The Biggest Myths About Motherhood in the Animal Kingdom

My closest brush with motherhood was an intense 24 hours fostering an orphaned baby owl monkey in the Peruvian Amazon in 2009. According to Charles Darwin, my maternal drive should have transformed me into an intuitively wise and selfless nurse. But the truth was I felt quite traumatized—fretful, exhausted, and for the sake of my defiled and defecated hair alone (the baby was happiest when clinging to my head), uninclined to repeat the ordeal ever again. I was 39 at the time and wrestling with whether I should be having children myself. My night with the owl monkey reinforced my suspicion that I was not cut out for motherhood. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Females have long been equated with motherhood, as if no other role existed. But my research about motherhood in the animal kingdom taught me that maternal instinct is a long-standing myth, created by men, that reduces females to identikit automatons and belittles the complexities of motherhood. Firstly, maternal instinct assumes caring for young is the sole responsibility of the female. In the owl monkey’s case, his mother would have suckled him every few hours. But after each feeding she would have driven him away, quite unsentimentally, by biting his tail, leaving his father to take on the heavy job of carrying him 90% of the time. The commitment to childcare demonstrated by owl monkey fathers is admittedly not the norm amongst mammals (only one in ten species exhibit direct male care...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized freelance Source Type: news