The Evidence Stops Short
There is little here that will feel groundbreaking to someone who is already a dad. The brain is plastic. Hormones will mess you up, though not in any linear or intuitive way. The science supplies mechanisms for experiences that fathers already know from the inside.
A more interesting argument emerges underneath the neuroscience. Dad Brain becomes an argument about caregiving as a universal human capacity and desire that society has made increasingly gendered. Saxbe’s case for de-gendering care reminds me of Ruth Bader Ginsburg pursuing women’s equality through cases involving men: make visible how the same system constrains both sexes, then attack the distinction itself. The book is strongest when fatherhood becomes evidence that care was never naturally women’s work.
I appreciated this as an overview of the evidence, but it is dispiriting how little evidence there is. I also wanted the book to become more normative about what being a dad should mean. A literature review can tell us that fathers change, that caregiving changes them, and that our institutions lag behind both facts. It cannot tell us what fathers owe their children, partners, or themselves.