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Dad brains: How fatherhood rewires the male mind

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191–200 of 218 posts

Re: Dad brains: How fatherhood rewires the male mind

#191

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Before kiddos I took the apriori belief that it would kinda suck. The belief was unassailable because I thought, evolutionarily, if it was fun to have kids it wouldn't be fun to make them - otherwise we'd endure unfun "making" because we know the having would be fun. And you were right. Subjectively , having and raising kids is fun. Objectively , it's not fun at all, but your mind convinces you that it is otherwise n…

So, what is "objective" fun. (Vs enjoying your subjective experience). Having kids is not "objectively fun" even though its "subjectively fun" because "my brain convinced me I'm having fun?" Pull at that thread and you'll land on the central mistake I made with my prior beliefs, and also a ton of things like, you know, stoic philosophy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and mindfulness. etc etc. The subjective is all you…

  Return to baseline happiness with some temporary dips does not match "you're not having fun stop believing you are".
The "temporary dip" is the entire time you have the children, let's say 20 years or so, and it's a pretty serious drop, not just a small blip. I'm not telling anyone to stop believing, it's just nature's way of making sure that we keep procreating and at the same time a very interesting phenomenon to observe. Nothing wrong with it.

Re: Dad brains: How fatherhood rewires the male mind

#192

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Four things are needed. Stereotypically they're divided Dad: Protect and provide Mom: Nurture and nourish You could do it differently, but that only works if you swap one, not share half half. Both have been eroded. Kids are raised by strangers, our food is crap, you can't warn each other about dangers cause that's somehow an insult and a single income doesn't pay the bills. The goal seems to be to set men and women…

"The goal seems to be to set men and women against each other." Is that not easy to disregard? I certainly feel like my wife and I disregarded it raising our kids.

If you've never bought into it, that the other sex is to blame, then I'm sure you teamed up quite smoothly.

But I've seen numerous examples, and in my own marriage we also had to figure this stuff out because as kids we had bought into a lot of (never quite spoken out loud but loudly hinted at) unhealthy messages...

Re: Dad brains: How fatherhood rewires the male mind

#193

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If I may attempt to clarify my stance. Stereotypically, on average, interpolate for your marriage and all that, if a man does a task/role, he has the ball. He doesn't share the ball. Doing X is my job? Aight, my job. No touchy. Mine. I've got this. Wife starts doing X. Boom, clarity lost. I know, I know, shades of grey and all that. But on average, divide it clearly and you know who is responsible for what. You did a…

> if a man does a task/role, he has the ball. He doesn't share the ball. Doing X is my job? Aight, my job. No touchy. Mine. I've got this. > Wife starts doing X. Boom, clarity lost. These seems to reflect a strong division of labor. And it has me wondering if that work might be ever divided on ideological grounds. Either of those would be the opposite of what works for me. They're also the opposite of what I want. Wh…

Reality is the final judge. If you get the seamless integration to work well and it's what you want, go for it. If it doesn't, revert to the default setting. Vanilla grows on you, it really does

Re: Dad brains: How fatherhood rewires the male mind

#194
post #120

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I can't speak for the person you're responding to, but my default reaction to people who say things like this is that they probably don't have kids, and if they do, I wonder about the well-being of their family life. I don't mean that to be insulting at all. It seems completely incompatible with being a family- or community-involved person. And what's society without kids? Whether you're a parent or not, we need kids…

I have kids and I am quite the opposite. My interest in them is very occasional. Teaching anything takes a lot of work and they're typically not interested anyway. Most of the experiences they have at school, I have no real insight on. I like to see their interests develop, and I notice that my youngest would probably enjoy partnering with me on some things, but that is it. I'm sure that puts me on some spectrum, but…

There are tribes where the mom cares for the sons until they're eight and then the boys are raised by the men from there on. Joining in the tasks the men do daily.

That said, a lot of people don't bond for the sake of bonding, but bond over a shared task (one that really needs doing, not an invented game that mimicks a task..)

Re: Dad brains: How fatherhood rewires the male mind

#195

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Yah. But did you skip leg day to take your lady to the hospital ?

At those two days I skipped it, but the rest I trained at the squat rack in my basement after every night feed of them.

Respect.

Re: Dad brains: How fatherhood rewires the male mind

#196

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Worse ability to fend off competition too?

Disagree, my desire and ability to defend my children has gone way up. My desire to go and conquer and carry off other women has gone down.

Your baseline T correlates with your ability to add and maintain muscle mass, not just your motivation to get into conflict.

Re: Dad brains: How fatherhood rewires the male mind

#197
post #183

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Sadly, we are barely civilized. A hundred-thousand of years need to pass to make hormones civilization compatible. We have prehistoric hardware -hormones- and modern software -law, rites, supposed behaviour. Current law is like a dog slow virtual machine running under a Pentium MMX and some software on it. Picture subleq/muxleq running Eforth under 233 MHZ based CPU running an ASCII Art Mandelblot with integers . At…

Speak for yourself, it seems like you’re really invested in something biological being “at fault” for something. You’re thread sitting which is never a good look, but worse still when you are spouting some kind of personal philosophy held up as science.

Is not personal philosphy but actual science.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/403855473_Sex_diffe...

Now keep your Humanities away from actual facts, please.

BTW, my favourite pop-science Mathematician it's a woman and the subject she loves most it's DIscrete Math, something directly related to my beloved computers too. She has no issues with the rest of branches but as I said the one she feels more confortable with it's graphs, nodes and whatnot.

Re: Dad brains: How fatherhood rewires the male mind

#198
post #180

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You have no idea what you are talking about and it shows. Pop science, you say, from Jorge Laborda? https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Jorge-... American Social Pseudosciences should shut up their Sokal-like mouth and learn the basics for once and all. They did tests and trials on how human males and females do orient themselves on distinct environments. Females used points and clues from the envir…

Yepp, that blog link you posted, from whoever this Jorge Laborda may be, is just 3 paragraphs recapping snippets from that book, it's right in the first line: "Why Men Don't Listen & Women Can't Read Maps", by Allan Pease. Since you like to appeal the authority of Some Dude, let me give it to you straight from the "About the Author" section from goodreads.com[1] of your sources. Are you ready? > Allan Pease is an Aus…

If you think different sets of hormones do not condition tons of behaviours you are deluded, buddy.

It affects me as a man, too, be highly educated or not. As I said, one of my favourite recreational Math authors (like Conway or Gardner) it's a woman, and her favourite Math branch it's discrete Math. Now, please, understand that she was pefectly able to understand the rest, as Mathematician men are able to the same with subjects they don't like much, too.

PD: women on average have a more developed language area than men. They can process and send more complex information like men on a single sentence from subtones in every word. If men use more 'complex' language than women on average it's because women already told everything implicitly with every subtone in words driving subtle but different messages women are able to understand but men do not.

So, most of what men do it's to add syntactic sugar while women have a much superior context aware syntax.

Re: Dad brains: How fatherhood rewires the male mind

#199
post #125

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Men and trans women actually can feed babies. It's just a matter of hormones. The line between genders is more blurry than you'd think.

Whatever scant liquids these males happen to squeeze out is insufficient for feeding, and is a risk to the infant.

It's literally been documented that it works. No need to be transphobic.

Re: Dad brains: How fatherhood rewires the male mind

#200
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yepp, that blog link you posted, from whoever this Jorge Laborda may be, is just 3 paragraphs recapping snippets from that book, it's right in the first line: "Why Men Don't Listen & Women Can't Read Maps", by Allan Pease. Since you like to appeal the authority of Some Dude, let me give it to you straight from the "About the Author" section from goodreads.com[1] of your sources. Are you ready? > Allan Pease is an Aus…

If you think different sets of hormones do not condition tons of behaviours you are deluded, buddy. It affects me as a man, too, be highly educated or not. As I said, one of my favourite recreational Math authors (like Conway or Gardner) it's a woman, and her favourite Math branch it's discrete Math. Now, please, understand that she was pefectly able to understand the rest, as Mathematician men are able to the same w…

YOU are delusional, amigo.

I literally give you a link that points out that what you're basing your beliefs on, is from some motivational speaker, pop-science, borderline con-artist author.

And you reply with... more anecdotes. Do you not see the irony? Are you incapable of reflecting on this?

There are of course some statistical biological (hormonal, physiological, whatever) differences between women and men. But there are also statistical biological differences between... men! And we are not grouping men like this, except in caste systems or believers in racism. So why should we do this for women?

Because it's extremely convenient for people like you, to have women classified as child-rearers and general house servants, and then retroactively explain that this is "natural" with anecdata and pseudoscience, and never having to make any real attempt at gender equality.

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