Quote:
Originally posted by Artemisia
What I mean is that both men and women feel the need to take care of their kids.
Do women psychologically feel more obligated than men do to take care of their kids?
I don't know, but I'm pretty sure women being caring and motherly has a lot more to do with social constructs than it does Biology.
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Actually, the concept of maternal instinct is actually heavily rooted in biology. In nature, mothers tend to be limited by resources (in societies in which the female selects for the male, which is true of most organisms including humans) and can only mate once at any given time (while males can have as many as they would like). Due to this, their opportunities for the propogation of their genetic material into the next generation (a fundamental of life according to evolutionary biology) are severely limited. In order to ensure that their children have greater success at surviving to reproductive age (in order to ensure
those genes are propogated into the next generation), there is a feeling of obligation to ensure their survival. Males have an essentially unlimited productive capabiltiy of spermatozoa compared to the once-a-ovarian-cycle situation of oocytes, and thus don't feel as much committment to the upbringing of their offspring. This is an observation of natural organismal societies, not necessarily human, but I feel a lot of this information can be transmitted into human societies.
I do think that motherly behaviour, as in that nuturing mindset, is built into the female biologically. The evidence is clear enough.