Darby Saxbe

Mom is exhausted and already feeling like she's doing too much.

We actually did a study about this in my lab where we brought the pregnant couples in and asked them to map out how they plan to divide baby care.

Then we brought them back after the baby's birth, did the same scale.

And in every case, moms were doing more after birth than the couple predicted.

Yeah.

So, and that's not, it's like, it was surprising to us as researchers, but every single mom I've talked to about this is like, that's the least surprising thing I've ever heard, right?

Because you can have these beautifully egalitarian intentions, but there are some biological realities in the early months.

And so I think it can be challenging for dads to fully participate unless the couple is really proactive about it.

Yeah, it's a great question.

I mean, it's a really important question because there are all these gaps in our research.

And so much parenting research, like I said, is focused on moms, but even more of it is focused on cisgendered heterosexual parents.

But we are very lucky to have a lab in L.A.

because we were able to get a really ethnically, socioeconomically, racially diverse sample.

It's actually changed a lot.

And for 95% of human history, we lived like hunter-gatherers.

So we were foraging, occasionally hunting.

Women actually brought in more calories than men in many societies.

And so, you know, the whole sort of like when people say like working mothers are unnatural, it's like, no, mothers have always worked.

And in fact, they've been major generators of income, calories, resources.

And so the model in hunter-gatherer societies is a lot of cooperative care.