Darby Saxbe

And the secondary caregiver dads looked like heterosexual.

Whoa.

So it kind of shows you how, again, adaptable the brain can be, right?

That men can build these primary caregiver brains.

Yeah.

Yeah, so it seems like couples fare better when they have a more egalitarian balance.

But what's interesting is that parents are pretty bad predictors of what that's going to look like.

We did a study where we brought couples into the lab.

These were the couples in our longitudinal sample.

And we said, what's your plan for splitting up baby care?

We gave them a worksheet.

We asked them to sort of estimate on a scale for each of 10 different baby care tasks and

And then we brought them back six months after birth and said, well, who's doing what?

And in every case, they had overestimated how much dad was going to do before birth.

Dad thought that he was going to do more.

And then after birth, he thought that he was doing more.

So dads were sort of estimating a higher contribution at both time points, but the couple was also just overestimating how much of an even split they were going to achieve.

Yes.

And I think it's hard to optimize a balance ahead of time.

We were not surprised, actually, that moms ended up doing more after birth because there are a lot of reasons for that.