Dr. Darby Saxbe

He studied one society where

males are within arm's reach of an infant 47% of the time.

So it's very common for men to be holding young babies, sitting in a circle drinking wine, and everybody's got a baby or a toddler on their lap.

So there are a few universals when it comes to parenthood, and especially when it comes to fatherhood.

And the degree to which it's

risky to our mental health, again, I think comes back to what is the level of societal support for parents.

We don't raise kids in a village anymore in the way that maybe we evolved to.

And so many parents find themselves socially isolated and cut off from their networks.

And I think that is one reason why parenting stress can be so pernicious.

And I think that can be experienced by dads as well as moms, depending on how involved dads are getting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I think we think of postpartum mood disorders as, again, a mother-only phenomenon, but there's plenty of evidence that depression and anxiety risk are increased in new dads as well.

So the prevalence in new fathers of depression is twice that of men

in the general population.

Like these are riskier times for our mental health.

And I think everything that you just described, right?

Your identity is changing.

Your relationships are changing.

And I also think what you said is something I heard from a lot of the dads I talked to, which is that they feel a little left out from the kind of charmed circle of the mother-baby relationship.