Mental Health

               In my recent article, “The Evolution of Manhood and the Emergence of Compassionate Warriors,” I introduced you to the work of Dr. Sarah Hrdy, an anthropologist and primatologist and one of the world’s leading experts on the evolutionary basis of female behavior in both nonhuman and human primates. Dr. Hrdy has recently turned her attention to men. In “Father Time: How Dad’s Are Being Called to Change the World for Good,” we go deeper in exploring the ways dads today are nurturing young children.

               Here we’ll explore what Dr. Hrdy describes as “a new kind of father,” hands-on dads who are leading the way to a better future for their own children and changing the evolutionary future of humankind. 

                In introducing her colleague, Dr. Ruth Feldman, Dr. Hrdy says,

“Born to an illustrious rabbi, Ruth Feldman was a precocious child, beginning to talk by eighteen months. What a shame, a colleague of her father’s once remarked, that his unusually bright daughter was not a son. Among Orthodox Jews, traditionally, it is sons who become scholars. Daughters do other things. Reminiscing years later, Feldman attributed her father’s decision to break with such tradition and promote his clever daughter’s intellectual development to their unusually close relationship. It planted her a powerful drive to succeed.”

                Like Dr. Hrdy, Ruth Feldman began her illustrious career exploring the importance of mothers to the life of her children. But then she became interested in the specific ways that fathers contribute to the wellbeing of children and society. Together with Eyal Abraham and others, Feldman’s team decided to study the changes going on with men who were becoming hands-on parents, involved with their wives in providing care for children beginning at birth. They included a subset of men who were even pairing up with other men to start a family as a same-sex couple. Some were adopting babies, others contracting with surrogates, then nurturing the babies right from birth with no mother involved.

                As Dr. Hrdy reminds us,

“For over 200 million years that mammals have existed, exclusively male care of babies from birth onward has never happened before. Yet, something’s happening now that has never occurred before.”

               As CBS News reported in 2024,

“When it comes to handling a pair of toddlers, Pete Buttigieg, the unflappable Secretary of Transportation, may appear a little jet-lagged. Pete and his husband, Chasten Buttigieg, raise their two-year old twins, Penelope and Gus, in Traverse City, Michigan, where they recently moved full-time from Washington to be closer to family. The kids call Pete ‘Papa,’ and Chasten ‘Daddy.’”

               Pete Buttigieg and his husband Chasten may be a most well-known pair raising their children from birth with only male parents, but they are certainly not the only ones. What we are learning about the male father’s brain is illuminating for all of us.

                Hrdy reported that the Feldman team recruited 89 couples in stable relationships who were first-time parents with babies between 12 and 18 months old. 48 of the couples were same sex-partnerships of two men, while 41 were heterosexual parents living in “traditional” families where the mother acted as primary caretaker (and, in most cases, breastfed), with the father merely helping her out.

                Later, as parents lay inside a magnetic resonance machine watching videos of themselves interacting with their babies, Feldman and coworkers scanned their brains. In the secondary caregiving men from “traditional” family contexts, neural circuits in the cortical region of their brains important in social discrimination and decision-making really lit up.  These were the areas that helped me, as a new dad, figure out what my newborn son needed and think through various options — was he hungry, cold, wet, excited, tired, etc. — and act appropriately.

                The biggest surprise, however, was what happened in the brains of the unusual, first-of-their-kind men acting as primary caretaker for a baby with no woman involved. (This is what went on in my brain when my wife had left me in total care of our infant son when she took a two-week break to go off with her girlfriend when Jemal was a year old.)

                “In their brains,” Hrdy reported Feldman’s findings, “emotion-processing networks involving the amygdala and hypothalamus were stimulated as well. These ‘ancient’ networks dating back to the first mammals, and even further, to their vertebrate precursors. They derive from the same highly conserved neural networks that for 200 million years helped hypervigilant mammalian mothers keep their babies safe.”

                “Now, these same limbic system areas were being activated in the brains of men — but only when the baby’s safety and well-being had become those men’s primary concern day after day.”

                When my wife was away and I was alone with our son, I was aware of every sound that might indicate danger or that our son needed something. Once those circuits become activated, they stay active forever.

                When we adopted our daughter, Angela, I was often on duty at night when my wife was asleep. It was me who often heard her whimpers and instantly awakened at the first sign of something amiss.

                In more and more families today we have men and women working together hand-in-hand to raise children. As Dr. Hrdy and Feldman point out, males and females often parent children differently — men tend to be more active and risk-taking with small children, throwing them up in the air and catching them (much to the horror of moms who worry that we may drop them). But the children love it and good fathers, like good mothers, never drop their infant babies.

                Through evolutionary history mothers have learned to keep their babies safe and alive. What Hrdy, Feldman, and others have shown is that men have the same capacity built into our brains. We can keep our babies safe, but men also can introduce babies to new experiences and that is important too. Good parents, whatever their sexual orientation, learn to be partners in working together.

                Dr. Feldman says that she likes to think about good parenting as 12 bar blues where your left hand is playing that 12 bar blues again and again and it’s predictable and safe. The right hand can improvise, come up with exciting new riffs. The mothers provide the safety and the fathers provide the risk-taking variety. Both are needed.

                In this short video, Dr. Feldman describes what her studies have taught us about the male brain and how it works to provide the vital functions that children need right from the very beginning of life. She also emphasizes that fathers and mothers don’t always realize how vital a father’s involvement is with their babies right from the beginning of life. Men often need encouragement and support to let them know they can trust their own parental instincts just as mothers learn to do.

                I was fortunate to have a wife who was an involved mom from the beginning, but also knew she needed time to herself after the baby was born and trusted me to step in. I was terrified at first, but once I was on my own, I realized I wasn’t really on my own. Even though my wife was gone for two weeks, I learned that my one-year-old son, Jemal, was right there with me. He knew what he needed and he taught me to trust my instincts. We made a great team which continues to serve us well. Jemal is now 53 years old. He and his wife have a child of their own and he tells me I was a great role-model for him about how to be a good dad.

                Our daughter, Angela, is 51, and has four children. She, too, credits me with being an involved, hand-on Dad and her experiences with me have offered a model of what a good parent must do in order to give our children and future generations the best change for a good life.

                I hope all men can learn how vital we are to the wellbeing of our children and that women can learn to trust that fathers can be as good parents to the children as mothers can. Our children, grandchildren, and future generations need us now more than ever.

                I always appreciate comments. It’s the way I know what I’m sharing makes a difference in people’s lives. If you appreciate articles like these and want to read more I invite you to subscribe to my free weekly newsletter here:

The post Time For Fathers: How Hands-on Dads May Be the Hope For Our Future appeared first on MenAlive.

Sam Keen was a philosopher, scholar, and author of life-changing books including Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination (1986), Your Mythic Journey (1990), and Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man (1991). He was also a mentor, friend, and colleague. The April 4, 2025 obituary in The New York Times, headlined: Sam Keen, Philosopher of the Men’s Movement, Is Dead at 93.

                “Only men understand the secret fears that go with the territory of masculinity,”

                Keen was quoted saying and the obituary went on to say,

“His message resonated: His book Fire in the Belly was a best seller.”

                The article went on to say,

“Mr. Keen, who described himself as having been ‘overeducated at Harvard and Princeton’, fled academia in the 1960s for California, where he led self-help workshops and wrote more than a dozen books.”

                Sam and I lived in the same area of northern California and were both in long-standing men’s groups, which I wrote about recently, “Why Joining a Men’s Group May Be the Most Important Decision of Your Life.” In my book, The Warrior’s Journey Home: Healing Men, Healing the Planet, I said,

“The acceptance of weakness and strength is a crucial part of the warrior’s journey home.”

                In his book, Fire in the Belly, Sam Keen gives a magnificent description of this phase of a man’s hero’s journey:

                “This isn’t the fun part of the part of the trip. It’s spelunking in Plato’s cave, feeling our way through the illusions we have mistaken for reality, crawling through the drain sewers where the forbidden ‘unmanly’ feelings dwell, confronting the demons and dark shadows that have held us captive from their underground haunts. At this stage of the journey, we must make use of the warrior’s fierceness, courage, and aggression to break through the rigidities of old structures of manhood, and explore the dark and taboo negative emotions that make up the shadow of modern manhood.”

                One of the most honest and revealing aspects of the modern male shadow that we discuss and explore in the groups that Sam and I were involved with is our ambivalence towards women. In my most recent book, Long Live Men! The Moonshot Mission to Heal Men, Close the Lifespan Gap, and Offer Hope to Humanity, I shared Sam’s revealing insights in section I titled, “Males Feel Engulfed by WOMAN.”

                I said,

“I’ve known Sam for many years, and I believe he offers insights into why men are the way they are that can help us better understand men’s hunger for women, along with our anger and fear of women.”

                In Fire in the Belly, Sam says,

“It was slow in dawning on me that WOMAN had an overwhelming influence on my life and on the lives of all the men I knew. I’m not talking about women, the actual flesh-and-blood creatures, but about WOMEN, those larger-than-life shadowy female figures who inhabit our imaginations, inform our emotions, and indirectly give shape to many of our actions.”

                If you knew Sam, who was tall, good-looking, and successful, you might be as surprised as I was when he shared the deeper truth about his life.

“From all outward appearances, I was a successfully individuated man. I had set my career course early, doggedly stuck to the discipline of graduate school through many years and degrees, and by my mid-thirties was vigorously pursuing the life of a professor and writer. Like most men, I was devoting most of my energy and attention to work and profession.”

                I could identify with Keen’s early experience. My own life trajectory was similar as was “the rest of the story.”  Sam continues saying,

“But if the text of my life was ‘successful independent man,’ the subtext was ‘engulfed by WOMAN.’ All the while I was advancing in my profession, I was engaged in an endless struggle to find the ‘right’ woman, to make my relationship ‘work,’ to create a good marriage.”

                Sam went on to say,

“I agonized over sex — was I good enough? Did she ‘come’? Why wasn’t I always potent? What should I do about my desires for other women? The more troubled my marriage became, the harder I tried to get it right. I worked at communication, sex, and everything else until I became self-obsessed. Divorce finally broke the symbiotic mother-son, father-daughter pattern of my first marriage.”

                Sam’s story is like my own and that of millions of men. When we are engulfed by WOMAN, we are out of touch with our true selves. We project all our hopes for a life of passion, joy, and meaning on to this or that woman, but it never works out because we are really longing for the mythical WOMAN of our dreams. Yet, we continually deny the reality and the power that this mythical female figure exerts in our lives.

                “I would guess,” says Keen, “that a majority of men never break free, never define manhood by weighing and testing their own experience. And the single largest reason is that we never acknowledge the primal power WOMAN wields over us. The average man spends a lifetime denying, defending against, trying to control, and reacting to the power of WOMAN. He is committed to remaining unconscious and out of touch with his own deepest feelings and experience.”

                It took a long time for me to understand my anger and fear of women and to begin the journey of becoming my own man. Sam’s experiences and his words have helped me.

“We begin to learn the mysteries unique to maleness only when we separate from WOMAN’s world,” says Keen. “But before we can take our leave, we must first become conscious of the ways in which we are enmeshed, incorporated, inwombed, and defined by WOMAN. Otherwise we will be controlled by what we haven’t remembered.”

                As long as we are controlled by what we haven’t remembered, we will continue to hate and love women, to hunger for them and also be afraid of them, to touch them tenderly and also want to hurt them. We don’t all have to get a divorce to separate ourselves from the hold that WOMAN has on us, but I do think that we need to be in a men’s group where we can, in the words of another friend and colleague, Robert Bly,

“Men need to be with other men in order to hear the sounds that male cells sing.”

                My own men’s group lasted 46 years. My wife, Carlin, says that one of the main reasons we have had a successful 45-year marriage is because I have been in a men’s group for 46 years. I would add two additional words of wisdom. First, it should be noted that my wife has also been in a number of women’s groups over the years, which I believe have helped her deal with her own issues as well as contributing to our successful marriage.

                Second, most men get themselves to a men’s group because someone cares enough to guide them to one. I was lucky to have found Sam’s books and gotten mentoring from older men. Other men find a men’s group because their wives, girlfriends, or other caring women have suggested, (or sometimes highly suggested, as in “if you don’t get in a men’s group this relationship is over”) that we go.

                Unfortunately, my men’s group came to an end last year. Four of the seven members have died and the group needs more than three to be viable. I believe I have at least twenty good years ahead of me and I have a lot I’d like to share with other guys. I’ve put the word out and have gotten a number of responses, but I’m still talking with men who would like to join. I describe what I’m looking for here. Take a look and reach out if you’re interested.

                Sam Keen will always be a mentor to the group, wherever his spirit may be flying. Thank you, my friend.

The post The Future of Men, Men’s Groups, and the Legacy of Sam Keen appeared first on MenAlive.

        In my recent article, “The Evolution of Manhood and the Emergence of Compassionate Warriors,” I introduced you to the work of Dr. Sarah Hrdy, an anthropologist and primatologist and one of the world’s leading experts on the evolutionary basis of female behavior in both nonhuman and human primates. Dr. Hrdy has recently turned her attention to men.

                In her book, Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies, Dr. Hrdy destroys the myths that have kept men disconnected from our evolutionary, God-given–(Kudos to Michael Dowd for his transformative book, Thank God for Evolution)–rights to care, nurture, and hold our sons and daughters from the moment of their birth until…forever.

                I have read thousands of great books in my life and tried to write a few of my own. To say that Father Time can change the world for good would be an understatement. To say the book is timely would also be an understatement. The news is full of stories about boys and men, most of them negative. We might wonder if there is anything good about men. Father Time is not only a book about what is good about men but also offers clear science that proves that men may hold the key that unlocks secrets to our very survival as a species.

                We don’t need scientists to prove that humans are in trouble. We only need to listen to the news (or even just the weather report) to see that we are destroying our life support system and we don’t seem to be able to listen to those who are calling on us to change our ways before it’s too late.

                Thomas Berry was a priest, a “geologian,” and a historian of religions. He spoke eloquently about our connection to the Earth and the consequences of our failure to remember that we are one member in the community of life.

“We never knew enough. Nor were we sufficiently intimate with all our cousins in the great family of the earth. Nor could we listen to the various creatures of the earth, each telling its own story. The time has now come, however, when we will listen or we will die.”

                Father Time offers surprising wisdom of what we might do differently. Yet, the book almost didn’t make it into print.

“It took science far longer than it should have to recognize and zero in on the nurturing potential of men,” Dr. Hrdy reminds us. “It also took me longer than I expected to complete what, as the years dragged on, I began referring to as ‘this albatross of a book.’ Father Time was begun in 2014 as I eagerly contemplated and then luxuriated in the birth of my first grandchild.”

She goes on to say,

“I watched with awe as my son-in-law tended him right from birth. At the time my spirits were buoyed by social trends favoring women’s increased reproductive autonomy and professional opportunities along with broader definitions of what it means to be a man. The Introduction was drafted during that optimistic period, before I had to put the book on hold when my husband was diagnosed with cancer and faced surgery and bouts of radiation to cure it.

“By the time I returned to the book, backlashes aimed at re-imposing constraints on both sexes and all genders were gaining traction. It was hard for me to feel as hopeful as when I began. Yet recognizing men’s nurturing potentials and promoting their expression seems more urgent than ever.”

Old Beliefs About Men Have Harmed Us All

                Dr. Hrdy freely admits that she has held beliefs about men that are no longer valid. Good scientists are able to change their perspective when faced with new evidence, but not all scientists are able to admit they missed some critical information about men. We all have biases, but we don’t all recognize them.

“I have written whole books about maternal love and ambivalence,” says Dr. Hrdy, “with emphasis on the former. Few people could be more aware than I that we humans are mammals whose females invest heavily in their young, gestating, birthing, and then suckling them.”

                Yet, she like many scientists and the public, have known a lot about what is natural for women, but have missed important truths about what is natural for men.

“According to the standard Darwinian script,” says Dr. Hrdy, “while females were nurturing babies, males were otherwise occupied, mostly competing for status and mates, often violently or coercively.” [emphasis mine].

                She concludes,

“While a mother’s top priority is likely to be the well-being of her children, a male’s will be siring more of them. In line with such Darwinian preconceptions, across cultures and through historical time there are few, if any, records of men turning their lives over to babies the way women do. Instead, what we find is a near-universal expectation that baby care is women’s work.” [emphasis mine].

                I shared my own early experiences with my two children in the article I mentioned above. Being a hands on and heart connected father with my infant children changed my life forever. Dr. Hrdy’s book Father Time reads like a mystery novel revealing deeper and deeper layers of the truth of men’s inherent ability to nurture small children.

                She says,

“It is a story covering millions of years of vertebrate, mammalian, and particularly primate evolution, followed by thousands of years of human evolution and history, punctuated by numerous social transitions, cultural shifts and innovations.”

                What she finally discovers is simple and profound:

“My unexpected finding is that inside every man there lurk ancient caretaking tendencies that render a man every bit as protective and nurturing as the most committed mother. It is a journey that has forced me to rethink long held assumptions about man’s innately selfish, competitive, and violent nature, what Darwin described as his ‘natural and unfortunate birthright.” [emphasis mine].

Father Time and Father Earth: Healing Ourselves, Healing Our Relationship With The Planet

                Another wise grandmother who offers an inspiring novel understanding of men is Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a Mestiza Latina psychoanalyst and post-trauma specialist who was raised in now nearly vanished oral and ethnic traditions. She is best known for her book, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of The Wild Woman Archetype was on the New York Times Best Seller list for 144 weeks.

                I still remember sitting with 200 men and women at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco in 1993. My wife, Carlin, and I were attending a special workshop for women and men, appropriately titled “Ovarios y Cojones: Labyrinths of Memory and Danger Within Women and Men,” with Dr. Estés and mythologist and storyteller, Michael Meade.

                Towards the end of the day, Clarissa shared a few poems, including, “Father Earth.” As soon as she shared the title, the hairs on the back of my neck began to tingle. I knew I was going to hear something special. Here’s what she shared:

Father Earth!
There is a two-million-year-old men, no one knows.
They cut into his rivers.
They peeled side pieces of hide from his legs.
They left scorch marks on his buttocks.
He did not cry out.
No matter what they did to him. He did not cry out.
He held firm.
Now he raises his stabbed hands and whispers that we can heal him yet.
We begin the bandages, the rolls of gauze, the cut, the needle, the grafts.
Slowly, carefully, we turn his body face up.
And under him, his lifelong lover, the old woman is perfect and unmarked.
He has laid upon his two-million-year-old lover all this time
Protecting her with his old back, with his old, scarred back.
And the soil beneath her was fertile and black with her tears.

                Like many in the audience I was moved to tears. Even as I’ve recounted the experience over the years in men’s gatherings, people are touched. A number of men commented,

“Finally, a woman finally understands what being a male is really about.”

                And many men get a glimpse into the deeper truth about men, women, creation, and the future of humankind.

                Thank you Clarissa and Sarah for sharing the wisdom of the grandmothers for all of us, men, women, and children. I also wish to thank another elder in our community, Holly Near, and her song 1,000 Grandmothers. Our local, Emandal Chorale, came together with our children and grandchildren to sing the song in a recent 4^th of July parade. I’m still moved to tears seeing my friends, our children, and grandchildren, and being part of a new kind of Independence Day. You can share in the joy of our gathering here.

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The post Father Time: How Dads Are Being Called to Change the World for Good appeared first on MenAlive.