This is just in time for Father's Day, which is increasingly a waste. We should just combine it with Mother's Day and call it "Parental Unit Day." Link. Excerpt:
A man's nipples are perfectly suited to soothing a crying baby until it can be fed, according to a report on fatherhood.
It names the Aka Pygmies, a hunter-gatherer tribe from the northern Congo, as the best fathers. When the mother is not available, the father calms his baby by giving him or her a nipple to suck. . .
Caroline Flint, the former president of the Royal College of Midwives, said that she had come across many examples of men in Britain “suckling” their babies, even though it might not be something they talked about very much.
She said: “It's not a case of the man saying to the baby, 'Here you are, have my booby', but usually of the baby snuffling along the father's chest, finding the nipple and sucking. The men are usually very surprised, but the babies seem content.”
We really like this paragraph:
Sebastian Kraemer, a child psychiatrist at the Whittington Hospital in London, said: “It is possible that in prehistoric societies this was a normal way of fathering.” He said that it would be wrong to assume from the past 10,000 years of history that our prevailing model of mother-based childcare was the right one.
Ten thousand years of history doesn't make it right? Okay, perhaps, but could it at least give rise to a strong presumption? Call it a "norm by prescription" or something, just tell the "men" to keep their shirts on or we'll have to throw our beer cans at them.
