Dr. Darby Saxbe

There's evidence that when kids have more father playtime, they're more confident with their peers and they're more comfortable taking risks.

So it's a really healthy form of play.

And, you know, I always want to be careful as a researcher.

I never want to be like a biological essentialist.

Like,

dads are driven to play in just this one way and moms always play in this way.

Like, I think we need to be really, you know, subtle about these distinctions and it's probably socialization and then a little bit of biology too.

And what's interesting is you see that signature kind of father style play, even in like male mountain gorillas and other primates that there's that sort of active

approach to interacting with kids that seems to feel really unique.

Definitely.

Yeah, which is I think, you know, you just use the word superpower.

I would also say our superpower as humans is that we're adaptable, we're flexible, our minds and bodies can shift according to what the environment needs from us.

And that's what makes us resilient.

That's what makes us humans able to occupy lots of different ecological niches and survive and raise healthy offspring.

And so we're all kind of built to have these brains that can parent and that can care.

We evolved as cooperative breeders, which another way to say is alloparents.

We raise children collectively.

That's how we were kind of designed to

to operate.

And so we all have this kind of architecture that makes us empathetic caregivers, we have these big social brains that motivate us to look out for the vulnerable.