Thank you, Paul, for your (as always) thoughtful and moving commentary. I am glad that you had a chance to reconcile, if that's the right word, with your father. He was right about your being learned, and it's a blessing that you were able to have a discussion in which his pride in you and respect for you were made clear. Your account of how and why fathers matter to their children is astute.
As a daughter, my relationship with my father was somewhat different than yours, but I too desired (and was pleased to earn) his respect, and was thankful to have his model of achievement, self-discipline, and moral rectitude throughout his life and after. He died eight years ago, and I am glad that I had him in my life for as long as I did, though I wish it could have been longer.
I occasionally tried to argue this point in my family law cases. Specifically, that one reason children benefit from a continued strong relationship with even a flawed father after divorce is that they learn by osmosis about role division and teamwork. But the moment I suggested that fathers and mothers have differences in the respects outlined here, judges would stop listening. Judges are so indoctrinated by the modern feminist myth that men and women are identical in every way (except, of course, for those in which women are superior), that it would have been hopeless ab initio trying to argue the difference between maternal unconditional love and paternal respect. I understood instinctively that it would have branded me a crazy person among my colleagues in law to suggest that the family is a system finely tuned by evolution to perform the function of raising children, and that to cavalierly excise one-half of the system would normally do untold damage.
Flood, fire, cyclone, etc aren't the gravest risk an Australian child will face: a child's gravest risk a child is likely to face is if their father is dragged into the Family Court of Australia to fight for mere scraps of their child's time with "visitation" which will be at the mother's discretion no matter what parenting orders say.
Insightful observation by Paul Nathanson here: "Mothers have historically given children unconditional love. “I’ll always love you, no matter what you do or don’t do.” Fathers have historically required their children to earn love—that is, the form of love that we usually call respect—in order to leave home and function effectively in the larger world."
I profoundly disagree. My original mother gave me away because she faced adversity and chose to put her own short-term interests ahead of mine. It was my father who wanted to keep me but he had no parental rights because he was an unmarried man. Both my fathers have shown me unconditional love. It is the love of mothers that is conditional on their own self-interest. It is women who are fundamentally selfish and men who time and again nobly sacrifice their lives and health for others, including strangers. There are exceptions, of course, but not many. At the first sign of danger, women look to men to act.
Your anger is not surprising, Tim, and I’d feel the same personal anger if I had been abandoned. But feeling is not the same as thinking. I do think that your mother was unusual—not because I think that all women (or men) are innately altruistic but because most women (and men) try to follow the patterns that every culture prescribes and strongly encourages for them. Precisely why they do so is another matter. I have no statistics to back up my claim, but I suspect that most women are both naturally and culturally prepared to bond emotionally with suckling infants. Others are not, it’s true, but even they usually feel a strong need to conform—or at least to fear the social cost of not conforming. Communities punish women (or men) for abandoning their children, after all, just as they punish men for abandoning their fellow soldiers in battle. My point here is not to trivialize your pain, only to set it in the context of a larger discussion.
Far from punishing women for abandoning their children, when I was born unmarried women were encouraged and coerced into 'relinquishing' their children. My mother had the option of support from her family (with the caveat that she cease contact with my father) or from a stranger who offered her free accommodation (the offer didn't extend to my father). My mother says that she had to choose between me and my father. In a similar situation I would have no hesitation in choosing my child because once I had the opportunity to bond with her, my love for her was unconditional.
I know from listening to other adoptees and mothers that my mother's behaviour was not that unusual. Many didn't even tell the father about the baby, yet they are invariably portrayed as victims because our society is gynocentric and they are female.
In order to dismiss my argument you insultingly portray me as angry, "in pain" and emotional. I was none of those things when I wrote my comment but I must admit that reading your condescending comment was irritating.
If mothers have historically given children unconditional love, how is it that tens of millions of them have killed their unborn children in utero?
] I regret that you feel offended. Moreover, your point about abortion is a useful one (although relinquishing newborns to other parents is not quite the same phenomenon because it doesn’t involve killing). And it does indeed illustrate the limits of evolutionary psychology to explain human behavior.
I don’t know why or even how so many women—and men—have come to favor abortion (whether in desperation or as a routine form of birth control). To institutionalize abortion means that parents must deny not only the connection with their own offspring but also the widespread reverence for life itself and the elaborate cultural mechanisms that must reinforce it. I’d try to explain this in connection with the prevailing hedonism and cynicism of our time (and similar times in the past), but the fact is that abortion is not a new phenomenon. Our remote ancestors might often have lacked enough food to feed their communities (overpopulation). Some resorted to raiding other communities for food, others to limiting their own populations by abandoning either the very young (through abortion, say, but also infanticide) or the very old (which is not unknown even today in some small-scale societies and even surreptitiously in our own rapidly aging society).
When mothers of any species are subjected to sufficient stress, they tend to abandon their offspring. Presumably this behaviour has evolved to ensure the survival of the mother since offspring can be replaced but mothers are the primary limiting factor in reproduction. If female parenting mostly happens in the oldest parts of the brain, such as the amygdala, then this abandonment behaviour is unsurprising since the amygdala also controls the flight/fight/freeze/fawn response. I do not doubt that mothers love their offspring very much, but a mother's love is not unconditional since there is a point at which she will abandon (or abort) her offspring to save herself.
Men tend to idealise mothers in part because we owe our existence to them, start out life as part of them, bond with them in utero and early childhood, and they are usually our primary caregivers in childhood. However, my point is that mothers can also be remarkably callous towards their offspring when a mother's interests diverge from those of her offspring. I am obviously drawing on my own experience and broader observations concerning adoption, but I think this principle also explains the prevalence of abortion, practices such as infanticide, and the relatively high incidence/tolerance of child abuse in families where the genetic father is absent.
Tim, you say with good reason that "a mother's love is not unconditional since there is a point at which she will abandon (or abort) her offspring to save herself." Under duress or in extremis, individuals can act either selfishly by risking their lives to rescue children or selflessly by abandoning their children.
My point is not, however, about women (or men) as individuals. Rather, it's about their task as mothers (or fathers). Nature itself does not produce altruistic people and therefore does not prevent them from abandoning or even killing their children. But barring extreme conditions (such as famine, plague, war, addiction), culture does cooperate with nature to foster altruistic ideals of behavior.
Offering children unconditional love is a universal cultural ideal (a gendered script) of motherhood, not necessarily the personal achievement of this or that mother. Whatever stands in the way of reaching that ideal is not a natural pathology. Women who abandon or even kill their children, in short, are not biological mutants. Some of these women resort to selfishness in extremis, but others strive for a selfless ideal An example of the former would be someone who throws her newborn into a trash bin. An example of the latter would be a nursing mother, in hiding from the Nazis, who suffocates her own crying infant in order to save the entire group from detection and capture.
And this would explain the behavior of fathers, too. Requiring children to earn respect, first at home and then in the larger world, is a universal cultural ideal (a gendered script) of fatherhood, not necessarily the personal achievement of this or that father . And some of these men resort to selfishness in extremis, but others strive for a selfless ideal. An example of the former would be someone who abandons his children in the interest of freedom or hedonism instead of providing for them. An example of the latter would be someone who persists in seeking close relationships with his children despite years of hostility from his wife and costly court battles.
It seems to me, Tim, that you and I are saying similar things but from different perspectives. At this time of relentless but futile debates over nature versus culture, both perspectives need to be heard. That's why I welcome this opportunity to go over them one more time.
Not all mothers give unconditional love. Narcissistic mothers (and fathers) make "love" conditional on the child doing as the parent demands; "Mummy won't love you if... ". heard my wife say this many times to our children.
Oh, you're correct about that, William. No individual and no society is perfect. Not all women and not all men live up to communal standards of adult behavior. And judging from what we know of people even in the remote past, what was true then remains true. My point is only that communities, if they intend to endure, should not abandon behavioral ideals that rely on countless generations of learning through observation.
Humans are among the 5% or so of mammal species that are bi-parental. That means that children need the different parenting methods of both parents that, unsurprisingly, function as a team to, as Paul says, instill healthy self-esteem plus the understanding that respect must be earned. Our decades-long campaign to remove fathers from children's lives is the single most important social issue facing this society. It has the power to do great damage and, of course, has already done so.
Interestingly, according to the research into gay male fathers by Dr. Ruth Feldman at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv, the male parenting brain looks to be more adaptable than the female one. Female parenting mostly happens in the oldest parts of the brain (e.g., the amygdala.) and male parenting in the cerebral cortex. That indicates that female parental behavior is far more ancient than its male counterpart, the cerebral cortex being comparatively new. But when there's no female parent, as in gay male families, male brains construct connections to those older brain structures and produce both the female unconditional love as well as the typically male parental behaviors. But when there's no male parent, female brains tend to keep parenting behavior right where it's always been which tends to deprive the child of the vital paternal influence.
Thanks, Robert. I hadn't read about that study of gay men. It is indeed interesting. But I'm not sure that it makes mothers optional. The problem is that parents need to give their children two conflicting messages: (a) unconditional love (almost always the mother) and (b) earned respect (almost always the father). Maybe a gay male couple could mimic the universal historical and cross-cultural pattern if one man replicates the mother. But it probably wouldn't be easy for most gay male couples--in our time, after all, it isn't easy even for straight couples--so I doubt that this pattern would be a reliable basis for family law. Being cautious, especially about social experiments, I'd say that we should wait for longitudinal studies to support any study before jumping on the bandwagon.
Moreover, I doubt very much that women would accept such a radical loss to their sense of identity. Not all women want to become mothers, and not all of those who do turn out to be effective mothers, but almost all women (barring medical anomalies) can be mothers and acknowledge the importance, both personally and collectively, of being able to make a distinctive contribution to the family and therefore to the community.
Well, I did not and would never say that mothers are "optional." Sorry you got that idea. And yes, Feldman's work needs more backup. But the fact remains that, for a wide variety of reasons, some kids end up with just one parent. And if there's solid information that males are substantially more able to take on both parenting roles, then erring on the side of paternal custody, as opposed to our current practice, might be justified.
The study synopsis I read a few years ago mapped neural pathways when a father became aa "sole parent" of a young child for any reason (partner death, court orders, separation, abandonment...) and concluded that men have the brain elastic to develop new pathways that mimic "mothering", abilities. Minimal /no similar ability was demonstrated amongst mothers
Yes, Dabir, I hear you and many more men who say the same thing. And I'd be no different if I were looking for a wife. We live at a time of extreme polarization, not only sexually and racially, due to a deadly combination of hedonism, cynicism and identity politics . The odds are against happy families or even stable ones, which were easier to take for granted when I was growing up a hundred years ago. (We had many problems, sure, but not that one.) And yet we need to know that it wasn't always like this and needn't be like this forever.
Paul i have been dealing with these issues and with disrespectful women since the age of nine when my mother divorced my father - that's fifty-seven years.
My father had 3 partners and my mother had nine. I spent my 59th birthday attending my last stepfathers funeral.
My wife died unexpectedly last year 4 months shy of our 42ed wedding anniversary. I endured our marriage because I loved her and did not want my son to endure a broken, smashed and blended dysfunctional family over and over again like I have for over half a century.
Now that I have peace and quiet for the first time in my life I have no plans to give it up any time soon. Especially to a woman who believes it is her right to dominate me like my stepmother's did my dad.
In my family the girls were considered to be going to be the achievers. Because of this attitude on the part of my father, our brothers weren’t discriminated against, they just weren’t expected to cut the mustard. Manners for the boys and girls were imperative, academic achievement not so important. Having original ideas and showing an early talent for making money and influencing business customers was the highlight. Practical skills weren’t valued, car repairs were the province of garages and anything domestic for builders, plumbers, electricians etc. So needless to say in some ways the boys under performed because their father loved them but didn’t expect much from them,whereas the girls were great at business or running the Company. The influence that fathers wield is immense in shaping their children’s lives. In most families in my generation, the boys were prioritised in most areas and it was most frequently the boys who got ahead. Nowadays not as much attention is paid to young males as there is to young females. Mainly caused to rectify the centuries when women, though loved and treasured did not have the opportunities of their brothers.Looking at my family loved, happy and close through the generations as mine is, shows what can happen when either sex is prioritised. Happily, my nephews were treated with the same opportunities as their sisters and thus I have nieces who are top executives in international investment companies. Nephews who along with their wives and children are the Directors of many office management companies. Nephews and nieces running their own businesses and others in the world of education. Equal opportunities means that neither sex should be disadvantaged in whatever field they enter. Let us not speak of either men or women doing well at the expense of others. We all deserve opportunities to shine and be valued.
Thanks so much for your insightful comment, Yvonne. Equality is indeed a very admirable ideal. The problem is that equality of opportunity is often conflated these days with equality of result--that is, with sameness. Because men and women are not the same in some ways, however, they often make different choices. This leads to the dubious ideological conclusion that one sex, or the other, is deliberately gaining from any numerical imbalance (a.k.a. "inequity"). Moreover, it leads to the dubious conclusion that the distinctive characteristics of one sex are either more valuable or less valuable than those of the other sex.
And yet, changing attitudes and customs (and technologies) notwithstanding, no community could possibly endure without cultivating both the skills that are, generally speaking, characteristic of men and those that are, generally speaking, characteristic of women. Men and women (along with many other species) have evolved to be interdependent, not independent (or "autonomous").
The skills that your father valued and passed on to his children (mainly to his daughters, for some reason) were academic and managerial ones, not "practical" ones, let alone artistic or emotional ones. Why do you think that he did that? What did your mother think?
My mother was a wonderful woman. An actress in a small way for propaganda films during the war, a lover of theatre, art and her six kids plus injured birds abandoned pets, people and other animals.. She was an avid reader too. She and my father adored each other but to be honest neither of them were hands-on practical in many ways. However, amidst my nephews and nieces I am proud to say that we have a plumber, an electrician, a dairy herdsman, a stonemason an ancient buildings repair and maintenance specialist,so most of our practical needs can be met en famille. As a footnote I must add that in my estimation the extreme emphasis that exists toward academia is not healthy. Having closed all the technical colleges and apprenticeships being as rare as hens’ teeth mean that society is alarmingly short of tradesmen. I am not noted for practical skills but my husband was a genius at everything other than car repairs.
I like your take except for the part about practical skills. I’ve always thought that an important part of parenting was teaching your kids to get their hands dirty. I have only sons but always enjoyed fixing things and building things together working in all the trades. We’d swap tools and talk about how to solve the problems as they arose. They’ve carried the skills they learned forward into their adult lives and find them very useful. They are both doing cerebral work but nowadays even if money is no object a good tradesman can be hard to engage in a timely manner.
I said nothing negative about practical skills. I merely wondered why Yvonne's father made the distinction between those and academic or managerial skills.
I agree that practical skills are not only useful but necessary and in some cases very creative. My father expected more of his daughters than his
sons because, I believe, that social skills, necessary in the advertising and publishing industries, come more naturally to girls than to boys, although boys can catch up later. The ability to talk and think creatively is more apparent in girls and these were the qualities my father admired and needed in his businesses.
"The ability to talk and think creatively is more apparent in girls and these were the
qualities my father admired and needed in his businesses."
Even your father projected his own self-hatred taught to him by other women onto other men. Just who do you think built and maintains all of the infrastructure of our modern day society that coddles women in comfort yet dispises men who are used then discarded.
It was "Creative Men" and if not for them and had it been left up to so called creative women we would still be living in the stone age.
No todays women are not more creative than men they are simply dismantling the very foundation our society was built upon.
Dabir Dalton. Sorry, I disagree with your generalisation about women in business disrespecting and hating men. That would not be in any way good for business. All the women I know, especially those who are CEOs of international companies value their staff and encourage ideas and commitment from male and female partners and staff. No business would run successfully if half the management and employees hated the other half.
I have long given thought to the sentence "The child is the father of the man".
I believe "the child is the father of the man" means that the experiences, impressions, and
emotions of childhood have a profound impact on how the person as an individual becomes an
adult. It emphasizes that the formative years of childhood play a crucial role in shaping a person's personality, values, and future. In other words the phrase, popularized by William Wordsworth's poem, suggests that the seeds of adulthood are planted in childhood.
It is obvious that the imprinting of offspring is present in all mammals...e.g. chicks follow chickens.
I note that a lack of imprinting in monkeys always leads to violent behaviour of those monkeys
when they reach adulthood. Harry Harlow's research, involved rhesus monkeys and surrogate mothers and poles wrapped in towels with those pole baby monkeys having no maternal
contact at all (no imprinting). As adults the latter were more violent.
As I have noticed over the last 20 years our own process of imprinting has been poorly done.
Increased violent behaviour as observed in youth today may have its roots in poor imprinting.
Don't know if it has been the correct way to do it, but as a father, I've never been concerned about getting credit or thanks from my three children as long as they do the right thing. When I see the right thing being done, it is satisfaction enough.
Thank you, Paul, for your clear and consistent articulation of the different roles and values of fathers and mothers. Given that you observe that it is difficult for a single parent to manifest and deliver both of those parenting styles, how do you account for the fact that children of either sex seem to do better when raised by single fathers than they do when raised by single mothers?
Given that you haven't yet responded, let me take a stab at answering my question.
I suspect the main reason why fathers are better able to offer the dual style of parenting that you describe as "unconditional love" and "earned respect" is that unconditional love is strongly validated in our culture, along with most feminine values, while earned respect is less so. So fathers would naturally find it easier to add the feminine style than mothers would the masculine. Add to this the fact that the feminine style is largely driven by what feels right, and applying consistent consequences for behavior, for example, often doesn't feel right at all to mothers.
I did respond to your question, David, or at least I tried to do so. (I've never had to answer so many comments, which can be confusing). Did the following not go through? If so, I don't know how to find it. If not, I have only this record in my own notes. Sorry for seeming to have ignored you.
[Paul Nathanson: 15 June 2025] Well, David, I tried to answer your question in a reply to Robert. I'm not sure about any "fact." Robert reports one study, which I haven't read (and probably couldn't evaluate effectively, in any case, because I'm not a psychologist). Here's what I wrote: "Maybe a gay male couple could mimic the universal historical and cross-cultural pattern if one man replicates the mother. But it probably wouldn't be easy for most gay male couples--in our time, after all, it isn't easy even for straight couples--so I doubt that this pattern would be a reliable basis for family law. Being cautious, especially about social experiments, I'd say that we should wait for longitudinal studies to support any study before jumping on the bandwagon."
In any case, David, your thoughts are much more interesting than mine. Thanks for adding them.
Thanks for this response, Paul. What you wrote to Robert went through and I read it. I guess I didn't recognize an answer to my question in what you wrote to Robert, since it was about gay male couples rather than single parents.
Paul, thank you for the insightful and thought provoking essay.
In the current post-family feminist matriarchal zeitgeist, fatherhood is seen as an expression of patriarchal misogyny, and like the feminist’s “War on Boys and Men”, feminists are also waging war on Fathers and Fatherhood, who invariably fall back on the marxist trope “Children only need one parent”. The predatory parasitical Feminist Industrial Complex (especially Family Law and Domestic Violence, but also education and government bureaucracy is at the heart of this misandristic campaign to reduce fathers to sperm donors and child support ATMs.
The feminist ideological mantra is soo enshrined in our judicial systems, that nothing short of entirely dismantling the current system and settling up a no-confrontational child-centric frame-work for resolving parental matters with ALL former predatory parasites prohibited from being a part of this.
Paul, well done insightful article. I was wondering if your books are available anywhere as a collection, hopefully discounted and away from Bezos' greedy fingers. I am building a library of gender studies material and while my need is not specific nor immediate I'm always looking to expand the collection.
Thanks, R. If the misandry books are available as a collection, I'm not aware of it. Some of them are in paperback, though, and two volumes are available in Japanese!
The title “Daddy Deserved a Better Son” immediately resonated with me.
When my narcissistic 82 year old mother was on her death-bed, the worst of the many hateful things she said to me when we were alone was not “I only wanted 2 children” (I have 3 siblings) but rather “You father wanted a son; instead he got you.”
This and other comments she made at this time strongly implied that my father had forced her to have more children (I'm a twin). My mother was great at subtly implying things, particularly inadequacies of the targeted child, but when questioned as to what she meant, she would refuse to say; if pushed, she’d deny she’d said anything.
William, that's a very, very, sad story. I don't know how you can live with it. Is it possible that your mother had some form of dementia and didn't understand what she was saying? Just a thought.
Even when I disappointed my father most, he would never have said anything so hostile. I caused him to come close, now and then, but he always pulled back from outright ridicule. On the contrary, he blamed himself for whatever was wrong with me (although that made me feel guilty for hurting him). It boils down to this: Becoming a parent--whether a father or a mother--is always complicated by ambivalence (apart from anything else) and therefore not easy to do well. And yet countless people have done reasonably well, throughout history, without taking Psychology 101. I have great admiration for those who keep trying despite the anxiety, sacrifices, mistakes and hardships.
No sign that she was suffering from dementia. This was not dissimilar too many things she'd said to me in 45 years; it was a continuation of a pattern she'd established when I was about 5.
Thank you, Paul, for your (as always) thoughtful and moving commentary. I am glad that you had a chance to reconcile, if that's the right word, with your father. He was right about your being learned, and it's a blessing that you were able to have a discussion in which his pride in you and respect for you were made clear. Your account of how and why fathers matter to their children is astute.
As a daughter, my relationship with my father was somewhat different than yours, but I too desired (and was pleased to earn) his respect, and was thankful to have his model of achievement, self-discipline, and moral rectitude throughout his life and after. He died eight years ago, and I am glad that I had him in my life for as long as I did, though I wish it could have been longer.
I occasionally tried to argue this point in my family law cases. Specifically, that one reason children benefit from a continued strong relationship with even a flawed father after divorce is that they learn by osmosis about role division and teamwork. But the moment I suggested that fathers and mothers have differences in the respects outlined here, judges would stop listening. Judges are so indoctrinated by the modern feminist myth that men and women are identical in every way (except, of course, for those in which women are superior), that it would have been hopeless ab initio trying to argue the difference between maternal unconditional love and paternal respect. I understood instinctively that it would have branded me a crazy person among my colleagues in law to suggest that the family is a system finely tuned by evolution to perform the function of raising children, and that to cavalierly excise one-half of the system would normally do untold damage.
Very well said, Paul.
"that men and women are identical in every way (except, of course, for those in which women are superior)." Just so.
Flood, fire, cyclone, etc aren't the gravest risk an Australian child will face: a child's gravest risk a child is likely to face is if their father is dragged into the Family Court of Australia to fight for mere scraps of their child's time with "visitation" which will be at the mother's discretion no matter what parenting orders say.
What a thoughtful and quietly searing essay.
Its twin themes stirred something deep—
the unseen labor of fathers,
and the cruel misandry woven into Western breath.
How often men dwell in the shadows of love,
their giving goes unnoticed, their care unnamed.
In the stillness beyond applause,
they bend their backs in silent service,
aching to be useful, aching to be seen.
There is a quiet heartbreak in their yearning—
especially for mature men who long not for glory,
but for the simple grace of recognition.
A longing not shouted, but held
in the chests of millions—
tender, invisible, and tragically human.
Insightful observation by Paul Nathanson here: "Mothers have historically given children unconditional love. “I’ll always love you, no matter what you do or don’t do.” Fathers have historically required their children to earn love—that is, the form of love that we usually call respect—in order to leave home and function effectively in the larger world."
I profoundly disagree. My original mother gave me away because she faced adversity and chose to put her own short-term interests ahead of mine. It was my father who wanted to keep me but he had no parental rights because he was an unmarried man. Both my fathers have shown me unconditional love. It is the love of mothers that is conditional on their own self-interest. It is women who are fundamentally selfish and men who time and again nobly sacrifice their lives and health for others, including strangers. There are exceptions, of course, but not many. At the first sign of danger, women look to men to act.
Your anger is not surprising, Tim, and I’d feel the same personal anger if I had been abandoned. But feeling is not the same as thinking. I do think that your mother was unusual—not because I think that all women (or men) are innately altruistic but because most women (and men) try to follow the patterns that every culture prescribes and strongly encourages for them. Precisely why they do so is another matter. I have no statistics to back up my claim, but I suspect that most women are both naturally and culturally prepared to bond emotionally with suckling infants. Others are not, it’s true, but even they usually feel a strong need to conform—or at least to fear the social cost of not conforming. Communities punish women (or men) for abandoning their children, after all, just as they punish men for abandoning their fellow soldiers in battle. My point here is not to trivialize your pain, only to set it in the context of a larger discussion.
Far from punishing women for abandoning their children, when I was born unmarried women were encouraged and coerced into 'relinquishing' their children. My mother had the option of support from her family (with the caveat that she cease contact with my father) or from a stranger who offered her free accommodation (the offer didn't extend to my father). My mother says that she had to choose between me and my father. In a similar situation I would have no hesitation in choosing my child because once I had the opportunity to bond with her, my love for her was unconditional.
I know from listening to other adoptees and mothers that my mother's behaviour was not that unusual. Many didn't even tell the father about the baby, yet they are invariably portrayed as victims because our society is gynocentric and they are female.
In order to dismiss my argument you insultingly portray me as angry, "in pain" and emotional. I was none of those things when I wrote my comment but I must admit that reading your condescending comment was irritating.
If mothers have historically given children unconditional love, how is it that tens of millions of them have killed their unborn children in utero?
] I regret that you feel offended. Moreover, your point about abortion is a useful one (although relinquishing newborns to other parents is not quite the same phenomenon because it doesn’t involve killing). And it does indeed illustrate the limits of evolutionary psychology to explain human behavior.
I don’t know why or even how so many women—and men—have come to favor abortion (whether in desperation or as a routine form of birth control). To institutionalize abortion means that parents must deny not only the connection with their own offspring but also the widespread reverence for life itself and the elaborate cultural mechanisms that must reinforce it. I’d try to explain this in connection with the prevailing hedonism and cynicism of our time (and similar times in the past), but the fact is that abortion is not a new phenomenon. Our remote ancestors might often have lacked enough food to feed their communities (overpopulation). Some resorted to raiding other communities for food, others to limiting their own populations by abandoning either the very young (through abortion, say, but also infanticide) or the very old (which is not unknown even today in some small-scale societies and even surreptitiously in our own rapidly aging society).
When mothers of any species are subjected to sufficient stress, they tend to abandon their offspring. Presumably this behaviour has evolved to ensure the survival of the mother since offspring can be replaced but mothers are the primary limiting factor in reproduction. If female parenting mostly happens in the oldest parts of the brain, such as the amygdala, then this abandonment behaviour is unsurprising since the amygdala also controls the flight/fight/freeze/fawn response. I do not doubt that mothers love their offspring very much, but a mother's love is not unconditional since there is a point at which she will abandon (or abort) her offspring to save herself.
Men tend to idealise mothers in part because we owe our existence to them, start out life as part of them, bond with them in utero and early childhood, and they are usually our primary caregivers in childhood. However, my point is that mothers can also be remarkably callous towards their offspring when a mother's interests diverge from those of her offspring. I am obviously drawing on my own experience and broader observations concerning adoption, but I think this principle also explains the prevalence of abortion, practices such as infanticide, and the relatively high incidence/tolerance of child abuse in families where the genetic father is absent.
Tim, you say with good reason that "a mother's love is not unconditional since there is a point at which she will abandon (or abort) her offspring to save herself." Under duress or in extremis, individuals can act either selfishly by risking their lives to rescue children or selflessly by abandoning their children.
My point is not, however, about women (or men) as individuals. Rather, it's about their task as mothers (or fathers). Nature itself does not produce altruistic people and therefore does not prevent them from abandoning or even killing their children. But barring extreme conditions (such as famine, plague, war, addiction), culture does cooperate with nature to foster altruistic ideals of behavior.
Offering children unconditional love is a universal cultural ideal (a gendered script) of motherhood, not necessarily the personal achievement of this or that mother. Whatever stands in the way of reaching that ideal is not a natural pathology. Women who abandon or even kill their children, in short, are not biological mutants. Some of these women resort to selfishness in extremis, but others strive for a selfless ideal An example of the former would be someone who throws her newborn into a trash bin. An example of the latter would be a nursing mother, in hiding from the Nazis, who suffocates her own crying infant in order to save the entire group from detection and capture.
And this would explain the behavior of fathers, too. Requiring children to earn respect, first at home and then in the larger world, is a universal cultural ideal (a gendered script) of fatherhood, not necessarily the personal achievement of this or that father . And some of these men resort to selfishness in extremis, but others strive for a selfless ideal. An example of the former would be someone who abandons his children in the interest of freedom or hedonism instead of providing for them. An example of the latter would be someone who persists in seeking close relationships with his children despite years of hostility from his wife and costly court battles.
It seems to me, Tim, that you and I are saying similar things but from different perspectives. At this time of relentless but futile debates over nature versus culture, both perspectives need to be heard. That's why I welcome this opportunity to go over them one more time.
Not all mothers give unconditional love. Narcissistic mothers (and fathers) make "love" conditional on the child doing as the parent demands; "Mummy won't love you if... ". heard my wife say this many times to our children.
Oh, you're correct about that, William. No individual and no society is perfect. Not all women and not all men live up to communal standards of adult behavior. And judging from what we know of people even in the remote past, what was true then remains true. My point is only that communities, if they intend to endure, should not abandon behavioral ideals that rely on countless generations of learning through observation.
Humans are among the 5% or so of mammal species that are bi-parental. That means that children need the different parenting methods of both parents that, unsurprisingly, function as a team to, as Paul says, instill healthy self-esteem plus the understanding that respect must be earned. Our decades-long campaign to remove fathers from children's lives is the single most important social issue facing this society. It has the power to do great damage and, of course, has already done so.
Interestingly, according to the research into gay male fathers by Dr. Ruth Feldman at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv, the male parenting brain looks to be more adaptable than the female one. Female parenting mostly happens in the oldest parts of the brain (e.g., the amygdala.) and male parenting in the cerebral cortex. That indicates that female parental behavior is far more ancient than its male counterpart, the cerebral cortex being comparatively new. But when there's no female parent, as in gay male families, male brains construct connections to those older brain structures and produce both the female unconditional love as well as the typically male parental behaviors. But when there's no male parent, female brains tend to keep parenting behavior right where it's always been which tends to deprive the child of the vital paternal influence.
Thanks, Robert. I hadn't read about that study of gay men. It is indeed interesting. But I'm not sure that it makes mothers optional. The problem is that parents need to give their children two conflicting messages: (a) unconditional love (almost always the mother) and (b) earned respect (almost always the father). Maybe a gay male couple could mimic the universal historical and cross-cultural pattern if one man replicates the mother. But it probably wouldn't be easy for most gay male couples--in our time, after all, it isn't easy even for straight couples--so I doubt that this pattern would be a reliable basis for family law. Being cautious, especially about social experiments, I'd say that we should wait for longitudinal studies to support any study before jumping on the bandwagon.
Moreover, I doubt very much that women would accept such a radical loss to their sense of identity. Not all women want to become mothers, and not all of those who do turn out to be effective mothers, but almost all women (barring medical anomalies) can be mothers and acknowledge the importance, both personally and collectively, of being able to make a distinctive contribution to the family and therefore to the community.
Well, I did not and would never say that mothers are "optional." Sorry you got that idea. And yes, Feldman's work needs more backup. But the fact remains that, for a wide variety of reasons, some kids end up with just one parent. And if there's solid information that males are substantially more able to take on both parenting roles, then erring on the side of paternal custody, as opposed to our current practice, might be justified.
The study synopsis I read a few years ago mapped neural pathways when a father became aa "sole parent" of a young child for any reason (partner death, court orders, separation, abandonment...) and concluded that men have the brain elastic to develop new pathways that mimic "mothering", abilities. Minimal /no similar ability was demonstrated amongst mothers
Men aren't women
Unfortunately far too many of today's women are hell bent on proving themselves as a liability todays men - like myself - simply cannot afford.
Yes, Dabir, I hear you and many more men who say the same thing. And I'd be no different if I were looking for a wife. We live at a time of extreme polarization, not only sexually and racially, due to a deadly combination of hedonism, cynicism and identity politics . The odds are against happy families or even stable ones, which were easier to take for granted when I was growing up a hundred years ago. (We had many problems, sure, but not that one.) And yet we need to know that it wasn't always like this and needn't be like this forever.
Paul i have been dealing with these issues and with disrespectful women since the age of nine when my mother divorced my father - that's fifty-seven years.
My father had 3 partners and my mother had nine. I spent my 59th birthday attending my last stepfathers funeral.
My wife died unexpectedly last year 4 months shy of our 42ed wedding anniversary. I endured our marriage because I loved her and did not want my son to endure a broken, smashed and blended dysfunctional family over and over again like I have for over half a century.
Now that I have peace and quiet for the first time in my life I have no plans to give it up any time soon. Especially to a woman who believes it is her right to dominate me like my stepmother's did my dad.
In my family the girls were considered to be going to be the achievers. Because of this attitude on the part of my father, our brothers weren’t discriminated against, they just weren’t expected to cut the mustard. Manners for the boys and girls were imperative, academic achievement not so important. Having original ideas and showing an early talent for making money and influencing business customers was the highlight. Practical skills weren’t valued, car repairs were the province of garages and anything domestic for builders, plumbers, electricians etc. So needless to say in some ways the boys under performed because their father loved them but didn’t expect much from them,whereas the girls were great at business or running the Company. The influence that fathers wield is immense in shaping their children’s lives. In most families in my generation, the boys were prioritised in most areas and it was most frequently the boys who got ahead. Nowadays not as much attention is paid to young males as there is to young females. Mainly caused to rectify the centuries when women, though loved and treasured did not have the opportunities of their brothers.Looking at my family loved, happy and close through the generations as mine is, shows what can happen when either sex is prioritised. Happily, my nephews were treated with the same opportunities as their sisters and thus I have nieces who are top executives in international investment companies. Nephews who along with their wives and children are the Directors of many office management companies. Nephews and nieces running their own businesses and others in the world of education. Equal opportunities means that neither sex should be disadvantaged in whatever field they enter. Let us not speak of either men or women doing well at the expense of others. We all deserve opportunities to shine and be valued.
Thanks so much for your insightful comment, Yvonne. Equality is indeed a very admirable ideal. The problem is that equality of opportunity is often conflated these days with equality of result--that is, with sameness. Because men and women are not the same in some ways, however, they often make different choices. This leads to the dubious ideological conclusion that one sex, or the other, is deliberately gaining from any numerical imbalance (a.k.a. "inequity"). Moreover, it leads to the dubious conclusion that the distinctive characteristics of one sex are either more valuable or less valuable than those of the other sex.
And yet, changing attitudes and customs (and technologies) notwithstanding, no community could possibly endure without cultivating both the skills that are, generally speaking, characteristic of men and those that are, generally speaking, characteristic of women. Men and women (along with many other species) have evolved to be interdependent, not independent (or "autonomous").
The skills that your father valued and passed on to his children (mainly to his daughters, for some reason) were academic and managerial ones, not "practical" ones, let alone artistic or emotional ones. Why do you think that he did that? What did your mother think?
My mother was a wonderful woman. An actress in a small way for propaganda films during the war, a lover of theatre, art and her six kids plus injured birds abandoned pets, people and other animals.. She was an avid reader too. She and my father adored each other but to be honest neither of them were hands-on practical in many ways. However, amidst my nephews and nieces I am proud to say that we have a plumber, an electrician, a dairy herdsman, a stonemason an ancient buildings repair and maintenance specialist,so most of our practical needs can be met en famille. As a footnote I must add that in my estimation the extreme emphasis that exists toward academia is not healthy. Having closed all the technical colleges and apprenticeships being as rare as hens’ teeth mean that society is alarmingly short of tradesmen. I am not noted for practical skills but my husband was a genius at everything other than car repairs.
I like your take except for the part about practical skills. I’ve always thought that an important part of parenting was teaching your kids to get their hands dirty. I have only sons but always enjoyed fixing things and building things together working in all the trades. We’d swap tools and talk about how to solve the problems as they arose. They’ve carried the skills they learned forward into their adult lives and find them very useful. They are both doing cerebral work but nowadays even if money is no object a good tradesman can be hard to engage in a timely manner.
I said nothing negative about practical skills. I merely wondered why Yvonne's father made the distinction between those and academic or managerial skills.
I agree that practical skills are not only useful but necessary and in some cases very creative. My father expected more of his daughters than his
sons because, I believe, that social skills, necessary in the advertising and publishing industries, come more naturally to girls than to boys, although boys can catch up later. The ability to talk and think creatively is more apparent in girls and these were the qualities my father admired and needed in his businesses.
"The ability to talk and think creatively..."
Just not the ability to DO creatively? Isn't the advertising industry all about manipulation?
"The ability to talk and think creatively is more apparent in girls and these were the
qualities my father admired and needed in his businesses."
Even your father projected his own self-hatred taught to him by other women onto other men. Just who do you think built and maintains all of the infrastructure of our modern day society that coddles women in comfort yet dispises men who are used then discarded.
It was "Creative Men" and if not for them and had it been left up to so called creative women we would still be living in the stone age.
No todays women are not more creative than men they are simply dismantling the very foundation our society was built upon.
"Even your father projected his own self-hatred taught to him by other women onto other men."
Maybe. More likely a very narrow understanding of what makes the world function and a bad case of looking down one's nose at the working classes.
It is said that one cannot serve two masters as one would be loved while the other one would be hated.
This is why todays women serve corporate interests while disrespecting and hating men - especially the men in their lives.
Dabir Dalton. Sorry, I disagree with your generalisation about women in business disrespecting and hating men. That would not be in any way good for business. All the women I know, especially those who are CEOs of international companies value their staff and encourage ideas and commitment from male and female partners and staff. No business would run successfully if half the management and employees hated the other half.
I have long given thought to the sentence "The child is the father of the man".
I believe "the child is the father of the man" means that the experiences, impressions, and
emotions of childhood have a profound impact on how the person as an individual becomes an
adult. It emphasizes that the formative years of childhood play a crucial role in shaping a person's personality, values, and future. In other words the phrase, popularized by William Wordsworth's poem, suggests that the seeds of adulthood are planted in childhood.
It is obvious that the imprinting of offspring is present in all mammals...e.g. chicks follow chickens.
I note that a lack of imprinting in monkeys always leads to violent behaviour of those monkeys
when they reach adulthood. Harry Harlow's research, involved rhesus monkeys and surrogate mothers and poles wrapped in towels with those pole baby monkeys having no maternal
contact at all (no imprinting). As adults the latter were more violent.
As I have noticed over the last 20 years our own process of imprinting has been poorly done.
Increased violent behaviour as observed in youth today may have its roots in poor imprinting.
Mothers raise children, fathers raise adults.
Yes, Reggie, that's an excellent way to summarize this distinction.
Don't know if it has been the correct way to do it, but as a father, I've never been concerned about getting credit or thanks from my three children as long as they do the right thing. When I see the right thing being done, it is satisfaction enough.
Thank you, Paul, for your clear and consistent articulation of the different roles and values of fathers and mothers. Given that you observe that it is difficult for a single parent to manifest and deliver both of those parenting styles, how do you account for the fact that children of either sex seem to do better when raised by single fathers than they do when raised by single mothers?
Given that you haven't yet responded, let me take a stab at answering my question.
I suspect the main reason why fathers are better able to offer the dual style of parenting that you describe as "unconditional love" and "earned respect" is that unconditional love is strongly validated in our culture, along with most feminine values, while earned respect is less so. So fathers would naturally find it easier to add the feminine style than mothers would the masculine. Add to this the fact that the feminine style is largely driven by what feels right, and applying consistent consequences for behavior, for example, often doesn't feel right at all to mothers.
I did respond to your question, David, or at least I tried to do so. (I've never had to answer so many comments, which can be confusing). Did the following not go through? If so, I don't know how to find it. If not, I have only this record in my own notes. Sorry for seeming to have ignored you.
[Paul Nathanson: 15 June 2025] Well, David, I tried to answer your question in a reply to Robert. I'm not sure about any "fact." Robert reports one study, which I haven't read (and probably couldn't evaluate effectively, in any case, because I'm not a psychologist). Here's what I wrote: "Maybe a gay male couple could mimic the universal historical and cross-cultural pattern if one man replicates the mother. But it probably wouldn't be easy for most gay male couples--in our time, after all, it isn't easy even for straight couples--so I doubt that this pattern would be a reliable basis for family law. Being cautious, especially about social experiments, I'd say that we should wait for longitudinal studies to support any study before jumping on the bandwagon."
In any case, David, your thoughts are much more interesting than mine. Thanks for adding them.
Thanks for this response, Paul. What you wrote to Robert went through and I read it. I guess I didn't recognize an answer to my question in what you wrote to Robert, since it was about gay male couples rather than single parents.
Interesting question indeed, my friend!
> "This was my secular bar mitzvah."
👍🙂
Certainly some facets in your story that echo those in mine. Thanks for the memories. 🙂
Paul, thank you for the insightful and thought provoking essay.
In the current post-family feminist matriarchal zeitgeist, fatherhood is seen as an expression of patriarchal misogyny, and like the feminist’s “War on Boys and Men”, feminists are also waging war on Fathers and Fatherhood, who invariably fall back on the marxist trope “Children only need one parent”. The predatory parasitical Feminist Industrial Complex (especially Family Law and Domestic Violence, but also education and government bureaucracy is at the heart of this misandristic campaign to reduce fathers to sperm donors and child support ATMs.
The feminist ideological mantra is soo enshrined in our judicial systems, that nothing short of entirely dismantling the current system and settling up a no-confrontational child-centric frame-work for resolving parental matters with ALL former predatory parasites prohibited from being a part of this.
That's beautiful.
Paul, well done insightful article. I was wondering if your books are available anywhere as a collection, hopefully discounted and away from Bezos' greedy fingers. I am building a library of gender studies material and while my need is not specific nor immediate I'm always looking to expand the collection.
Thanks, R. If the misandry books are available as a collection, I'm not aware of it. Some of them are in paperback, though, and two volumes are available in Japanese!
Sir Paul, this is new bit from Bill Maher's show. I think you'll really enjoy this! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fV8YldywoLA
The title “Daddy Deserved a Better Son” immediately resonated with me.
When my narcissistic 82 year old mother was on her death-bed, the worst of the many hateful things she said to me when we were alone was not “I only wanted 2 children” (I have 3 siblings) but rather “You father wanted a son; instead he got you.”
This and other comments she made at this time strongly implied that my father had forced her to have more children (I'm a twin). My mother was great at subtly implying things, particularly inadequacies of the targeted child, but when questioned as to what she meant, she would refuse to say; if pushed, she’d deny she’d said anything.
William, that's a very, very, sad story. I don't know how you can live with it. Is it possible that your mother had some form of dementia and didn't understand what she was saying? Just a thought.
Even when I disappointed my father most, he would never have said anything so hostile. I caused him to come close, now and then, but he always pulled back from outright ridicule. On the contrary, he blamed himself for whatever was wrong with me (although that made me feel guilty for hurting him). It boils down to this: Becoming a parent--whether a father or a mother--is always complicated by ambivalence (apart from anything else) and therefore not easy to do well. And yet countless people have done reasonably well, throughout history, without taking Psychology 101. I have great admiration for those who keep trying despite the anxiety, sacrifices, mistakes and hardships.
No sign that she was suffering from dementia. This was not dissimilar too many things she'd said to me in 45 years; it was a continuation of a pattern she'd established when I was about 5.
What happened when you were five?