Robin Nixon, LiveScience, October 23, 2009
Some 95 percent of male mammals have little to no interaction with their children. Homo sapiens are one of the most notable exceptions, leading some scientists to think fatherhood is an important part of what makes us human.
Most theories for the family involvement of fathers invoke the familiar “Man the Hunter” characterization, in which dad protects and provides for his young.
While fathers do play key roles in securing the physical health of their children, they also can be important for the optimum development of psychological and emotional traits considered to be primarily human, such as empathy, emotional control and the ability to navigate complex social relationships.
Unlike many other animals, humans need their fathers well beyond the act that leads to conception, researchers are coming to realize.
Paternal prep school
There is plenty of time for this emotional hand-off. While other primate babies can fend for themselves in roughly a decade, human childhood stretches 18 to 20 years, said David Geary of the University of Missouri and author of “Male, Female: Evolution of Human Sex Differences” (American Psychological Association, 1998).
Also, anthropologists speculate that the relative helplessness of human children has made multiple caregivers a vital necessity—that encourages bringing dad into the picture. Even today, in both traditional and industrialized communities, a father’s presence correlates with improved health and decreased child mortality, Geary said.
Evolutionarily speaking, he added, the kid-phase probably lengthened as dads got more involved. With an extra person dedicated to caring for them, kids have no need to rush towards adulthood.
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Kids also learn from fathers during a unique form of papa play. Unlike mothers, fathers tend to roughhouse with their children.
“They rile them up, almost to the point that they are going to snap, and then calm them down,” Geary said.
This pattern teaches kids to control their emotions—a trait that garners them popularity among superiors and peers, he said.
Parenting for the grandkids
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When children have warm relationships with their father, as well as calm home lives, they tend to sexually mature later. Their bodies intuit they are safe and time is taken perfecting social skills before entering the real world, Geary said.
The extra practice gives children a competitive edge. As adults, they are more likely to form secure relationships, achieve stable social standing and become able parents. In this sense, a father who takes care of his children also gives his grandchildren a leg up.
{snip}
Being raised by more than one person also enhances social skills, theorizes anthropologist Sarah Hrdy, author of “Mothers and Others” (Belknap Press, 2009). Children not only grow up more emotionally secure, they are better at taking another’s perspective—a skill critical to our socially-reliant species.
In traditional communities, especially during infancy, extra caregivers are usually female kin, such as grandmothers and aunts, Hrdy writes. But in nuclear families, fathers play this role.
When father-child relations are strained or chaotic, the insecurity can translate biologically as a message to grow up fast, Geary said. There is an unconscious sense that “if you are going to reproduce at all, you better start early,” he said. As a result, girls reach menarche sooner and form clingy relationships, while boys become aggressive and sexually exploitive.
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Original article
(Posted on November 2, 2009)
Comments
I think the main problem with this theory is that it assumes that there is racial equality in terms of natural paternal involvement with children. As anyone with a brain and a shred of intellectual honesty can see, whites in their natural element and blacks in their natural element are way different in this regard.
All one has to do is read Rushton to see that there might be an evolutionary basis to these differences. Blacks evolved in warm climates with plentiful sustenance that took little work to acquire, so there was no need for the father to stick around. Whites evolved in cold climates where a child would die if s/he only had one steady parent to rely upon.
They say non-domesticated animals don’t have the ability to be good or evil. When you create the capacity, or an ideal, of good, you also create the possibility of evil.
So then why are liberals doing everything they can to eliminate fathers?
I keep looking for this perspective to be included into the social work profession but there seems to be a barrier. There is a systemic bias towards liberalism and individual rights which can’t handle marriage and fatherhood. The liberal newspapers in my city often have articles on poverty and youth problems but there is almost never any mention of the benefits of stable families with dad around. Any mention of pushing people toward the traditional family structure is said to violate women’s rights. The social work profession needs to be called out on this.
The feminists would have us believe that fathers are purely optional, and that, say, two lesbians who want to raise children together should have the complete approval and acceptance of society.
It’s amazing how many white men are willing to go along with this point of view, or at least pretend that they do. Why men would adopt a point of view that basically argues that they are irrelevant I don’t know.
At the same time, the leftists would have us believe that the breakdown of the black family and the absence of black fathers has absolutely nothing to do with the staggering crime rate in the black community (it’s all due to “racism,” doncha know?) It’s amazing how these leftists causes all tie in with and support one another.
The part about father’s roughhousing with their children made me laugh, because that is certainly true in my house! I know my son loves to wrestle with his dad, and as he is only 9 years old and almost as tall as me, I can’t play with him in this fashion. The squeals of laughter and frustation I hear when they play, must be good for his emotional health, as he is slow to anger and loose control. I never thought of it that way before. We also have a daughter, and she knows there is nothing dad wouldn’t do for her. Thank God for fathers, because in our house, he has played as big a role as I have, and kids need BOTH!
No way this guy doesn’t understand that this is a hard slap in the face to Blacks, Hispanics, and femists. Liberalism meets science and loses.
This is the primary reason I am against Gay Marriage: the importance of Gender. I grew up without a mom, and as insignificant as it might sound, it was really embarassing for me to go to school with a rat’s nest because my Dad wasn’t the type to put pigtails in my hair. Not to mention other feminine tasks I cannot perform. On the male side, a boy who grew up without a father told me, although purely sentimental, that he regretted that his father never taught him how to shave.
Gays and Lesbians can do as they wish, and I certainly can do very little to prevent them from conceiving if they wish too. But taking away social stigma also leaves teenagers confused. Funny how it is argued that removing stigma would prevent naturally gay children from trying to pretend they are straight, thus avoiding regrettable straight experiences- yet no one sees it harmful that teenagers today are “experimenting” only to find out they are straight.
Gays are a minority. They do not deserve to have their life threatened, but the over-acceptance is hurting the rest of us. I am for majority-rule, as our forefathers envisioned
Question Diversity wrote at 6:17 PM on November 2:
It doesn’t assume racial equality. We are all human and we respond in a similar manner. If more minority fathers would take responsibility for their children, we wouldn’t have the violence we have today. We see the same thing in Whites, Asians and Jews when fathers abandon their roles.
Between waring tribes, large predators, drought, and famine, Africa was hardly the Garden of Eden. In primitive society fathers were the protector of the village. Here in modern America fathers of all races are free to abandon their children, because the government will step in to raise them and we see how poor of job it does.
You need a two-parent household, BUT you also need the parents to be honest, hard-working, responsible, and to teach their children to work hard and to be responsible for their own lives. This applies to every race.
“When children have warm relationships with their father, as well as calm home lives, they tend to sexually mature later.”
In all likelihood, the brilliant minds behind this research made no attempt whatsoever to prove the existence of a cause and effect. They probably completely disregarded the race of their subjects and concluded that precocious children are thus because dad isn’t around. It never occurred to them that both sexual precocity and fatherlessness might be effects of race based genetic differences.
Question Diversity makes a good point, but also it seems obvious that the women of a given race or ethnicity tend to bring the behavioral traits that their men have toward work, toward dealing with men.
Blacks are notable for their lack of foresight and planning, and crave instant gratification. Similarly, black women, if they like a guy, they want him now, and often don’t even particularly care if he impregnates her and runs off. This is one reason as Steve Sailer reported that white women have sex with blacks ten times more often than white men do; white men are afraid that this easy black woman will catch him with a baby or at least get him in hock for child support (after all, white = rich), whereas white women (at least, those who don’t want a brown baby but still want the sex) routinely use birth control.
Now, take a white woman. For example, a beautiful young Norwegian blonde. North Germanics (also covers Danes, Prussians, and Swedes) are organized and highly intelligent, with a lot of forethought and planning, and are also known for stubbornness and an almost cold, callous, Machiavellian manner of doing things, as long as it gets done. She falls in love with a man, enough that she sees herself marrying him, and she senses he wants her back. As long as he doesn’t melt down (after all, 80% of the world’s men would cut off their left arms for a chance with her), he will be going through sometimes several years of purgatory before she reels him in… but, unlike the African woman, this is for life. Other white women, and Asian women, are more like this, with allowances for their own ethnic group’s quirks. Italian women, for instance, are more outgoing and passionate with their emotions than the “colder” North European women. And so forth.
Unlike many other animals, humans need their fathers well beyond the act that leads to conception, researchers are coming to realize.
Wow. So researchers are finally coming to realize what small children have been easily figuring out since the dawn of time, and what libs, feminists and the like are still missing.
This study might as well be about the shocking tendency of ursids to defecate in areas endowed with many, many trees.
As an aside -even an animal (one of my favourite) the crow/raven is one of the most intelligent because to a large degree its intelligence is due to a relatively long and complex childhod always being raised by both mother&father crows and quite often an older brother/sister bachelor crow as well as the crow community. If even birds employ this strategy and reap its success-won’t humans benefit even more from this “k-strategy”per Rushton??
So basically, science is discovering what most civilizations have already known for thousands of years. There is a reason that there is a stigma associated with fatherless children, especially fatherless boys. We recently decided that stigma was just a “social construct” and that the government can replace fathers. Look how well that has turned out.
So then why are liberals doing everything they can to eliminate fathers?
What better way to tear apart Western Civilization and White society than to attack the very structure of the traditional White family? In the 40s, the arbiters of ‘change’, Freudo-Marxists and the Frankfurt School of Degeneracy told us that the family unit was pathological and fathers authoritarian ( therefore inhibiting one’s freedom).
Professor McDonald explains:
“…the epitome of psychological health was the ‘genuine liberal’ — a radical individualist who is completely detached from all ingroups, including race and family. White people who rejected their family as role models were analyzed as psychologically healthy, while those who had positive views of their parents were analyzed as psychologically inadequate.
The Frankfurt School was essentially claiming that White families who successfully transmitted their ethnocentric attitudes to their children were pathological — a view for which there isn’t a shred of evidence…”
http://tinyurl.com/ylx79qk
Later in the 60s, those trying to exterminate Western Civilization, such as Saul Alinsky (where have I heard that name before? Oh Yeah, he’s obama’s guru), told young people not to trust their parents, but to trust their university professors and pop culture figures instead.
The feminists of the same period labeled fathers as ‘irrelevant’ and LBJs Great Society replaced real fathers with the pseudo father of the welfare state allowing single, unmarried mothers to depend on the government for support —to devastating consequences.
The results of the devastation of fatherlessness are not in dispute (from the Bureau of the Census, The Justice Department and CDC):
63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes
90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes
85% of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders
80% of rapists motivated with displaced anger come from fatherless homes
71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes
70% of juveniles in state operated institutions come from fatherless homes
85% of all youths sitting in prisons grew up in a fatherless home
http://tinyurl.com/yzz8m4d
The feminists, LBJ’s Great Society, women’s studies departments, and the 60s radicals couldn’t have been wrong could they?
Yes, profoundly, excruciatingly wrong—but why should they care about the tremendous damage they’ve done?
Bon
In addition to blacks/hispanics, don’t forget about the low-IQ white underclass, which is growing with great rapidity.
In my experience, the two groups that best understand the importance of family stability are Jews/NE Asians.
Perhaps NW Europeans did at one time, but dysgenics has done away with it almost completely…
