Some people believe the compulsion to bear babies is biologically inbuilt – even suggesting women who refuse their supposed evolutionary duty are being selfish. Others hold the view that this so-called “maternal instinct”, also referred to as “baby fever”, has nothing to do with biology and is a social construct.
To begin this discussion we have to understand what an instinct really is. To qualify as an instinct, the behavior should be automatic, irresistible, triggered by something in the environment, occur at some particular time during development, require no training, be unmodifiable and occur in all individuals of a species.
So few (if any) human behaviors qualified as ‘instincts’ that psychologists replaced the term with ‘drives’. The idea is that we have a set of innate drives that pushes our behavior in preset directions. Drives are not unmodifiable or even irresistible, like instincts—but they are innate. They are not learned—and (with occasional exceptions) they are universal.
Surely all women must have a maternal instinct or the human race would die out. We are mammals, and all other female mammals seem to have one. Maternal instincts and breasts—surely that’s what it means to be a mammal. Some women don’t seem very interested in having babies but that can’t be normal—can it?
On this line of work, maternal instinct is supposed to be real as many psychologists, and even sociologists stated in different investigations. However, and this is a big however, many people advocate the maternal instinct it’s an invented concept that arosed, at least in Western culture, circa the Industrial Revolution. During this period of time, a new sexual division of labor was negotiated — the one where men go to work and women stay home raising kids. Suddenly, the new party line was that such arrangements were handed down by nature. So what we’re calling biological instinct is actually a cultural development — a historical artifact, not a fact of nature.
I believe that wanting to protect your child has nothing to do with the gender of the person. Both parents (on the assumption it is an heterosexual couple) have the same capacity to take care and love their child. Some psychologists say that, by having the baby on her belly and experimenting the pregnancy, women have an stronger connection to their baby. On the other hand, cleaning and cooking have nothing to do with the desire of protecting your child and, also, french scientists have discovered that mothers and fathers are equally good at identifying the cry of their baby.
The researchers, from the University of Saint-Etienne, found that the ability of a parent to identify their child’s cry was determined by the amount of time they spend with the baby, not by their gender. The parents were played a recording of cries from five babies, one of which was their own, and were asked to identify which was their child.
Overall, the parents managed to identify their child correctly 90 per cent of times. However, the mothers were right 98 per cent of times and fathers who spent a lot of time with their child were right 90 per cent of the time. Taking this into account, if women are expected to be with their child while doing housechords, the infant would have a deeper connection than with his father who has to win the money they need to survive.
