But as I’ve gotten older — and I’d like to think wiser — and as my own worldview has evolved, I’ve started to understand that the joy I experience around kids is not just about surplus energy or drawing a contrast with my New York City lifestyle, but actually the activation of an inborn paternal instinct. Some part of my being has a desire to make what sociobiologist Robert Trivers calls “parental investment.” That is to say: to play a crucial role in the future, to sacrifice something, to be a part of a clan and not just an isolated hedonic maximizer.

My generation, Millennials, is having children later, and at lower percentage rates than generations that came before us — only 40% of Millennial men are fathers, compared to 46% of Gen Xers, and only 33% live with a spouse and children, as compared to 66% of Gen X men. Among Zoomers, breeding is even less likely, in part thanks to a significant gender gap: 57% of Zoomer men want kids (a priority valued much more highly among Trump voters), but only 46% of Zoomer women want them (and likely they don’t want them with Trump voters). Add to this the ethos of AI, robotics, and life extension, and it suggests that one of the many schisms coming to our civilization will be that of the childless versus the parents: those who maximize life extension and hedonism, and those who value what will start to be considered “trad immortality” — that is, old-fashioned biological procreation. I don’t mean that everyone will fall into just these two camps, of course, but that this distinction will be a meaningful and historical one. The seeds of it are already planted. 

Much is said, and rightly so, about the consequences of delayed parenting for women: both positive and negative. But there is far less emphasis on the consequences of delayed parenting for men. Men also undergo hormonal, neurological, and psychological changes when they become fathers. As biological anthropologist Christopher Kuzawa writes, “humans are unusual among mammals in that our offspring are dependent upon older individuals for feeding and protection for more than a decade.” 

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Men, like women transform when they have to provide care and protection to a family. The shifts are less obvious but no less existentially and morally meaningful. Men of my generation, however, are reaching or crossing the boundary of age 40 not only without having had kids, but without ever having thought about having kids, and thus remaining in what can only be deemed a long adolescence — or a long 20s, at least.

To be sure, not everybody should have children. And I suspect that lifelong bachelors do play a valuable role in civilization (for instance, there’s a reason why historically almost no philosophers have been married). Certainly some people’s most procreative acts are creative and intellectual, and not biological. But on the whole, something is wrong with a society in which increasingly few men unlock the deepest meaning of their own masculinity — a tissue-deep meaning. In a 2014 Emory University study, fathers showed much higher levels of plasma oxytocin, higher prolactin, and lower testosterone than non-fathers. A landmark 2011 longitudinal study out of Northwestern found that the men with the highest testosterone — the most competitive, virile males by the manosphere’s own metrics — were the most likely to become fathers, and then experienced declines of roughly a third in their testosterone levels after becoming fathers: peak masculinity leads to fatherhood, and fatherhood transforms it. For some in the manosphere, this sounds like a disaster (because “high T” is God), but we are meant to become less aggressive and more nurturing when we have children. 

Fathers also live longer than non-fathers, even controlling for marital status. Fathers show lower rates of mental illness and engage in fewer risky behaviors. Moving away from the reductionist sociobiological point of view, any serious reader of great literature knows that fatherhood is often the mark of the hero, of a boy transformed into a man, who is ready to apply the lessons of his long education to the future and the next generation.

Whether extrapolating from Tolstoy — think of the birth of Prince Andrei’s son in the first part of War and Peace — or science, it is not hard to see why a world with fewer fathers, and a lower share of fathers, is less healthy, less civilized, less enmeshed in the meaning and drive of life.

Earlier this year, the internet writer and former academic sociologist Justin Murphy wrote a long post on X, perhaps to provoke conversation, about his own dislike of being a father. The responses to his post were, to my mind, salutary: one premise of Murphy’s confession was that fatherhood is central to manhood, and that manhood without fatherhood — or without a taste for fatherhood or love of fatherhood — is a manhood or masculinity that must question itself and interrogate itself. Certainly this is the right track. 

The gulf is wide between the pleasures of a civilization that suspends adolescence forever and the ancient challenge of sacrificing one’s own gratification for the sake of new life and of the future. What Murphy’s viral post demonstrates is that it’s hard to transition from an easy life to a difficult one, where you must be ultimately responsible and seek more than self-fulfillment. I have this anxiety myself. One reason for it is that men of my generation never learned how to overcome such feelings. Without rituals of manhood, which bring men gradually, but definitively, into modes of responsibility both positional and spiritual, the shift from bachelorhood to parenthood produces anxiety and shock. 

A highly technologized, ultra-modernized world where everyone lives far from nature, tradition, and religion, is one with more choices, and concealed preferences. So my point here is not to punish those who choose not to have children, but to inject some kind of paranoid philosophizing into the conversation. Are we forgetting that we have a choice — and that both tradition and biology make a very powerful case for fatherhood? 

Some, yes, are meant to be monks, playboys, philosophers, esoteric computer programmers who spend their lives in largely solitary conditions. But those are few. How many of us are really Leopold Bloom without wives and without children — without a hero’s journey, without the inheritance of Odysseus, who knows who he is because he has an island home, a wife and a son, an old father, a loyal dog? Many of us. Which means, ultimately, that many of us will never experience the sweetness of growing old.

Sometimes I try to interrogate my own reasons for it, in that guilty way that parents do with every decision we make, everything that we could have done differently. I wonder if it’s second-child syndrome, that everything she does is old hat to us so we’re relaxed, whereas everything the eldest one does is new ground broken and new fears faced. Or if it’s just differences in personality, that she tends to misbehave with a cheeky grin that makes it harder to be angry. Or, of course, if it’s simple sexism: I forgive the girl-child things I wouldn’t the boy, because gender roles. I don’t know what the truth is.

Another cliché is that fathers of daughters are suddenly supposed to have a wave of newfound feminist feeling. “As a father of daughters, I now realise that, in fact, women should have the vote,” we are meant to say; or, “As a father of daughters, I now realise that perhaps we should pay women nearly as much money as men.” 

It’s such a trope that I know of at least two articles spoofing it. Both of them are good and funny and hit home. “As a man with no daughters, I am completely incapable of feeling any empathy towards any woman whatsoever,” says one. “How merrily I used to drive down country lanes in my old Ford, periodically dodging off-road to mow down female pedestrians (you must remember I had no daughters then),” recalls the other. Other pieces are more straightforwardly angry.

I haven’t greatly noticed such a change in myself, I think probably because I’m already as perfectly egalitarian and pro-women as it’s possible to be; DM me if you want lessons in feminism, ladies! But there’s an implicit accusation in the trope, and I want to defend my fellow fathers-of-daughters from it.

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The accusation, I think, goes something like this. The father-of-daughters didn’t care about women beforehand; he was unable to even process the idea of them as fully human. Now that he has daughters, he wishes to protect them from bad things, and to do that — he belatedly realises — he needs to protect all women. But it shouldn’t take the production of a new woman from your genetic material to realise that women deserve equal pay, a life without fear of assault and all those other things. 

There’s also a suggestion that fathers in these situations still don’t see women as fully human: they wish to protect their daughters because they see themselves as the owners of those daughters, and wish to protect their property; or because their daughters are extensions of themselves, and they wish to protect themselves.

Most especially, I think the argument is: it should be obvious that women deserve all the things that men deserve, and if a man needs to procreate to realise it, then something is wrong with that man.

To argue that that is not necessarily the case, I want to go back to a beach in Turkey in 2015. That autumn, a little boy called Alan Kurdi died with his brother and mother, trying to cross the sea to Europe having escaped the Syrian civil war. You’ll remember the awful photo; it was everywhere, the little boy on the beach. A year or so later, another awful photo went viral, of another young boy, Omran Dagneesh, covered in dust and blood after an air strike.

That second time, I wrote about it. I was a relatively new parent at the time: when Alan died, Billy was about 18 months old, and Ada was as yet unborn. When Omran was caught in the air strike, Billy was two and a half or so, Ada just short of her first birthday.

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The images provoked an extraordinary reaction in me. With the photo of Alan, in particular, I was close to tears; I swore online at a journalist who shared it (“STOP TWEETING IT. STOP TWEETING THAT FUCKING PICTURE. It is a little boy. A dead little boy. Let him have some dignity”). With the photo of Omran, to quote my own words from the time, “I stood staring at my phone for over a minute, with the picture, again, switching between Omran’s face and Billy’s in my mind, like those optical illusions that could be a duck or a rabbit depending on how you look at it.”

I return to that piece every so often, because it still evokes an echo of the same reaction each time I read it: the yawning, panicking horror; seeing myself, as in a dream, simultaneously the parent of the child and the child himself. In my imagination, the child’s inability to comprehend the horrible things that are happening is the worst part; he would not understand why it was happening or why I had been unable to protect him. My chest still tightens when I think about it. 

Three years earlier, I would have had an entirely different response. Of course images of dead and suffering children would have been awful and heartbreaking to look at, but they wouldn’t have evoked the asphyxiating shock that they did when I was a father myself. 

Why was that? After all, it should have been obvious that children being injured or dying in war is awful, that Alan and Omran would have been unimaginably scared, that their families would have been devastated in ways that the word “devastated” cannot do justice to because it is worn away by overuse. I shouldn’t have needed to have kids of my own to realise that. And yet I did. 

And I don’t think I’m alone. A lot of people, both men and women, messaged me to say that since becoming parents, they have become hugely more vulnerable to images or stories of children. Parenthood opened a sort of empathy-valve: suddenly we were all drinking from a firehose of empathy; we couldn’t not put ourselves in the place of the scared child, whether we wanted to or not.

That is, I think, what is going on in the minds of the authors of those fathers-of-daughters pieces. You can be a man, making your way through the world, and being perfectly aware — on an intellectual, conscious level — that the women in your life have concerns which are different from yours. Most, if you asked them, would probably agree that women deserve equal pay for equal work, that medical research should gather as much data from women as from men, that pathways to STEM careers should be as straightforward for women as for men. They might even have said that it was obvious.

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But if the father-of-daughters experience is anything like my experience with the images of children, then perhaps – one day – that empathy-valve was opened. They couldn’t not feel themselves in the place of their daughters walking down a dark alley at night, or being told girls don’t do physics. And suddenly, instead of it being a thing of which they were intellectually aware, it was a great burning heart-squeezing pressure, and they couldn’t stop themselves from taking whatever platform was available to them and shouting from it to anyone who would listen.

Maybe that will happen to me, some day; maybe it happens when one’s daughter reaches her tweens or teens, when society starts to impose more strictures on what she should and shouldn’t do (at the moment she is far more concerned about whether she is Elsa or Anna in her playground games of make-believe). Maybe at the moment I’m in the calm “it is obvious” intellectual stage and it’ll all change for me.

If it does, it doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll suddenly realise the Right Thing to Do, any more than it meant that Andrea Leadsom would have been a better PM than Theresa May because she was a mother. The empathy firehose gives you insight but costs you detachment, I think, and sometimes detachment is important; empathy won’t tell me the correct maternity leave policies for a given trade-off between economic growth and female participation in the workforce, for instance.

“Parents don’t necessarily make better decisions,” I wrote in 2016. “They just make different mistakes.” There is, for any policy goal, a correct policy decision, and I’m not sure being a father of daughters reveals it to you. But it probably makes you want to shout about the problem a lot more.

I haven’t felt the father-of-daughters impulse, as I say; I’ve just felt myself become wrapped around our daughter’s little finger, even when she shrieks “I HATE DADDY. POO POO DADDY” and refuses to let me put her to bed, which she does fairly often. But I understand the awful rush of empathy behind it.