I’m a Dad-to-Be With One Particular “Maternal” Instinct. It’s Actually Quite Normal. (2024)

“That’s you.”

My wife was smiling and whispering to me at the halfway point of a three-hour birthing class last week. A new slide had just come up on the PowerPoint titled “Signs That Your Baby Is Arriving Soon.” There were five or six bullet points featuring signals like Braxton Hicks contractions, nausea, or “lightening,” when the baby drops farther down into the pelvis. The last item on the list was “nesting.”

The amiable class facilitator was explaining, mostly to the men in the room, that as delivery approaches, our birth partners would begin frantically preparing the house for the baby’s arrival, pasting wallpaper, installing curtains, cleaning baseboards, doing laundry, and preparing mountains of food.

“And there’s not much you can do about it,” she said, shaking her head with mock sympathy.

My wife was nudging me, however, because I’ve been doing a lot of that kind of stuff too. As our due date nears, I’ve been clearing out old furniture and buying new stuff, power-washing and building, planting and weeding, ticking items off our domestic to-do list with uncharacteristic energy. Of course she is, too, but I think we’re doing it for the same reason: a desire to have our house in order before our son arrives.

And yet, here’s the thing: According to our instructor, popular wisdom, and the internet, I’m not supposed to be nesting. Because it’s a woman’s impulse. If you check out the massively popular pregnancy website the Bump, you’ll learn that nesting is when “moms-to-be feel the overwhelming desire to redesign, reorganize and obsessively clean their living space.”

The good people over at Whattoexpect.com add that the desire is not merely overwhelming; it’s natural. Nesting, they say, is a biological “instinct” (shared with various other members of the animal kingdom) that is “nature’s way of getting you ready to nurture a child.” Parents.com joins the chorus, calling nesting “a natural phenomenon that many pregnant mammals experience in preparation for welcoming a baby.”

Which probably explains why my humble web search “Do fathers have a nesting instinct?” turned up so few results. I was surprised, but what I learned next surprised me more. Because it turns out that the more relevant question is, “Do humans have a nesting instinct?” And the answer might well be no.

British philosopher Arianne Shahvisi published a groundbreaking paper on the question in 2020. Her main findings are threefold. First, online discussion of nesting as a gendered, natural impulse is extensive. The vast majority of the most popular parenting and pregnancy websites feature posts testifying to the power and prevalence of what they essentially characterize as an evolutionary adaptation.

But the hard science that might be expected to scaffold such an expansive discourse is exceedingly thin, and what’s there is inconclusive at best. There is a field of research on nesting in the animal kingdom, but there the term refers quite literally to the building of nests or other analogous structures. And birds don’t build nests to “prepare to nurture a child”; they build nests because they need actual nests.

In a 2021 paper, Lisa Malich, a professor who specializes in the history of psychology, concurs with Shahvisi. She calls nesting’s position in the field of science “marginal” and goes on to note that in the 19^th century, scientists more often wrote about male animals exhibiting behavioral patterns consistent with the practice. Malich posits that the popularity of this idea may have something to do with the fact that in 19^th-century Europe, property law decisively favored men; accordingly, the dwelling—or nest—was perceived as a male domain. The loosening of such legal norms is one (but by no means the only) force that made way for the feminization of nesting in the 20^th century.

And yet to argue that there may be no such biological impulse in women is not to suggest that expectant mothers don’t cook and clean and organize and prepare in the third trimester. Surveys suggest that three-quarters of pregnant people feel that particular need. But they don’t do so for evolutionary reasons; they do so for social ones. As Shahvisi argues, there persist quite substantial social pressures for women to carry out domestic tasks, and those pressures are magnified during pregnancy. In other words, biology doesn’t make women nest; the patriarchy does.

In an interview, USC psychology professor Darby Saxbe, author of the forthcoming book Dad Brain, hedges a bit and allows for the possibility that some nesting behaviors might have a biological root. But others, she says, “like an emphasis on cleaning in a particular way and acquiring specific brand-name goods through baby showers—are definitely mediated through culture and … are laden with gendered expectations about care work.”

I’ve certainly see that trend firsthand, as some (though by no means all) fathers-to-be in my ultraprogressive metro-Boston milieu hang back and watch as their wives break their backs building cribs, cooking and freezing casseroles, and scrubbing floors as the due date approaches, all in the name of nesting.

So perhaps it’s time to discard this pseudoscientific myth and embrace nesting as a family project. My wife is currently doing the very hard work of growing a human inside her body. While she does that, reorganizing the refrigerator is the least I can do to help.