Do You Actually Need A Father To Raise A Child? - Dr Anna Machin - #680

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Anna Machin. She's an evolutionary anthropologist at Oxford University, a researcher into the role of fatherhood across time, and an author. The modern world has made dad surplus to requirements. In many ways, the deadbeat dad is such a meme in sitcoms and cartoons now that it's no surprise men don't feel that they have a role in child rearing. But just how important are fathers to the development of boys and girls, and what don't we know about their impact? I expect to learn how fathers saved the human race when babies' heads got too big, whether it's normal for dads to not feel love for their baby when it's born, the most important ways dads can bond with their kids, whether dads are more important to girls' or boys' development, what pushback Anna got for writing a pro-father book, and much more. This feels like a very important conversation, and I learned an awful lot about the unseen impact of fathers and fatherlessness on the outcomes that kids get, on their emotional intelligence, on their level of mental health, everything, and also the challenges that are faced by dads. I really, really hope that this gives comfort or advice or solace to many people that need it. And Anna's book is fantastic, and you should definitely go and check that out as well if you resonate with this episode. This Monday, the world's strongest bodybuilder, Stan Efferding, creator of The Vertical Diet and absolutely fantastic human with tons and tons of insights about training and dieting is on Modern Wisdom, another Modern Wisdom cinema episode filmed out in LA when I was with Gymshark, and this one is really, really great. So get ready for that. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Anna Machin.
Why do we need to change the narrative around fathers?

**Anna Machin** (2:08)
We need to change the narrative about fathers, partly because the one we have at the moment is a complete fiction, which is kind of made up from many myths and stories we've been told in our culture over the years about the role of fathers, about their importance to their children, about how they become fathers, how they learn the knowledge to become fathers. And actually, all of this is based upon absolutely zero academic research, absolutely no observational research at all. It's just stories that we've told each other, anecdotes. And because of that, the myths we've built up around fathers are just that they're myths. They're not actually true and they are very damaging to fathers. They're damaging to men and they're also damaging to their families. So the work that I do and those of my colleagues around the world, we do it because we actually want the facts to be out there. We want the stories we tell about fathers to actually be accurate.

**Chris Williamson** (3:03)
Which myths do you wish that you could put into the ground and fully bury about dads?

**Anna Machin** (3:08)
The first one I would bury is that fathers, men are not instinctive parents. So we have this story, and I hear it a lot still from the dads that I study, went before they have children, which is that mom is an instinctive parent. She's somehow magically able to do this, whereas dads have to learn. because of that, they tend to see what mom does as a gold standard of parenting, and whatever they do as a secondary bit of a failure. Actually, it's not true, and we'll probably go into that a little bit later, but we've discovered that men are as biologically primed to parent as women are, which as an evolutionary anthropologist makes perfect sense to me. But that's probably one of the biggest ones because it really undermines a man's confidence.
That he feels that actually if he just goes with what his gut is telling him, he will be okay. He really, a lot of them lack a lot of confidence, and they do very much belittle themselves in relation, for example, to what mom is doing.

**Chris Williamson** (4:07)
Yeah, there is a demonization of fatherhood, and I want to get into this later as well, but I wonder how much of it is a cope in response to single-parent households and us trying to not make children who grow up in single-parent households feel like they're falling behind, because if we minimize the impact that fathers have on children's rearing, then the people who do grow up with just mom don't feel like they're missing out on as much. And this is a trend that we see, you know, the tyranny of the minority is somehow, sometimes how it's categorized, but yeah, it's so, so fascinating. One of the other things, William Costello, who's one of David buss's students out here, told me a story that you taught him about how fathers saved the human race for extinction because baby's heads got too big.