We tend to assume that women do most of the caregiving in our society because nature made it that way.

But nature is full of countless examples that subvert that expectation, from poison dart frogs to owl monkeys.

This week, Karen Fischer explores what the animal kingdom reveals about gender, caregiving, and why flexibility — not biology — may be the whole point.

Let’s go.

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A few months ago I caught up with my older brother on the phone—let’s call him Dee—and he recapped a barbeque he went to with friends.

Dee has three children; the youngest is 18 months, and the oldest is 12. At the barbecue, Dee happened to see a friend from high school who was there with his children—let’s call him Dent.

Dent has six or seven children, and at the barbeque, all of the kids crowded around him, laughing. He took turns scooping them up, twirling them around, and setting them back down to continue his conversations with Dee.

Meanwhile, Dent’s partner chased after the children making sure their diapers were clean, they had something to eat, had put on sunscreen – without a break. This struck Dee as odd because Dent’s laissez-faire attitude towards caregiving was the opposite of his own.

“I do everything,” Dee explained.

He and his partner share caregiving tasks in what’s closer to a 50/50 split, so Dee couldn’t fathom how Dent got away with not changing diapers, and ultimately felt that Dent was there to have fun with the children, but not exactly pulling his weight in doing all of the tedious, remarkably un-fun tasks with them.

This tale of two caregivers gets at something curious. ‘Caregiving’ is often thought of as caring for a disabled or elderly loved one.

Depending on who you ask, being a parent is synonymous with being a caregiver, but to others, raising children is assumed and innate, and doesn’t count.

Karen is an independent writer and reporter. You can find some of her bylines at The Verge, Eater, and CQ Researcher. She also produces The Gumbo Pot, a weekly Substack of independent reportage on education, health, culture, infrastructure, food, and energy.

kfischerwrites.com

In the human world, these attitudes towards parenting or caregiving—whichever you prefer—have disproportionately impacted women, like Dent’s partner, and imbue little socially-acceptable flexibility or support for different types of care networks for the very young, or very old.

Today, there are about 63 million caregivers throughout the country, or one in four adults, that are largely providing unpaid labor to care for a loved one.

With a rapidly aging population, those figures are only going to grow, and continue to stress the quality of life and economic prospects for caregivers, the majority of whom are still women.

Some would argue that there is an evolutionary basis to that.

Across the board, only about 10 percent of male mammals partake in raising their young, with the evolutionary argument being that procreation is more important in the hard-wiring of the brain for males than females. If all of a male’s energy was focused on raising a single baby, it would severely limit opportunities for more robust procreation.

But this rule isn’t hard-and-fast in the animal kingdom, or in humans: According to the National Alliance for Caregiving, in 2025, 38 percent of primary caregivers were men in the United States, or over 20 million people.

Furthermore, some male mammals that do participate in caregiving have been found to produce more offspring. Male parental care strengthens mating and community bonds, which may be why 90 percent of bird species are socially monogamous after their offspring hatch.

Even if the majority of caregiving for mammals looks a certain way, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t exceptions to the rule that tell remarkable stories of fluidity and evolution.

Sometimes, animals have no caregivers at all, and that works just fine.

In the rainforests of Central and South America, tiny technicolor creatures about an inch long captured the imagination of Elizabeth Preston, science journalist and author of “The Creatures’ Guide to Caring.”

“I spent a lot of time in the book on poison dart frogs,” she says.

Their story is strange. When these frogs lay eggs, they don’t do so in bodies of water the way that most frogs do. They remain in the rainforest for the entirety of the reproductive process, which creates a problem: They need a body of water for their tadpoles to survive. They’ve evolved to work around that inconvenient snag in the system.

One mate, typically the male, will transport tadpole eggs on his back. Traveling as a group comes with risks—it’s not uncommon for tadpoles to eat one another, so the male may carry just one or two. He’ll hop around the rainforest until he finds a suitable pool to his liking, and then unload the tadpoles there.

That’s the end of the caregiving journey for some frogs. But others, for whatever reason, choose to be more involved. Some males will hop back to pools daily, and if the tadpoles seem hungry, the male will sing, drawing the female to the pool, where she deposits an unfertilized egg for the tadpoles to eat.

Meanwhile, many species of fish don’t care for their young at all. Neither do many species of turtles, insects, alligators, or cobras.

There’s a great mystery in why some frogs choose to lean into caregiving, and why others don’t.

“Neuroscientists are investigating what’s active in their heads when they’re caretaking, or not, to see the similarities between the mother and father’s brains, and the roles they’re doing,” Preston says.

But ultimately, the arrangement among the poison dart frogs has worked for thousands of years. Success as a species is survival, point-blank. If the young die, the species will die, so the bar is to keep the young alive, thriving, and procreating.

Preston interviewed around 80 scientists to write her book, and took several trips across North America to witness care systems among hyenas, Canada jays, naked mole rats, and beetles in the flesh.

She found that one of the reasons why females figure so prominently in mammal care systems is biological: the young need mother’s milk to survive.

An element of involved male caregiving could be monogamy, Preston says—when animals are monogamous, males know that offspring are really theirs, so they feel more inclined to keep them alive.

The assumption, from there, is that females who are finally relieved of caregiving tasks will welcome sharing the daily grind 50-50 with their male partner.

That’s not always so. If there is any rule in the animal kingdom, there is always an exception, and nature is littered with broken rules and rites.

For example, female owl monkeys are monogamous and will nurse their young, but beyond that, they’re standoffish, and males complete the rest of the caretaking tasks.

Monogamy doesn’t explain a tapped-out female owl monkey who is disengaged from caring for her young. Even monogamy, the crown jewel of the caregiving kingdom, doesn’t create ‘happier’ caregivers.

In owl monkey society and suburban barbeques alike, one partner can check out while the other does most of the day-to-day work. It’s hard to uniformly say what any caregiver will do when push comes to shove, which gets at something key in the natural world.

“There are really no rules in biology,” Preston says. “I don’t think a male animal that doesn’t care for their young is a bad parent. All animals have evolved to keep their genes alive, [and] to keep their offspring alive… [They’ve just] found very different solutions to the problem of staying alive.”

Preston’s takeaway from all of this is that humans evolved as cooperative breeders, and are hard-wired to raise their young in community. Asking for help is natural, and parents shouldn’t pressure themselves to take on all caregiving responsibilities.

But my takeaway is more in the vein of rules, and exceptions.

I think of the poison dart frogs who have evolved to do something that makes no biological sense, and then choose whether they want to do more caregiving, or not.

I think of the owl monkeys, and the chronically checked-out moms staring off into the forest below with a baby monkey mewling in the background.

Both are surprising when looking at them through the endless lessons humans learn on what it means to be a good caregiver (or mother, father, child, sister, brother, grandparent), but both of those animals have survived through millennia. No matter how their actions look when projected onto human subjects, they’re doing something right.

Perhaps my takeaway and Preston’s intertwine: the more flexible a social system is, the more that every being in an ecosystem can meet their full potential, whether that means caregiving, or not.

The poison dart frog and the owl monkey don’t agree on how to do it, but they’ve both survived anyway.

The question, then, is how to build flexible social systems that caregivers can tap into when they need it, without assuming that one person, or gender, will bear the brunt of it all.

Some states are making great strides.

In 2025, New Mexico passed universal child care to all residents in the state regardless of income. Parents must be working or attending school to qualify for the benefit. There is also a carve-out for grandparents, so any grandparents raising their grandchildren can tap into the resource to help them out.

Other states like Michigan have programs such as Rx Kids, which disburses between $4,500 to $7,500, depending on the community, to mothers throughout and post-pregnancy to pay for care costs.

The results: fewer NICU admissions, more housing security, and estimates of millions of dollars in savings for health systems.

Federal policy moves slowly.

States are more agile, and can pilot flexible plans to make caregiving easier for scores of families.

The question is who may be next. 

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