Parenting Rewires the Male Brain 291
sciencehabit writes: "Cultures around the world have long assumed that women are hardwired to be mothers. But a new study (abstract) suggests that caring for children awakens a parenting network in the brain—even turning on some of the same circuits in men as it does in women. The research implies that the neural underpinnings of the so-called maternal instinct aren't unique to women, or activated solely by hormones, but can be developed by anyone who chooses to be a parent."
Re:Activity Rewires the Human Brain (Score:0, Interesting)
Try mentioning that the Isla Vista killer, the psycho nice guy who "shot all those women" actually hated men equally as much as he hated women; he hated the more attractive men for taking what he considered rightfully his, and he hated the less attractive men because he thought himself a superior form of life. His first victims were his roommates who he called "the biggest nerds in the world" and thought they were "pathetic", but then he killed a jock because he was jealous of the guy's achievements.
In the end, he killed three men, two women, and himself. Everyone remembers that he shot two women, and feminists around are lauding it as proof that all men harbour fiery hate for women in their bellies, but either downplay or outright forget the men he killed.
The Isla Vista killer was just a narcissistic, hateful, insane misanthrope who believed he was entitled to the rockstar life of super-luxury for no effort and became enraged when it didn't mysteriously fall into his lap. He's not indicative of all men and it's disingenuous to say, or imply, otherwise.
The men he killed are just as dead and just as undeserving as the women.
Re: I believe it because.. (Score:1, Interesting)
No need to excuse having or not having children.
As a father I found this sentence hilarious: " I think it's more lazy to keep having kids than to take the measures not to."
I guarantee the writen doesn't have childern :-D
It would be way easier to not have sex for the rest of my life than to take care of even one child. Not to speak of various measures you can take to have sex and still not have kids. They are the lazy mans option. If you want to think of having children through how lazy or not lazy it is. Which really makes absolutely no sense.
Re:'stay-at-home-dad' schlock (Score:3, Interesting)
From what evidence we have we can see that starvation was relatively rare in hunter-gather societies, but it was really common in farming communities, especially when there were more mouths to feed than the land could support. The lords needed some way to make sure that the population couldn't rise above what the land was able to support, so they used marriage, especially church-sanctioned marriage, as a way to control the peasant population. According to Dr. Wyman only 40% of people in medieval Europe were married [yale.edu](Sorry for the zip, lecture #9 is the one that lists this info if you are interested, fascinating course overall). The landlords simply controlled the church who in turn controlled marriage. Civilizations have been using marriage, and the taboos of sex outside marriage, to control population for eons.
Other factors can ease parenting "instinct" in men (Score:4, Interesting)
I had the luck of finding a husband who cared about me keeping my job. That meant sharing of the parental duties, except the obvious ones like breastfeeding. I noticed that not only his parental instinct was at least as developed as mine -- and getting better with each subsequent child, but also that he is more comfortable than me in this parenthood thing. The reasons being:
1 - he's more sure of himself than I am, because society taught him to.
2 - he gets less hen-pecking and judging that I do. With our first-born, family would let me know that I "was doing wrong", and I'd believe it (see number one). But a caring father is like a super-hero here and does not get that much crap. And also can find better company (but that's just here where I live I guess as I heard horrible things from other dads). Also random people compliment him for being so involved with our kids.
3 - he can lift 2 kids at the same time
Re: I believe it because.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Given that humans tend to markedly discount future costs, and do basically every horrible thing imaginable to statistical judgements, it may well be simultaneously true that your assessment of overall cost over time is correct and laziness(in combination with poor assessment of risk-discounted future costs, and/or short term lapses in judgement caused by the relative attractiveness of futzing with a condom or hot animalistic fucking) leads people to keep having kids where a less-lazy approach would more rigorously apply preventative measures.