In particular I’ve been shocked at how many fathers do almost nothing in terms of childcare. It’s a shame that there isn’t a more general expectation on fathers to look after their kids at least to some extent, and that not looking after your kids isn’t considered socially unacceptable.

I don’t believe this is just the fault of “men”, but I think it comes from a surprising lack on understanding in terms of how much work looking after kids is. It’s pretty much a 16 hour a day job for the first few years. If you don’t have someone to help it’s almost unbearable.

That said, I agree it's a shame when it actually plays out that way and our society as a whole (and even fathers in modern society) lose out.

Fathers have multiple physical adaptations for fatherhood that are very important. The idea that fathers experience no hormonal or physical changes is not scientific.

Much like mothers, though, if they remove themselves from the proximity of their children these effects cease.

In summary, men are more likely than women to be reproductively successful with a low effort child rearing strategy. Is it the best strategy overall in modern society? I don't think so, but you can see how we'd evolve that way.

1. Neither the premise of spreading genes with "little effort" nor the bit about incentivization is actually true unless you have a very odd definition "less time". While lifelong monogamy may not be an obvious strategy, communal child rearing that involves fathers has been the norm for most of recorded history in all civilizations, with poor and absent fathering nearly always being villified unless needs of the community outweighed it.

2. Lots of women have multiple children, no problem. Many elect to go back through it again. This idea that pregnancy wracks every woman is just ridiculous.

It's not even clear we evolved that way. Looking at our near genetic relatives, they don't actually do things the way you're describing and communal living isn't "a group of females desperately trying to avoid pregnancy as males raid and ravage them."

If you want ~100CE greek doctors to be more inclusive you're gonna need a time machine.

Sometimes reality gets in the way of ideals. Men, for example, are pitifully bad at lactating.

Given initial conditions like that- things quickly fall into the familiar pattern.

I can't produce milk but I can do everything else. So in the middle of the night when the breast is done if baby is unsettled I can take care of this, which can take ages.

Sharing this exhausting and sometimes excruciating workload is a big part of parenthood here. It is also ultimately highly rewarding; editing this as she's just about fallen asleep in my arms, gorgeous thing.

Giving birth is hard from a few weeks and arguably months before to a few weeks and or months after. That naturally tends to taking a few months off and hey infant needs a lot of care so when not extend that a little. Add a second pregnancy at 1-3 years after the fist and it's easy to end up with a stay at home mom.

Now, this is far from the only pattern, but it is common for real biological reasons.

I merely took objection to the exclusionary term that is motherhood, because in this context I deal with screaming babies a lot - as a father. That is not "motherhood", it is "parenthood".

Unless it's all about single women bringing their babies up alone? I saw no reference to that in TFA.

It's a bit like craftsman vs craftsperson, not that I really wanted to go there. But there are real reasons for using more inclusionary terms even when the traditional "feel more natural" (to the speaker / author) or whatever.

The AAP and WHO both endorse this position, and I can't find a reputable leading health org that argues otherwise.

The more I read about the basis of the claim though the more confused I get.

Parenting advice sites all point out that it helps child immunity. But the underlying studies are based on the ingestion of immunoglobulin, which doesn't even survive digestion. So essentially it protects the esophagus against waterborne illnesses, ie, mainly those no longer common in the developed world. That definitely makes sense in terms of evolutionarily-relevant child mortality threats, but that context is always omitted.

Or you get claims of improved cognition, then find meta-analysis that can't reproduce any results after five years.

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2017/03/...

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/04/the-cas...

Parenting guidance seems full of replication crisis issues, even in the medical literature. That's been the most eye opening thing about becoming a parent... people's strong interest in parenting makes it hard to explain the poor state of the data on the topic.

You also must consider all the leukocytes in breast milk. Both maternal and infant infections cause huge increases in leukocyte production. There is a theory (hard to test) that babies like to stick their hands in mom's mouth while breastfeeding so that mom gets baby germs, and then mom will make appropriate leukocytes. Bizarrely, baby backwash (into the breast! while feeding!) also leads to maternal immunological response. Fun fact: breast milk from the same mom can vary in color dramatically (from blue to white to yellow) and a lot of that has to do with the contents, with yellow in particular generally having a high leukocyte content.

I'm a little biased. We got a lot of information pushing us not to supplement from health professionals and organizations, and nothing on the risks of failure to thrive or the case for supplementation. We had a calorie deficit no one caught, because measuring breast milk consumption is opaque, and no one talks about low consumption with the same fervor. They should though, it's an issue that drove an entire industry of wet nurses before formula (who were in turn criticised as unnatural in their day). They say breast if possible, but never detail how to tell the difference between just doing the hard work, or just banging your head against an immovable wall.

This inconsistency in advice, even though calorie deficits are incredibly dangerous, and more clearly so,[0] worries me there's a bias against technological development that keeps us from giving advice about both risks (or really much at all about the more important risk here).

[0] insofar as there are conflicting metaanalyses on breastmilk, but the signal is far stronger here, no one is publishing research suggesting failure to thrive is no big deal.

https://www.mdanderson.org/publications/focused-on-health/oc...

If you click through to read the underlying research you get a massive jumble of conflicted studies, including several meta-analyses that fail to find any significant results.

This gets reduced to "breastfeeding lowers the risk of breast cancer" in parenting lit without any context about how radically uncertain this area is.

Becoming a parent and actually reading the underlying lit has nearly destroyed my faith in medical research.

Of course we can all agree that in ideal circumstances, breast milk is the best thing for babies, its unique biologically adapted (even between feeds) formula is impossible to mass manufacture and biologicals like leukocytes are impossible to add in.

However, if the mother does not produce enough milk, then failure to thrive concerns take over, supplement.

If mother is post partum, dad can take over and supplement.

People just eat the tagline these days instead of doing a basic cost/benefit analysis and thinking a little bit for themselves.

Add to that the seeming acceptance of bad science and you end up with anti-vaxxers.

The “breast is best” narrative is partly an outgrowth of the Nestle boycott. In developed nations, the difference between breastfeeding and formula feeding is pretty minimal. Minor immune benefits for breastfeeding. Minor weight benefits for formula feeding (formula fed babies gain weight more rapidly as nutrition is always available). However, in developing nations, (powdered) formula is far less safe due to lack of sanitation and formula producers have gotten a lot of justified criticism over their marketing campaigns in developing nations.

In an ideal case, breastfeeding seems strictly superior in terms of the baby’s health even in developed nations. The benefits of breastfeeding vs sanitary formula are small but seem to exist. However, the ideal case is often not the actual situation.

My problem with the lactation advocacy is that many advocates ignore actual difficulties with breastfeeding. Low/insufficient milk supply, pain during feeding, inability to share the burden with a partner, sleep impact, isolation (for women uncomfortable with public breastfeeding or living in places where this is frowned on), career impact, etc. It’s often presented as if any issues are failings of the mother. “Pain? You’re definitely doing it wrong. Supply issues? Just keep breastfeeding exclusively and your underweight baby will be fine. The fact that your baby is in the 1st percentile for weight at 3 months and always hungry doesn’t mean you need to supplement.” Etc.

https://fedisbest.org/

Of course, some people see that as an anti-breastfeeding movement.

The rhetoric around breastfeeding is insane. Trying to do legitimate research online about it is almost impossible.

My least favorite part of breastfeeding advocacy is when people say it's free. Yes, it's free, as long as you ignore the extra time it takes for the mother that can't be shared with other caregivers (unless you pump, which takes more time), extra food you have to eat, the pump and various accessories, and the time spent cleaning all the little pump parts. Yeah, other than that it's free.

It's 2018, you have the power to control when you (or your female SO) get pregnant (you have had this for quite a while, actually). There's no logical reason to "oops, now I'm a stay at home <whatever>".

The brain is exceptionally good at repressing bad memories. The effects of lack of sleep on memory / brain function might play a big part of it. (Just speculating from personal experience, I have no formal knowledge).

BUT -- I do think it's actually useful to talk about "parents having it all", because all those breadwinner men with stay-at-home wives missed out on a lot of quality bonding time with their kids. They may have thought they had it all, but they actually missed out on developing real, meaningful relationships with their kids.

You can't raise children in absentia. If you're concentrating on your career you simply can't dedicate yourself to raising children.

So, no fathers haven't always had it all because having it all is a practical impossibility in almost all walks of life.