Why Fathers Matter - Dr Anna Machin

Why do we need to change the narrative around fathers?

We need to change the narrative about fathers partly because the one we have at the moment is a complete fiction, which is kind of made up from many myths and stories we've been told in our culture over the years about the role of fathers, about their importance to their children, about how they become fathers, how they learn the knowledge to become fathers. And actually, all of this is based upon absolutely zero academic research, absolutely no observational research at all. It's just stories that we've told each other, anecdotes. And because of that, the myths we've built up around fathers are just that, they're myths. They're not actually true, and they are very damaging to fathers, they're damaging to men, and they're also damaging to their families. Um, so the work that I do and those of my colleagues around the world, we do it because we actually want the facts to be out there. We want the stories we tell about fathers to actually be accurate.

Which myths do you wish that you could put into the ground and fully bury about dads?

Uh, the first one I would bury is that fathers, men, are not instinctive parents. So we have this story, and I hear it a lot still from the dads that I study, right before they have children, which is that like mom is an instinctive parent. She's somehow like magically able to do this, whereas dads have to learn. And because of that, they tend to see what mom does as a gold standard of parenting, and whatever they do as a secondary bit of a failure, and actually, it's not true. And we'll probably go into that a little bit later. But we've, we've discovered that men are as biologically primed to parent as women are, which as an evolutionary anthropologist makes perfect sense to me. But that's probably one of the biggest ones because it really undermines a man's confidence that he feels that actually, if he just goes with what his gut is telling him, he will be okay. He really, a lot of them lack a lot of confidence, and they do very much belittle themselves in relation, for example, to what mom is doing.

Yeah, it's, uh, there is a demonization of fatherhood, and I wanna get into this later as well, but I wonder how much of it is a cope in response to single-parent households and us trying to not make children who grow up in single-parent households feel like they're falling behind. Because if we minimize the impact that fathers have on children's rearing, then the people who do grow up with just mom don't feel like they're missing out as, o- on as much. And this is a trend that we see, you know, uh, it's the tyranny of the minority is somehow sometimes how it's categorized. But yeah, it's so, so fascinating. One of the other things, uh, William Costello, who's one of David Buss's students out here, told me a story that you taught him about how fathers saved the human race for extinction because babies' heads got too big.