Fellow Pede Ddrake517 points out the need for both parents in a child's life and there are many reasons why that's true.
For a fascinating deep dive on some of the reasons -- the physical reasons, mainly; the psychological / emotional health reasons are an entirely different rabbit hole -- I recommend Leonard Shlain's Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution. It approaches the topic from an evolutionary viewpoint, but the details he describes are valid (indisputable, in most cases) regardless of one's view on that topic. Many of the pieces of this puzzle are well known, but Shlain constructs a profound and sweeping theory of what makes humans so different from every other animal -- and it's not just our powerful minds.
For example, the human brain, and our cortex in particular, is enormous for our body size compared to brain size in other animals. Big enough to make us very smart, but also big enough that BIRTH is a difficult and dangerous event for human mothers and babies. Until Western Civilization's improvement in public health and medical practices (yes, now badly corrupted, but that's another story), death in childbirth was a horribly common way to die. Birth is no big problem for other species, but as Genesis 3:16 points out, it is a difficult and painful process for human mothers. And dangerous.
Despite that, our brains (and thus skulls) are SO large that we are born essentially premature, needing months before we can even walk. A newborn human cannot even turn over; a newborn horse or giraffe can walk in an hour or two -- and EVERY newborn animal matures to the point of being ambulatory and able to somewhat take care of itself far quicker than do human young. By some estimates, we humans are born about 9 months premature.
Unsurprisingly, these two factors BY THEMSELVES make having a devoted partner a huge benefit to a human mother (and other factors are also involved). More than perhaps any other species, humanity survives because men and women bond so that mothers don't have to face pregnancy, childbirth (and recovery), and chid-rearing on their own.
There are a wide range of additional differences between humans -- human females in particular -- and other animals related to the need to accommodate and survive our large brains and skulls. I'll leave you with just one, in the form of a question: Female mammals, by definition, all have mammary glands and feed their young by creating and delivering milk to the baby -- but how many mammal species, other than humans, have breasts of the type that human females do? Dogs? Cats? Horses? Mice? -- of the ~3,500 species of mammal, only HUMAN females have breasts. Why?
(No, cow udders don't count; they don't serve the same purpose at all).
Fellow Pede Ddrake517 points out the need for both parents in a child's life and there are many reasons why that's true.
For a fascinating deep dive on some of the reasons -- the physical reasons, mainly; the psychological / emotional health reasons are an entirely different rabbit hole -- I recommend Leonard Shlain's Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution. It approaches the topic from an evolutionary viewpoint, but the details he describes are valid (indisputable, in most cases) regardless of one's view on that topic. Many of the pieces of this puzzle are well known, but Shlain constructs a profound and sweeping theory of what makes humans so different from every other animal -- and it's not just our powerful minds.
For example, the human brain, and our cortex in particular, is enormous for our body size compared to brain size in other animals. Big enough to make us very smart, but also big enough that BIRTH is a difficult and dangerous event for human mothers and babies. Until Western Civilization's improvement in public health and medical practices (yes, now badly corrupted, but that's another story), death in childbirth was a horribly common way to die. Birth is no big problem for other species, but as Genesis 3:16 points out, it is a difficult and painful process for human mothers. And dangerous.
Despite that, our brains (and thus skulls) are SO large that we are born essentially premature, needing months before we can even walk. A newborn human cannot even turn over; a newborn horse or giraffe can walk in an hour or two -- and EVERY newborn animal matures to the point of being ambulatory and able to somewhat take care of itself far quicker than do human young. By some estimates, we humans are born about 9 months premature.
Unsurprisingly, these two factors BY THEMSELVES make having a devoted partner a huge benefit to a human mother (and other factors are also involved). More than perhaps any other species, humanity survives because men and women bond so that mothers don't have to face pregnancy, childbirth (and recovery), and chid-rearing on their own.
There are a wide range of additional differences between humans -- human females in particular -- and other animals related to the need to accommodate and survive our large brains and skulls. I'll leave you with just one, in the form of a question: Female mammals, by definition, all have mammary glands and feed their young by creating and delivering milk to the baby -- but how many mammal species, other than humans, have breasts of the type that human females do? Dogs? Cats? Horses? Mice? -- of the ~3,500 species of mammal, only HUMAN females have breasts. Why?
(No, cow udders don't count; they don't serve the same purpose at all).