The Atlantic reports on the shocking science that kids kinda actually sorta do need dads. They should be careful. While they call it science, it sounds kinda Jesusy or something.
The war on women continues.
What this view overlooks, however, is a growing body of research suggesting that men bring much more to the parenting enterprise than money, especially today, when many fathers are highly involved in the warp and woof of childrearing. As Yale psychiatrist Kyle Pruett put it in Salon: “fathers don’t mother.”
Pruett’s argument is that fathers often engage their children in ways that differ from the ways in which mothers engage their children. Yes, there are exceptions, and, yes, parents also engage their children in ways that are not specifically gendered. But there are at least four ways, spelled out in my new book, Gender and Parenthood: Biological and Social Scientific Perspectives (co-edited with Kathleen Kovner Kline), that today’s dads tend to make distinctive contributions to their children’s lives:
Science is femophobic.
They even have charts that show all kinds of bad stuff happens more often when Dad isn’t in the pitcha.
Next thing you know, the Atlantic will report on the startling new science that suggests that fetuses kinda sorta look and behave like little babies.
Haha. Just kidding.
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