Darby Saxbe

I'm VERY excited to announce that I'm writing a book for @Flatironbooks! It'll be about the neurobiology of fatherhood & how fatherhood transforms men's lives. Thanks to stellar @WMEBooks agents @alexanderjkane & @RossGail. Reach out if you have dad stories or research to share!

I agree with Stepman's that we should normalize flexible and part-time careers for parents of young children. This model is much more common in countries that have universal healthcare, which is one of the biggest obstacles to making this a possibility in the USA

Stepman is taking issue with the free market decisions made by women while ignoring that men also make market decisions and choose to outsource some of their labor. She blames women for cultural atomization while ignoring that women report greater community integration than men.

There are many strange & inaccurate claims in this article. One of the oddest is that working women somehow invented the need for cheap domestic labor: "Women leaving the home en masse created a demand for a servant class." Stepman went to UVA, so she probably knows about slavery

Looking forward to this!

One of the worst strategies I can think of is the right-wing one, which emphasizes traditional maternity - quit your job, stay home, rely on a husband, have as many babies as possible. France, for example, has one of the highest birthrates in the EU - and one of the highest female labor force participation rates. France has a very in-demand childcare system, and it's not just the creches you've heard about; it also subsidizes the kind of in-home one-on-one care that a lot of parents prefer for babies. It also just gives parents money for each child.

More baby time for everyone! It's an irony of contemporary society that most of us who work and socialize in adult spaces get very little time with babies and young children, while parents are isolated and overwhelmed.

@rcobooth Congrats!

got to watch this little guy look at the sky for the first time on our way home from the hospital. I'll be off from work for the next few months caring for him, and seeing him take in what I hope are many more firsts. welcome to the world, Jesse ❤️

@CameronCorduroy I had a $600,000 over 5 years NSF Physics grant terminated last year because our grant mentioned "polarization" which was included in the banned terms list. We were discussing the polarization of light. We never got the grant reinstated.

@BradWilcoxIFS We need bipartisan agreement on pro-family policy, not scoring points against one “side” or the other.

@BradWilcoxIFS Last time I checked, journalists who write for New York Magazine aren’t running for office, setting policy, or representing a political ideology. They represent their readership: young, urban, and single. Making family formation into a partisan issue is counterproductive

I'm often asked by my left-leaning colleagues and friends: Why do you think that liberals are less family-minded? Headlines like this👇🏽which lead to trends like this👇🏽

My Substack on daycare: darbysaxbe.substack.com/p/daycare-is-n…

New essays up about alloparenting, religion, & daycare. There's a new energy swirling around motherhood in far-right circles, asserting the primacy of mothers as the only possible "natural" caregivers, but this ignores our evolution as cooperative breeders. Links in comments.

Fairer Disputations piece: fairerdisputations.org/beyond-mothers/

"A strict divide between the home front and the workplace reflects only a brief window in our human history, when the industrial revolution divided the spheres of work and family." @darbysaxbe fairerdisputations.org/beyond-mothers/

Glad to be on board!

Scott Galloway recently said on a podcast that childbirth is “disgusting” and “unnatural” for dads. I’ve studied fathers' experience of childbirth in my lab for years, and I think Galloway is wrong. darbysaxbe.substack.com/p/scott-gallow…

@CathyReisenwitz You are correct! I did mean households. Got mad and typed too fast

I think you're thinking about households. 40% of households have a female breadwinner. Single mothers make up a large proportion of these households. "The share of marriages where the wife is the sole or primary breadwinner has increased from 5% in 1972 to 16% today [2023]." pewresearch.org/social-trends/…

"For various biological and psychological reasons"? 40% of U.S. couples have a breadwinner wife. Research from my lab (and others) find that men are effective parents who show brain & hormone changes when they engage in caregiving. The biological essentialism here is out of date.