Father Time

How Nurturing Is Natural for Men

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Print ISBN:
  9780691238791
• Subtopic: Biology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691286273
• Index: Biological Sciences

A sweeping account of male nurturing, explaining how and why men are biologically transformed when they care for babies

It has long seemed self-evident that women care for babies and men do other things. Hasn’t it always been so? When evolutionary science came along, it rubber-stamped this venerable division of labor: mammalian males evolved to compete for status and mates, while females were purpose-built to gestate, suckle, and otherwise nurture the victors’ offspring. But come the twenty-first century, increasing numbers of men are tending babies, sometimes right from birth. How can this be happening? Puzzled and dazzled by the tender expertise of new fathers around the world—several in her own family—celebrated evolutionary anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy set out to trace the deep history of male nurturing and explain a surprising departure from everything she had assumed to be “normal.”

In Father Time, Hrdy draws on a wealth of research to argue that this ongoing transformation in men is not only cultural, but profoundly biological. Men in prolonged intimate contact with babies exhibit responses nearly identical to those in the bodies and brains of mothers. They develop caring potential few realized men possessed. In her quest to explain how men came to nurture babies, Hrdy travels back through millions of years of human, primate, and mammalian evolution, then back further still to the earliest vertebrates—all while taking into account recent economic and social trends and technological innovations and incorporating new findings from neuroscience, genetics, endocrinology, and more. The result is a masterful synthesis of evolutionary and historical perspectives that expands our understanding of what it means to be a man—and what the implications might be for society and our species.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• More praise for Father Time
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Fathers Then and Fathers Now
• 2. Rethinking Man’s “Unfortunate Birthright”
• 3. Opening the Floodgates
• 4. Daddy Brains
• 5. Darwin and the Broody Capon
• 6. The Transformative Power of Babies
• 7. Primate Precursors to Caring Males
• 8. Pleistocene Emergence of an Unusual Ape
• 9. Changing Men’s Minds
• 10. The Cultural Construction of Fatherhood
• 11. Shifting Opinions on the Way to the Present
• 12. Twenty-First-Century Convergence of Men and Babies
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• References
• Index