagnant, so rigid, so deeply walled in as the assumption that the decision to have children is by default a good thing,” she is invigorated when a friend suggests that having children might be fundamentally immoral, which leads her to explore the anti-natalist philosophical tradition, from Arthur Schopenhauer, Peter Wessel Zapffe, and David Benatar up to contemporary climate pessimists. Invoking Nietzsche’s “parable of the madman,” she argues that, as with the news that God is dead and we have killed him, people are not (generally) ready to receive the message that we can—and therefore must—choose whether to procreate, or not to do so at all.
By contrast, Berg and Wiseman see anti-natalism as chokingly dominant, specifically among millennials. Like “many in our generation [who] are waiting to have kids until later in life, or are forgoing it altogether,” Wiseman regrets that “my mom’s easy-won certainty has become harder for women like me to adopt.” A desire for children “had been so available to her and yet felt so alien to me.” The book has a distinct “how I learned to stop worrying” vibe, as both authors do, in the end, elect to become parents. Each chapter presents and then debunks what they take to be a plank of anti-natalist pessimism: that parenting has become unaffordable; that parenting represents patriarchal bondage; that the future has been cancelled by climate change. Each of these claims is invoked to be disputed, along with the cultural apparatus that sustains it, whether that be statistics about millennial economic well-being, a feminist tradition of maternal ambivalence novels and memoirs, or the literature of ecological collapse. For Berg and Wiseman these pessimistic narratives do damage: “Having children is steadily becoming an unintelligible practice of questionable worth,” they say, that “for many people, having and raising children is no longer understood as a necessary part of a full human life.”
Putting aside whether this is a bad thing, is the underlying claim true? When young people say they plan not to have children, Berg and Wiseman believe them. Yet when they assert that “natalist pressures on women in progressive and liberal secular society are lifting” and that “for many educated, working women . . . motherhood is no longer the ineluctable mandate it once was,” they are speaking rather narrowly, about a very thin strand of the total population. They repeatedly reference a survey they conducted of highly educated millennials (95 percent with a college degree, almost 70 percent with a master’s or higher), which is exactly the sort of pool one might expect from a survey distributed “through our social media platforms, friends, and acquaintances.” After all, the most highly educated and progressive strata of society—who tend to read books like these (and reviews of them)—is where generalizations like “people are not having children today” are truest. But what makes this group of people specific is what makes it unrepresentative. About 38 percent of American millennials have bachelor’s degrees, and one of the best predictors of fertility is educational status.
Berg and Wiseman have smart things to say about why highly educated people might not have children. There is surely something to their claim that a lot of climate fiction’s scabrous pessimism about humanity tends to be unleavened by any sense of what’s good about humanity and would make our extinction a tragedy. They are also probably right that feminist writers describing their ambivalence with motherhood tend not to discuss parenthood’s more positive aspects. Yet one might not fault these writers for “the absence of praise of motherhood,” if one didn’t regard anti-natalism as, per se, a problem. After all, in contrast to childless writers like the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and Gertude Stein, contemporary writers like Rachel Cusk or Maggie Nelson tend to derive their maternal ambivalence from actually being parents. And what is more human than complaining about the misery of life (and parenting), and despairing that it’s over too soon?
More to the point, using literary novels as a proxy for mass culture makes the book’s focus on a strikingly narrow class of highly educated millennials all the more glaring. The cultural reach of writers like Rivka Galchen, Sheila Heti, Jenny Offill, and Lydia Millet represents a rounding error in the number of parents and could-be parents who consume mom blogs, Instagram influencers, advice columns, parenting forums—extraordinarily popular and influential cultural forms that are almost definitionally pro-natalist.
Van der Lugt, by contrast, is less interested in the social forces that constrain choice—what Berg and Wiseman call the “externals” of climate change or economic insecurity that won’t-be parents often cite—than in the ways our narratives and language foreclose choice. By anatomizing our cultural pro-natalism with an insect collector’s unsentimental systematicity, her goal is “building more sensitive and sensible languages of begetting” in its place. “If there is a virtue to be associated with begetting,” she writes, “it lies in making the decision to beget conscientiously and responsibly.” Fair enough. Yet for all her rigor, Begetting can feel like a chess grandmaster playing a game against herself: neither side wins, nor ever could. We never learn if van der Lugt elects to have children, and while it feels impertinent to want to know, she opens the door with the first-person frame in the introduction. Perhaps denying us this closure is the point. Her conclusion is the kind of carefully measured and delineated position that only a philosopher could love: “not (or not yet) to say that begetting is always immoral, but that it is not always moral, and this in itself is saying a lot.”
If every generation thinks it invented sex, they are also wrong when they invent choosing childlessness. The fact is, outside of a very narrow, highly educated slice of the Global North, the vast majority of people today still become parents, and at roughly the same rate they always have. Meanwhile, it’s worth remembering that people in the past tended to exercise the same general kinds of choice-within-constraints that we have today. The difference is in degree far more than in kind.
Books like these imply or outright state that the birthrate is falling because of a new epidemic of chosen childlessness. But the data doesn’t show us that; what it shows is that people have far fewer children, one or two instead of eight. (Meanwhile the sharp decline in teen pregnancy alone accounts for half the drop in the United States’ general fertility.) Opinion columnists and reactionary politicians habitually infer rampant childlessness from the declining number of total births, but the modern childless woman (and debates about “parents” are mainly talking about women) remains the same kind of statistical outlier she has always been.
As recently as 2016, the percentage of U.S. women between ages 40 and 44 who had borne a child was 86 percent—higher than it’s been since the mid-1990s and down only from 90 percent in 1976, a time when only about 10 percent of women earned a bachelor’s degree. The rate fell as low as 80 percent in 2006, but these are still strikingly high numbers. Direct comparisons to the past are tricky, but it’s telling that in 1870, for example, only 84 percent of married American white women had borne a child, compared to 93 percent in 1835. (Imagine the panicked op-eds! Of course, among enslaved women, for whom reproduction was truly compulsory, the number was about 97 percent.) If we remember that perhaps 1 in 10 American women today struggle with infertility, it seems hard to imagine it could be much higher (at least in a reproductively free society).
The general birthrate has fallen, of course. But what should we compare today’s figures to? Berg and Wiseman write that “after declining steadily for thirty years, the national fertility rate reached an all-time low in 2020.” Yet the all-time low they refer to—1.6 live births per woman—rebounded to 1.7 in 2022, which was also the previous all-time low first reached in 1976. Isn’t an “all-time low” that’s lasted for fifty years better described as a half-century norm?
Indeed, if we go even a little farther back, the big picture—for two centuries—has been a steady and dramatic decline starting from an average of seven children in 1800 but culminating in just under two by the 1940s, well before the pill was invented. The postwar “baby boom” that followed was the anomalous (and temporary) spike that its name suggests, after which the United States essentially reverted back to the prior trendline. “After around 1950,” Vegard Skirbekk observes in Decline and Prosper!: Changing Global Birth Rates and the Advantages of Fewer Children, “the pace of fertility decline in the Western countries tapered off, eventually stagnating around or just below two children per woman.” Unless what you are really concerned with is white birthrates, immigrant populations, and women in the workplace—in the way that white panic eugenicists, a century ago, more openly admitted to being—U.S. society has already been at or below the “organic replacement rate” for essentially all of living memory (a fact that is masked by high rates of immigration).
In the transition from a high- to low-fertility society—given the massive medical, cultural, economic, and political transformations in the last fifty years (to say nothing of the last two or three centuries, or the millennia before that)—isn’t the more remarkable thing that the ratio of childlessness to childfulness has changed so little? Even today, without a narrow focus on the segment of the population who have and exercise choice by saying no, the safe assumption is that the overwhelming majority of American women will continue to become mothers, just as they always have. Anecdotes and surveys—and airy gestures to “culture”—are often very poor guides to broader demographic trends.
It’s also far from clear that people make the kind of rational, reasoned choices that our philosophers might expect of us. Take me: in my thirties, I would have described my non-parent status as a choice, but today, in my mid-forties, the census will record that I have chosen to have two children. Both of these choices are fairly typical. Millennials may choose to be childless for longer than their parents did—for a variety of obvious reasons—but when they make the opposite choice, even once, it turns out that they will be parents forever. People’s choices change much more than they tend to realize, but in this respect, they only change in one direction. Survey data can only represent how people feel now, and while we can speculate that the future will be different than the past, there are not, yet, any good statistics on future birthrates.
At the same time, we too often underestimate the choices people had in the past, or the ambivalence they felt. My parents didn’t “choose” to have a child—sometimes modern contraception fails—but, while I never asked my mother about why she hadn’t wanted children, I don’t think she would have told me about the panic, trepidation, or even regret that she must have felt, in 1978, as she struggled to imagine the very different life she was about to embark on. For one thing, when talking to me about it, decades later, she hoped to be a grandparent. For another, she would have told me about the life she did end up having. She would have assured me that I was always wanted; she would have been at pains to insist that she never regretted my existence. She would have told me one truth, but not the other one.
These are the kinds of stories parents truthfully tell their children. You don’t tend to tell them what their existence cost you, or about all the other possible futures that their existence foreclosed. But my mother had good reasons to not want kids. She was the first of the eight children with which, in theory, God had blessed her parents, but who had been far more of a blessing than they had planned on. Of course, my grandparents would say they had chosen children; my grandmother was a good Catholic and a zealous antiabortion activist. But the difficulty of their lives made it clear why they had not wanted that many children, or at least not so many so quickly. They were angry at the priests whose “rhythm method” of natural contraception delivered four children in their first four years of marriage. They felt lied to. And as the family story goes, once they had fulfilled the biblical mandate to be fruitful, they received a special dispensation from their priest to employ otherwise-forbidden contraception (after which they only had one more child). Meanwhile, my great aunt became a nun and had zero children; that, too, was a choice she made.
People may talk more about choosing childlessness than they ever have, but contraception was not invented a generation ago. Van der Lugt references Charles Knowlton’s 1832 The Fruits of Philosophy as “one of the first contraception manuals,” but in Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother, Peggy O’Donnell Heffington observes that “There have always been reasons to opt out of motherhood, and there have always been ways to do it.” The book of Genesis tells us to be fruitful and multiply, but it also specifically condemns the withdrawal method, which was at least as efficient as anything Knowlton recommended (washing out the vagina after sex with alum and vinegar). Latex condoms and the pill are certainly superior forms of contraception, but “better” is not the same as “new.” Scroll through the “History of Birth Control” Wikipedia page: isn’t it a lot longer than you expected? If what we’re interested in is the choice to become a parent—and the ethics that surround it—then what an Egyptian woman in 1850 BCE was doing, when she put honey, acacia leaves, and lint in her vagina before having sex, should be part of the conversation.
It is, of course, difficult to know how many twenty-somethings in the nineteenth century would have hoped not to have children—much less how a sexually active Silphium-user in ancient Greece would have filled out Berg and Wiseman’s survey—but historians estimate that between one in three to six nineteenth-century pregnancies ended in abortion. This choice may have been more common in the era before it was “legalized,” when it simply happened; as the province of woman, it was effectively unregulated, uncounted, and flew under the radar. It’s also much easier to quantify sex that was “fruitful” than sex that wasn’t. The public story of procreation tends to be told—by fathers—about the children that were had, rather than by women about the children whose existence was prevented. Yet unconceived children are still a “real” phenomenon, as a choice being made, even if it never becomes a number or a story.
For Heffington, the “choice” framing is primarily “useful for those who saw not having children as abnormal or deviant.” On the right, scorn for childless women harmonizes with letting mothers sleep in the beds in which they procreated: having exercised their procreative freedom, conservatives tend to leave them to face the consequences of their choices alone. But even celebrating the free choice of women to control their reproduction—or imagining that freedom into existence where it doesn’t—too often allows those with the most privileges to turn away from the many today who lack them. Fetishizing “choice” leads to triumphalism about a present whose actual freedom is neither as novel nor as evenly distributed as many imagine. As feminists of color have been saying basically forever, reproductive justice is far less about being able to choose than having good options to choose from.
Because she’s not interested in what women should choose, Heffington can tell stories about how and in what conditions women have chosen. Nothing so simple as moral clarity emerges from her account of environmental non-procreation, for example. She writes about Paul Ehrlich’s much-maligned Population Bomb with rare sympathy, because explaining why the eugenicist Zero Population Growth movement linked arms with feminism in the early 1970s allows her to describe how and why they divorced. By not fetishizing choice, she can reframe infertility as perhaps “the only medical condition that is a medical condition only if the person who has it thinks it is”; indeed, by embedding the rise of reproductive medicine within the often forgotten eugenicist panic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she can suggest that infertility’s persistence as a medically untreatable problem has something to do with the fact that “people trying to solve infertility have always had other motives,” whether racial uplift or pure profit.
Heffington also zooms out from the choice to conceive to the larger question of how children are cared for. Neither Begetting nor What Are Children For? says anything about the family form in which a child, once chosen, will be raised, but most readers will assume they mean biological reproduction within a nuclear family. Absent are adoption, aunties, “alloparents,” professional domestic laborers, plus any of the other ways that kin is made, to say nothing of wayward lives, “polymaternalism,” “mothering without mothers,” and other queer, communal, blended, found, nontraditional families. These are never part of the binary choice. Yet the nuclear family is as much a modern artifact of the Global North as the drop in general fertility itself. And if you are a parent, you will perhaps understand why the expectation that children be raised in isolation from a supporting community and kin structure—that two parents raise all the children they have, all by themselves—corresponds neatly with a historical decline in the numbers of children that parents choose to have.
Indeed, Heffington argues that this “choice” is directly downstream of broader changes in social and family structure:
In western Europe, marriage patterns began to shift in the second half of the eighteenth, as couples increasingly struck out on their own after they wed rather than joining an extended family home, which had previously been the norm. As they did, people started controlling their fertility: having fewer kids, spacing them out in longer intervals, and stopping well before nature would otherwise have forced them to. Americans made a decisive move toward what would later be called the nuclear family around the dawn of the nineteenth century, when the individualist rhetoric of the revolution found its way into their dining rooms and hearths, and Americans pulled back from their neighbors as never before.
In some communities, these arrangements survived longer. Citing the early twentieth-century childhood of civil rights icon Ella Baker as a kind of “family socialism,” Heffington describes a world “in which food, homes, family, tools, and wealth were shared by those who had more with those who had less,” and “children were passed from those who birthed them to those who could care for them without anyone raising an eyebrow.” She notes that when the American anthropologist Niara Sudarkasa arrived in Nigeria in the early 1960s to study kinship patterns among Yoruba women, she found a kind of community ethos and care that shared much in common with Baker’s childhood.”
Yet “raising children was a communal act” for even most of white U.S. history. “American colonists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ‘conceived of the family almost entirely within the context of the community,’” as Heffington cites the late Helena Wall observing; if children had parents, they sometimes had more than just one or two, and their identities could change. Adoption only became “legal” in the mid nineteenth century because, before then, it simply happened: a sister’s unwanted child became yours, if she and you wanted that, and nothing more needed be said. A much more fluid sense of who children “belonged” to prevailed in a world where high-status elders had the right (and obligation) to discipline children who weren’t “theirs,” while the labor of parenting was just as comprehensively distributed onto a variety of (usually lower-status) women, or older children.
Unlike annual fertility and birthrate figures, there exist no press releases announcing the average number of caregivers that children have. But as nodes in a distributed network of child care, “childless” aunts, cousins, siblings, grandparent, and neighbors—who may once have had or would still have small children themselves—have traditionally been the structural foundation of high-birthrate societies, as necessary to general reproduction as those who actually bore children. Seen in this light, “childlessness” might be more of a crucial aspect of begetting than an alternative to it (something even Vance can understand, albeit in the most misogynist way possible). If the nuclear family is seen as contingent and statistically anomalous as the baby boom generation’s fecundity, then history’s variety of “alternative” family arrangements come to seem more like the nuclear family’s penumbra, complement, and enabling context.
How did we come to think otherwise? Heffington observes that the rise of in vitro fertilization corresponds with a small but meaningful decline in adoption rates, as society has come more and more to equate parenthood with biological reproduction. But while Baker’s “family socialism” is certainly not the kind of high-birthrate society that reactionary white nationalists like Vance are nostalgic for, there are many reasons why we might not want to return to the gender mores and social hierarchies that made it possible to produce large numbers of children. Do reactionaries simply romanticize high birthrates because an entire gender was excused from child care? Even in the sunniest vision of communal parenting, how many forgotten spinster aunts were forced to be nurturing caregivers in exchange for room and board because, being unmarried, they had no access to secure housing of their own? How much abuse was normalized in those arrangements?
Heffington presents a rich archive for thinking about how essential childless woman have always been into reproductive society. But how applicable is that history to the kind of problems and questions so many parents face today? With no clear social consensus on how to parent, the idea of fellow citizens as co-parents surely strikes many as an unattractive prospect. (Parenting forums are packed daily with posters angry that a stranger chided their child for self-evidently bad behavior—or wondering if they overstepped by scolding a misbehaving, unattended child.) How many progressive millennials would put their daughters in the hands of Trump-voting grandparents? Generational answers to the how of parenting have arguably changed more radically than the question of whether to be a parent. Modern parenting—especially among the well-educated—tends to treated as a psychically demanding, time-intensive, extremely difficult third job. (A much-cited 2016 study found that in 1965, mothers in Western societies spent an average of 54 minutes a day on child care activities, but that college-educated mothers in 2012 were spending an average of 123.)
My grandmother once told my mother she was selfish for having only one child; my oldest-of-eight mother told me how much of her childhood she spent taking care of her own siblings (and how my grandmother had done the same thing, as a child, when her own mother was incapacitated). This was not yet named “parentification,” nor understood to be harmful to a child’s development. But my mother had a different understanding about what she wanted for her child. So do I for my twins, which is typical for my demographic cohort: I would have been happy to be childless, or to have only had one, but I have never seriously contemplated having more than what demographers call the “replacement rate.”
Why, after all, do we need to “replace” ourselves? Peter Thiel—Vance’s patron, mentor, and donor—has warned that if everyone who can become a parent only does once, the human race will round down to zero in about a thousand years. He doesn’t use the words “race suicide”; he also doesn’t mention that unborn American children are, on a global scale, counterbalanced by all the African babies being born. His “we” does not include populations whose birthrate remains well over the replacement level. “Only by excluding Africa and a great many developing countries from consideration . . . does the term ‘baby bust’ have any resonance,” as Edward Paice observes in Youthquake: Why African Demography Should Matter to the World.
Thiel probably knows about Africa. Birthrate panics express gender through race and race through gender, and I suspect that when he bemoans “a world in which people are not reproducing themselves,” it’s his antipathy for Africans talking rather than his ignorance. These are also issues of labor: I suspect that Vance knows who tends to care for children like his when people like him and his wife are at work. For the highly educated, dual-income households in the Global North, whose reproduction tends to be of most concern in public discourse, lower-class immigrant women and women of color are increasingly and overwhelmingly the care workers who hold things together. For the right, they are the problem to be solved; for everyone else, they are the solution to the child care shortfall we don’t tend to talk about.
If the United States won’t throw open its borders to anyone who wants to come, another option would be for men to do more primary child care. Both modest and radical, this has the benefit of being something that is already happening.
The “traditional” gendered division of labor is often defended by a kind of biological determinism: men simply aren’t designed for child care! For this reason, it’s unsurprising that utopian feminists and family abolitionists from Shulamith Firestone to Sophie Lewis tend to see biology itself as a core part of the problem, something which must transcended alongside everything else. Taking our reproductive “nature” seriously can feel like conceding too much to the world’s Vances; modern men and women, we might think, have little to learn from a deep evolutionary past whose world was so different from our own.
The eminent evolutionary biologist, feminist, and grandmother Sarah Blaffer Hrdy sees things very differently. In Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies, she argues not only that men are much more biologically suited to be caregivers than we might have ever imagined, but—more transgressively—that there is nothing particularly “natural” about the “traditional” reproductive division of labor. Even to frame it this way, she thinks, is to fundamentally misunderstand what our nature, as humans, is. It is precisely our creation of cultures—our ability to invent and re-invent new ways to survive and thrive in a constantly changing world—that makes us the kind of animals we are, along with a radically flexible archive of latent genetic potential. Human nature, in short, is the ability to be many very different things. Biology is not a prison but a key.
A good Darwinist, Hrdy opens the book by noting she had always taken for granted, in her training (and research), how sexual selection produced a rigid division of labor between the sexes. “For over 200 million years that mammals have existed,” she writes, “exclusively male care of babies from birth onward has never happened before.” For this reason, “traditional” cultural expectations seemed firmly rooted in biological fact: lactation is what makes mammals mammals, after all, so mammalian child care is predictably a mother’s affair. Especially before the industrial production of baby formula, there was essentially no alternative to breastmilk. Even today, devoted male parenting remains an exception to the rule, and precisely as associated with the urban Global North (with its dual-income nuclear households and limited options for child care) as the decline in birthrate itself.
In other words, even a trailblazing feminist biologist like Hrdy had never seriously questioned the idea that, as Margaret Mead put it, “motherhood is a biological necessity, but fatherhood a social invention.” But when and where something as evolutionarily unprecedented as the devoted male primary caregiver has become culturally normal—even without a mother altogether—the neurophysiological facility with which men have taken to the endeavor, Hrdy argues, requires revising our scientific understanding of how parenting is gendered. What blew Hrdy’s mind—much of the book is written in a first-person frame to emphasize the scientist evolving with the science—was how many biological responses to parenting occur in men, in response to changing social cues. As “endocrinologists documented changes in hormone levels that resembled those in mothers,” she notes, “neuroscientists started to scan the brains of primary-caretaking men [and] found that their brains . . . responded the same way a mother’s would.”
Changes in culture and social structure may have put men “into the home,” but nature was waiting for them when they got there. Not only is it possible for men’s brains to respond and change in the same ways as secondary “alloparent” caretakers—the neuroendocrinological shifts most often seen with grandparents and other non-primary caretakers—but patterns associated with matrescence itself can be found in men as well, should they take on primary caretaker roles. (For this reason, Lucy Jones’s recent Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood contains a section on men, covering much of the same science.) What makes the greatest difference, it turns out, is not gender—nor even childbirth and lactation, though they do make a difference—but time: The longer a man spends in intimate caretaking proximity to an infant, the more this “father time” will rewire his brain. At her most utopian, Hrdy ventures to suggest that a world of nurturing dads would represent more than just the tapping of an untapped labor resource; if, as many people say, so many of our social problems boil down to men being men, a different biological constitution of masculinity represents a revolutionary shift in human society.
Much of Father Time is devoted to the story of why scientists never bothered to investigate this possibility. Since Darwin, when patriarchal scientists looked to our primate relatives to understand what was “natural” for humans, they saw mammals for whom paternal care was extremely unusual and drew the congenial but erroneous conclusion that women were simply evolved to do child care in ways that men were not. But as even Darwin noticed (though promptly forgot, as Hrdy points out), human beings share a great deal, genetically, with our hermaphroditic fish ancestors, and that library of genetic potential matters. While neuroscientists often privilege the most distinctively human neural regions, in the cortex, so many of the things we do the most—eat, sleep, mate, and parent—do not derive from our proudly Homo sapiens heritage. These oldest and most “animal” behaviors tend to be governed by the hypothalamus, where we are most like our most distant and fishy ancestors.
Hrdy contends we are now in an evolutionary moment where the relationship between genes and phenotypes is being radically revised. Citing Mary Jane West-Eberhard’s wasp studies, she observes that genes are often the “followers rather than the initiators of evolutionary change”; rather than the kind of “operating system” that an analogy with computer code would suggest, our genes might be better understood as a toolkit of inherited and latent possibilities for organisms to draw from as the world around them changes. Nothing is more natural, in other words, than for what is “natural” in a species to change (and to do so by reviving genetic possibilities that we might tend to associate with our non-primate evolutionary ancestors). When the world is changed—or when we’ve changed the material conditions of the world in which we reproduce—our “nature” is to evolve to thrive in our new context.
What does make humans at least somewhat unique, among primates, is that we are particularly hardwired for culture, for building self-replicating societies that develop and teach social responses to changing environmental conditions. These cultures may change faster than the range of options our genes provide for us to pull from, and fathers and mother do not, in a biological sense, parent in precisely the same ways. But if we are “supremely indoctrinable apes,” it makes no sense to describe our cultures as opposed to nature. It is our nature to be enculturated, just as the function of our cultures is to push our nature forward, creating biologically distinct forms of human being as a result of our integration into ever-changing environments.
At the highest level of generalization, Hrdy tells an evocative and compelling—if basically speculative—story about how learning to nurture made us human. Babies gave us culture, she argues, because they taught us empathy and socialization: “in the process of growing up reliant on eliciting care from others as well as mother . . . little humans began to develop their inordinately other-regarding sensibilities.” It was in the harsh Pleistocene conditions where our branch of the mammalian tree formed that infants first learned to cultivate caretakers other than their biological parents; as they became effective and empathetic charmers, adults, in turn, developed new capacities to be charmed children who were not their own. Perhaps, Hrdy suggests, this is how we learned to imagine ourselves collectively, and to behave as if the well-being of other children than our own was also important. It may even be that as we transformed ourselves into caregivers, we created modern human society as we know it.
Maybe we’ll do it again. As we face the dawning of a climate-changed world, defined by very different environmental conditions than for literally all of recorded human history—an almost unspeakably omnipresent context for all of these books—one response to what is coming is to stand athwart history and call for a return to whenever or whatever we take to be the moment when things were normal, or what we once expected normal to be. What I take from Hrdy’s much more expansive view of human possibility is a strange sort of confidence in futures we’ve never seen or imagined. Perhaps this is her perspective, as a grandmother who has seen the world change so much, rather than a millennial faced with the sudden prospect that it will. But of course the world will end, and begin again, just like it always has. Like dying and being born, it’s what makes us what we are.
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