Updated 17 October 2026 22:18
It has long seemed self-evident that women care for babies and men do other things.
Hasn’t it always been so? But come the 21st 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.”