Customer Reviews

The Tending Instinct: How Nurturing is Essential to Who We Are and How We Live

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Shelley Taylor has pulled off a coup, integrating scientific research with anecdotes from her own life and translating academic jargon into readable prose.

Men and women differ in the way they respond to stress. After a hard day's work, men want to be alone; women spend more time with the children. And it is this tending instinct that keeps a society together and makes individuals healthier.

Men and women differ in other ways that influence social interaction, says Taylor. Men's groups are more hierarchical, women's more informational. Married men live longer than single men, and women fare better during times of major crisis, such as the dissolution of the Communist bloc.

Another key theme: Nurturing is essential to well-being. A nurturant parent can override genes that would predispose a child toward aggression, depression or other disorders.

Much of what Taylor writes will not seem radically new, but cumulatively, chapter to chapter, she builds a case for recognizing the importance of nurturing and the style of interaction known as traditionally female.

Because Taylor is a psychologist, rather than sociologist, it's not surprising that she omits suggestions and implications. Many well-educated citizens, for instance, resent payments to welfare mothers, yet Taylor's findings emphasize that paying women to nurture their children can save millions of dollars by keeping those children out of the criminal justice system.

A sociologist could point out that in fact tending seems to be punished by society. "Nurturant" occupations, such as teaching and social work, typically pay less than more aggressive occupations, such as policing. In medicine, surgeons make the most while pediatricians and psychiatrists earn the least, on average.

Taylor also ignores outliers -- the non-nurturing female and the nurturing male. -- who occupy ambivalent roles in many societies. And while she says that friends will become the most important social relationship, as we move farther from families, I find that friendship bonds often are formed based on family status. A married but childless woman says, "People my age are having babies!" and I say, "Women my age are getting visits from the grandchildren!"

As an academic, Taylor herself anticipates comments on what's working and what's missing, and she has made an exceptionally strong contribution here. I am recommending this book to readers who want to learn more about stress as well as those who are fascinated by the eternal "how men differ from women" puzzle.

When Darwin wrote that man attains "a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman - whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands," he was echoing what had been known to be true since the time of Aristotle. Taylor explains clearly and with compelling authority why this traditional viewpoint is so wide of the mark.

In marketing, the discipline in which I work it is quite evident that the world of consumer commerce revolves around the tending and befriending instincts of woman. Taylor grasps the fundamental principles of marketing better than all the commonly used textbooks. The reason is they all start out from the Darwinian perspective that humans are at core selfish. If the human brain was a computer that was programmed by evolution then the dog-eat-dog perspective might be tenable. However mammals tend their young - they have to, so the urge to nurture is a necessary part of human nature. Taylor makes it abundantly clear that it is a feminine trait - not masculine.

This book is excellent at explaining the connection between befriending and stress. It makes an excellent companion book to Hrdy's book "Mother Nature," an anthropologist, also from UCLA, that explains more details about lactation and mothering.

For woman readers this book should be inspiring and validating. For men... well it is sobering and in spots embarassing.

Thank you Shelley!

Human beings are very complex individuals -- we are all driven to make a place in the world, yet we have different means to achieve this place...different behaviors that allow us to "survive."

In the book, "The Tending Instinct," the author shows how men and women differ in their responses in times of need. According to the author, women are born with a "nurturing" quality and tend to seek support from others during times of stress. During these times, women will also reach out to help others. This natural "tending instinct" that women have, is vital in a society and also beneficial to children who are exposed to this instinctive behavior at an early age.

MyParenTime.com highly recommends the book, "The Tending Instinct" -- this book is wonderful! It is clearly written and very interesting. Readers will find it greatly informative!

Insightful, provocative, inspired, "The Tending Instinct: How Nurturing is Essential to Who We Are and How We Live" is one of the most interesting texts today on how and why nurturing manifests itself in our society. With thorough detail the author examines current research and examples to uncover how the tending instinct functions in today's society and how it explains the differences in how men and women respond to stress.

Most studies on stress and the "fight or flight" response that we have been taught since childhood have been based on studies of men and/or male rats or other creatures. Shelley Taylor shows that that may be the case for men in general but for women the response is grouping together, reaching out to others, and "tending" each other. Well researched, logically argued, it is a real treasure trove of insight.

The only thing that I did not like about the book is actually a comment more on today's society than on the author's writing style. It is a shame that she feels the need to qualify so many of her comments, but she is probably right in doing so. It keeps breaking up the flow of the writing to the point of being annoying. For example, she writes "...women continue to be the mainstay of caring for children by a large margin". That's an observable fact that I think most people would take as true. However she follows it up with a parenthetical "...I do not mean that women should or must care for children or that only women can care for children, only that they are more likely to do so." It is a shame that in our politically correct society we have to be so careful not to offend that we need to sprinkle comments like this through a text that would otherwise be so well written.

Still, it is an excellent book and provides a different perspective on many issues related to tending and caring for others. From the first chapter to the last, it is book that I would highly recommend and applaud the author for bringing such an insightful work to the public. Bravo!

If you have ever wondered about how the other half of the sky copes with stress! If you have ever given any thought to the science of anthropology & how it has neglected the study of how women look at life. If you have had this needling question that "What if society is a lie?" & couldn't find any answers...then this book's for you, because Shelley E. Taylor asked a seemingly innocuous question which unearthed a fascinating idea!

THE TENDING INSTINCT is a powerful, transformative read. It deals with both old & new ideas about community, society, morality & how women & men think about their lives, how we interact & cope with stress.

Very good stuff! Well written, well-researched, informative & everso interesting. You will find yourself nodding & saying "Of course! I knew that!"

This is a compelling and very well-written book. It is thought-provoking, and a good complement to the many male-centered books of evolutionary biology. But it is probably not what most modern-day men want to hear, especially if you pride yourself on promoting equality. If you are a man and you ever wondered what your purpose is in the universe, don't read this book. The takeaway message is that not only are you not doing anyone any good, but you're probably making things worse. What is left unanswered though is, if women are so much better off just being with other women, then why do they seem to still need men? Emancipated feminists will chortle: "Exactly!" But the fact is that the vast majority of women do choose the company of men. Perhaps this is where traditional evolutionary theory steps in. Something draws women to be with men. Men must be good for something -- no?

Indeed, contrary to what this book would have you think, anecdotal evidence suggests that women often prefer the company of men over women, and find no support group at all among women.

The author also makes some scientific mistakes in attributing causation to correlation. For example, in a Chapter about the Social Contexts of Tending, she draws causality in the correlation of health and social status, suggesting that success derives from being well tended to, ignoring the possibility that healthier people might be more likely to succeed.

This book could be a blow to any progress we've made toward equality, it could be sexist, and entrenching instead of eroding stereotypes, but I give it four stars because it is very well written ( I had trouble putting it down), thought-provoking, and offers a counterweight to other popular evolutionary theory.

The Tending Instinct is a seminal work, tying together ideas and data from difficult-to-quantify areas such as the psychology of stress, the emotional and physical aspects of the act of nuturing, and its [especially long-term] effects, and the biochemistry of stress response in humans and other primates, in both the long and short term. She also discusses tending in society as a whole -- that is, the nurturing infrastructure of a society, those elements of day-to-day life that make it easy to tend or be tended. Ease of access to trusted caregivers for working parents, or medical care, educational or mentorship opportunities, for example.

Taylor is synthesizing, spanning disciplines to draw together different strands of research in biochemistry, psychology, and other arenas, to propose they demonstrate human beings are overridingly a tending species, a nurturing species. Success, for h. sapiens, is existing in a strong network of support, giving and taking as one's needs require. Our most successful humans are those who inspire, those who persuade, those who build coalitions to achieve a good for the entire group.

Fascinating stuff.