I received a desk copy of Jeremy Adam Smith’s new book, The Daddy Shift.  It is a must read for any father who is interested in taking an active role in his children’s lives.  Particularly if you are the primary care-giver.

The core tenant of the book is that we are at an inflection point where male gender roles are going to radically shift, with dads taking a much more active and nurturing role in the raising of their children.    I think this is quite right and the author does a good job at sketching out the evidence.

The book leverages both anecdotal stories and personal experiences to illustrate larger social trends in fathering.  The primary focus of the book is on the recent structural changes in our economy and the trickle-down effect it has on men’s roles as fathers and ultimately, on the construction of the male gender ideology.

Smith leverages the theory of anthropologists such as Marvin Harris, who have advocated a model known as Cultural Materialism. This model is simple — technology and the organization of work impacts how people organize socially and this in turn shapes religion and ideology.  It may be a bit of an oversimplification of the relationship between these elements of culture, but the jist,  that economics drives social organization which drives ideology, is fairly well substantiated.

It is an interesting read in that it both lives in and analyzes the same phenomena.  So on the one hand it tries to provide a theoretical framework for explaining the shift in male roles as parents, from the structural roles to the ideological beliefs.  At the same time, it lives within this context, using other information to explain why the old ideologies are fundamentally wrong.

For example, it explains how dads, due to disproportional lay-offs and increased parity of pay by sex, are more frequently finding themselves to be the primary stay-at-home parent.  A cultural materialist would state that economic infrastructure, such as the shift from a manufacturing to a knowledge based economy, drives structural changes, such as more dads staying at home.  Finally ideologies change to accommodate these fundamental changes in the social fabric.

The author himself, steeped in this last step of culture change, thus also devotes a large proportion of the book to providing arguments in support of a new ideology that is congruent with the economic and structural realities.

So in a sense, the POV of the book is a little confusing.  It is fundamentally Marxist in its orientation, but then taps evolutionary psychology as a defense of its position.  I think that leveraging evolutionary psychology as the core framework would have been better, providing a paradigm to explain more than just the recent historical past.     This is congruent with the fundamentally materialist analysis that Smith takes.

Smith makes the common mistake of framing our current behavior by referring only to our “historical” past.  The assumption is that our historical past is sufficient to provide contextualization on human nature.

Smith argues that men have been the distant patriarchs of the family for tens of thousands of years.  It would seem to be arguing that our historical roots are grounded in this patriarchal system.  The book paints a picture of ancient times, where, due to agriculture, men are the monarchs of the family.

This may serve as an adequate backdrop for the contextualization of events that the author deconstructs during the 20th century, such as the impact of the Depression, WWII, and the Civil Right Movement on gender roles.

But it leaves at the table the significance of evolutionary psychology in shaping human nature.  Thus despite the fact that Smith later dips into human psychology, combating the belief that men are inherently less capable or inclined to nurture their offspring, it does not connect this to our long prehistory well.

The issue is one of history, or rather “prehistory”.  The author makes it sound like our past is rooted in patriarchy, when in fact, this is an anomaly of our past.  From the time that anatomically modern humans appear on the scene, from the Middle Paleolithic through the Mesolithic era and into the more recent Neolithic era, people were primarily living in egalitarian groups who subsisted through foraging.

Agriculture is a fairly recent phenomenon in human “history”, arising perhaps around 10,000 years ago.  Thereafter it took several thousand years for agriculture to spread and become the predominate form of production.  So for the other several hundred thousand years of anatomically modern human history, we were foragers.  Here is a graphical representation of the period of our past that agriculture was present:

Yes he does touch upon some of the notions of evolutionary psychologists such as Frans de Waal, Cosmides, and Tooby, noting that evolution has impacted how the sexes contribute to the raising of offspring.   But the narrative here is quite thin.  There are two issues that deserve more attention:

The environment of evolutionary adaptation (EEA as it is commonly referred to) was one of foraging.  This history is not one that engendered significant sex-based behavioral differences in the ability or inclination to nurture offspring.

If you look at modern day foragers, such as the Aka group mentioned by Smith, to get an inkling into the lives of our ancestors, it is very egalitarian with a lot of leisure time.  This fundamentally undermines the patriarchical basis of human society.  And as Smith reports, men are much more involved in child –rearing.

While our modern gender constructs may indeed be shaped by our more recent history as farmers, factory workers, and desk-jockeys, our species and our brains evolved to be foragers.  For hundreds of thousands of years we were likely living in very egalitarian societies where men contributed significantly to rearing of children.  Male psychology is therefore well adapted to be a significant contributor to the nurturing of their offspring.

Our very recent historical past has created many structural impediments to fathering, but this has been the anomaly in human history, an outlier. These particular barriers that our resent grandfathers and great grandfathers experienced are now dissipating.  We are returning to normality.

As Jeremy Adams Smith points out, there is no evidence of a monopoly on nurturing by women from a psychological basis.  If the infrastructure warrants, men are well adapted to care for their children.  If you strip away the over-simplified arguments by staunch socio-biologists, few evolutionary psychologists would argue for significant sex-based biases toward parenting.

So the story is more thus:  we are a species where men have always significantly contributed to nurturing their offspring, until the very resent past when suddenly the division of labor drove the formation of patriarchal societies where men had to work out of the home to such an extent that they were alienated from child rearing.  With recent shifts in the post-industrial economy, the economic conditions are such that gender-biases are dissolving from child rearing again.  The culture now is in the process of catching up, lingering in the peculiarities of the industrial economy.

Finally, the Daddy Shift leads inevitably to a point of crisis.      Yes we are returning to a much more egalitarian space for parenting.  But we are also evolving to a place where the economic demands on the family are so great, that child rearing is dangerously marginalized.  Greater egalitarianism is good as it is more congruent with our evolved psychology, but egalitarianism without commitment to children is not a wonderful place to be.  The problem again lies in another form in incongruence between our economic system and our evolved psychology.  We are a species that requires intense nurturing of our offspring and have accomplished this in the past through a community of relatives.  The modern economy with duel income nuclear mobile families is in stark opposition to this nurturing.  What then, becomes of our children?

That is a post for another day.