Darby Saxbe

And that can include fathers.

So there's all this cultural variability in how much men are doing.

But in hunter-gatherer societies, you sort of have these egalitarian social structures because you sort of don't want to compete for resources because everything is shared.

And you have some flexibility around gender roles because women actually are bringing in as many calories as men.

They are really important resource gatherers, which is why it's funny when people are like, women shouldn't work.

They should just mother.

They've been working since the beginning of time.

Like we have this strange blip where women sort of stayed home and were specialized to the domestic realm.

Yeah.

So going back, though, to I talked to an anthropologist who studied this hunter-gatherer tribe called the Aka, and the men are super hands-on with the babies.

They're holding babies.

I think they're within arm's reach of their babies about 47% of the time.

Mm-hmm.

Exactly.

Like, you'll see a group of men hanging out, and they're drinking wine, and they're all holding babies.

Cute.

You know?

Yes, the Kipsigas.

And if you think about how much fathering are men doing, it's like, well, how does the culture make its living?

In the Kipsigas, which is a different tribe where there's this totally different style of fathering, there are all these prohibitions against men picking up babies and interacting with babies too much in the first year after birth.