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The biology of dads

aeon.co

201–210 of 285 posts

Re: The biology of dads

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2020/comm/chil... I didn't expect to see similar proportions of children both living only with mother and only with father. In fact, 12 to 17 years of age is 44% only with father versus 36.6% only with mother. Not only do more teens live with their father only, but only 20% live with both parents?

> only 20% live with both parents That's not the correct conclusion, the percentages add up to 100% for both the single mother and single father parent cohort, but it doesn't say anything about kids who are living with both parents.

Oh, yes, I grossly misinterpreted what that meant. It’s “of the children living with one parent, these are how the ages are distributed within mother only and father only households.”

Re: The biology of dads

#202
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple months old baby is not capable to be manipulative. That requires reasoning, predicting and emphating abilities they don't have.

Deception doesn’t require consciousness or reasoning. I feel like there are many different personal definitions for manipulation here and people are just disagreeing indirectly on that.

Deception and manipulation are much different things. In any cases, babies lack the ability to lie or pretend.

You really need to stretch definitions to absurd to get near to deception too. They cry cause discomfort and really have no idea how you will react or what you will think f about that.

Babies are dumb and simple biological mechanisms from this point of view.

Re: The biology of dads

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might have missed the point of my post. It's laughable because it is so far from reality, not because the ideals are something to be laughed at.

I would argue that American males are closer to the warrior archetype than any other democracy. We certainly have fought more actual wars than any other advanced nation, we have the best combat athletes in the world, many of us hunt, shoot and practice warrior like skills. I am hard pressed to think of any other modern society that comes even close.

95% of your population is _not_ fighting wars and is not manly in the slightest. You just have allocated a sickening chunk of your significant GDP to the military machine.

If you are looking for a high percentage hardass peoples I'd look in the baltic regions, Russia comes to mind. Some African nations too. Americans are lazy and fat and know no hardship. Which is fine. Good actually. Just don't parade the warrior archetype.

Re: The biology of dads

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe remembering the fathers that after his kid is born there is a "hell" time of mostly 3-4 months where the baby will be adapting to you and vice-versa. Then the baby sleeps gets longer and you can have 6-8h of sleep. New fathers: Hold tight, after 3-4 months it gets way easier.

In my experience it's a lot longer than 3-4 months. Or perhaps it's hell for 3-4 months, then just purgatory for another couple of years. I have a 4-yo and 2.5-yo and my sleep has still not recovered. Just last night one of them woke up screaming, and this continues to happen about weekly. Being woken up in the middle of the night is one thing, being woken up in the middle of the night to the banshee screams of a you…

Seconding this. It wasn't until she turned four that we could assume that we would sleep through the night, instead of vice versa. Takes a long time for the exception to become the rule.

Re: The biology of dads

#205
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but at that point it's kind of out of your control. You've probably provided 95% of the guidance you could have provided and they're almost grown-ups. I understand the attachment, but at some point you have to let go and life is full of risks (and interesting things). Though I doubt my reasoning will assuage any parental fears :-)

> Though I doubt my reasoning will assuage any parental fears :-) Yeah how many teenagers do you parent? :)

None, yet. I do consider that I know myself well enough but we'll see in a bunch of years :-))

Re: The biology of dads

#206
I wasn't aware you could just give someone oxytocin via a nasal spray. That seems like it would be a pretty effective antidepressant. Sometimes I really feel like I just need a hug... Why don't they sell that stuff over the counter?

Re: The biology of dads

#207
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making a pretty big leap of assumption here. - he didn't say that he had biological kids - the step daughter is his own daughter, they aren't two different things - he didn't say that if he does have biological kids, that he didn't tear up at their graduation - he also didn't specify the ages of any of his kids, so there's no reason to assume that any others have graduated I'm curious as to where those assumpt…

Also, it's not like we're born with DNA testers. There's no reason why our instincts actually know the difference between our biological kids and others we've been with, played the same role with, and raised the same way.

That has been found to be empirically not true. As always, there is a distribution (see Homicide by Daly and Wilson, for example). Now, if we know by instinct, smell, or just because we know...

Re: The biology of dads

#208
post #58

"They seemed like ideal infant-caregivers: calm, gentle, patient and sensitive. They didn’t seem like men you would go to battle with. In fact, they were the very antithesis of the warriors and athletes – think Maximus, Achilles or Michael Jordan – often associated with a masculine ideal." I became a father quite a bit before most of my friends, and so was the butt of some jokes about masculinity for the way I parent…

> They didn’t seem like men you would go to battle with... Maximus, Achilles or Michael Jordan – often associated with a masculine ideal.

Funny how often the “masculine ideal” gets ret-conned in ways that say more about the person making the argument than anything else. Achilles is hardly insensitive——the turning point of the Iliad is his mourning over the body of Patroclus.

Re: The biology of dads

#209
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Re: The biology of dads

#210
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is great. In my comment, I almost mentioned that because of how much earlier people historically had children (than most Americans and Europeans do now), most of the people we think of as "masculine ideals" throughout history would have been (were) fathers. The number of times I read about a famous historical figure on Wikipedia, and they mention almost as an afterthought that they had 6 kids... But I didn't wan…

I’m not sure who “Maximus” is—if the author is talking about the movie Gladiator, the whole premise of that story is that Maximus is a loving family man who kills the illegitimate Emperor who had his wife and son killed. Achilles had a son who fought in the war against Troy. Hector, who Achilles fought and killed, also had a family, and that’s a key part of his portrayal by Homer. He’s the loyal soldier who fights to…

Yup, just posted about this myself before reading further down. The whole line is a bizarre illiteracy that is, I think, unfortunately common.
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