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Comment by thefz | Hacker News Reader

> Parenting is a biological and psychological life milestone

Allow me to disagree. First: there's no evidence of any change in your body, as a male, after becoming a father.

Second: supposing such a "wireless" change would happen, getting someone pregnant and immediately disappearing from their life would yield a perceptible change even with distance and no involvement with the life of the child.

Third: I personally think there's no innate drive to parent, and only an innate drive to mate; everything else is injected by society.

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There could be a great discussion about whether male parenting and reproduction comes from the bio/psycho/social drives.

For this context, I think trying to make these distinctions is a distraction. By way of common sense, reproducing & parenting has been a HUGE factor in the propagation of human life (this is so obvious it's kind of funny to write).

> For this context, I think trying to make these distinctions is a distraction.

So basically you don't want to have a discussion that might make you reconsider your belief.

No I just don’t have time to write an entire epistemological defense of “reproduction and parenting is a key milestone for humans”. It should be self evident. If you don’t think so, consider what happens if untrue (hint: no more humans).

You have completely missed the point of all my comments above and took your own tangent.

Not exactly true - they have found statistically significant hormonal changes in men after becoming fathers: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/parenting/baby/fatherhood...

Reading the article... yikes. One more reason not to.

yes, but did they compare to fathers who abandon their partner? or don't even know that they are a father? and likewise to fathers who adopt?

i strongly suspect that it's the act of actively becoming a parent, whether biological or adoptive that is responsible for that change in hormones

Which is probably why they said “parenting” and not “impregnating”

Birth of the first (and only first) child triggers what might be the largest brain rewiring in males since pubety. Women don't seem to undergo a rewiring of the same scale [1].

To me, this makes sense, given how unusual the new skillset has to be compared to pre-fatherhood life (manipulations with the newborn, deciphering needs, new attetion patterns etc.).

[1] Mentioned in the book by Stanislas Dehaene, "Consciousness and the Brain", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_and_the_Brain

My mother claims that the day my son was born I became a completely different person!

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