While they don’t get the hormones from breastfeeding, attachment-dads get loads of love- and parent-promoting hormones. Anyone does, simply by holding (and especially wearing skin-to-skin) and smelling and feeding and caring for and sleeping next to babies. Oxytocin is the hormone of love, and is present whenever we touch each other with caring, sit down to a meal, brush a child’s hair. Dads need to do a lot MORE of the hands-on (in-arms) caring of kids in order to meet similar levels of a breastfeeding mom, but it’s not like they are hormone-deficient or hormone-static systems. Actually, studies looking at men at birth show that fathers intimately involved (by their choice!) in the birth experience show a similar hormone spike post-birth to those of an unhindered-birth mother.

(I also disagree that the average stay-at-home dad looks any more wiped than, say, I did that first year — and all I did was sit at home and nurse him and try to survive until The Man got home!)

As for a lot of the rest of your questions, I’ve tried to answer a lot of them myself over at my blog. I’d be interested in your reactions.

Next bit:
Men are different from women generally. Men do things differently to women generally.
Until the synthetic chemicals, soy and plasticisers we are constantly soaking in that are sapping our sperm counts (did you know men today have on average half the sperm count of our fathers? That sperm levels regarded as abnormal are constantly being adjusted down every 5 years or so) turn us into a single androgynous unit: we’ll continue to be different halves of the same species with very different biological tuning.
As part of that biological process of growing up I think it’s been pretty clear over history that boys need to have role models that are men. Girls need to see how women behave too.

As for “dangers” that men are oblivious- you can say the same about different parents. Kids really don’t die that much growing up although you’d never know it looking at the mass pussification of playgrounds that happened at the tail end of my (our) childhood. Kids bounce well, heal excellently although they might get sick and appear to need to get a healthy exposure to germs to develop a normal immune system. But the extraordinary helicopter parenting (hover around constantly stopping any slight “danger”) is somewhere between unnecessary and extremely damaging I reckon (but hey, I’m not a parent.. But I was a kid and get annoyed at parents who prevent their kids from ever finding out things via our inbuilt action-pain result-resulting don’t f**king do it again process. It’s been replaced with action-immediately prevented by parents-possibly don’t do it next time to avoid the smothering parental attention. That might just be what you’re experiencing there rather than a man vs woman thing. Or it could be that men generally believe it’s better to get a bit dirtier, muck around, take a few more risks: you know, to have fun as a kid. I’ve seen plenty of dads doing the helicopter parenting big time. But if boys avoided everything their protective parents said not to do: there’d be no climbing trees, riding bikes, swimming in rivers, mountain exploring, wilderness adventuring, pilots, motorcycle riders or pretty much anything other than “stay inside wrapped in cotton wool” aficionados.

Feminism:
- I think the term “feminism” gets used or is associated with a range of stuff. I’m not too fussed on what it can mean, I’d prefer “equal opportunity” as the goal. If someone wants to do something then there shouldn’t be any gender bias getting in the way. That’s all that’s really important. Whether you adhere to the ideals of some particular feminist ideology is kinda irrelevant so long as the opportunities aren’t cut off, limited or hampered based on sex.

Can one be in a 1950s “pappa brings home the bread, mumma irons the shirts” and still believe in feminism: sure. Is how they’re living taking full advantage: well, it’s about choice, so yes in that sense, but with reference to fully flexing the “feminist muscles”: perhaps not so much. Is the society that person is living in in need of that flexing? Perhaps not very much in Australia, but in saudi arabia: most definitely.
People believe in all sorts of ideologies and concepts: whether they put them into action is another thing. I feel very strongly about the environment, but I have flown quite a lot in my time. I mitigate it via planting trees, but really I’d be much truer to the ideal if I never set foot on a plane. Am I a hypocrite for not shunning air travel completely, or just a bit selfish enough to take advantage of the ability to travel vast distances in reasonable time? Perhaps? But there’s rarely a situation without at least a little compromise or some hypocrisy in pretty much everything in our lives. The trick is to try and minimise that I think. So staying home with kids and then voting for a law that effectively muzzles women might not be really sticking with feminist leanings.