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When Charlotte Callaghan wakes up in the night, her small voice swells through the dark as she calls out for comfort.

“Daaaaaaaadddyyyy!” the three-year-old will yell, until her father comes to coax her back to sleep. Sometimes she’ll scurry down the hall and try to crawl into bed with him.

Spencer Callaghan, a 38-year-old father to two daughters (his youngest, Harper, is 1), works from the family’s Ottawa home as a digital marketing consultant, taking care of the breakfast and dinner routine as his wife, Courtney Callaghan, a teacher, goes to and from school.

When Charlotte was born, he felt like a bit of a “third wheel.” But hundreds of diaper changes later, and the more time spent together, he became extremely attuned to her needs, and she responded in kind. When her sister came along, the desire for daddy tended to rise.

“I wouldn’t call it a maternal instinct; I’d call it a parental instinct,” he said. “I don’t say that to disparage the concept of a motherly instinct, but there’s also a fatherly instinct.”

That fathers are more active and involved than ever is hardly breaking news — a socially accepted shift your average laundry detergent TV ad will readily confirm. But beyond the societal shift, new research reveals men can be just as biologically primed for care as women. A French study published earlier this year found that fathers are able to recognize whether a crying baby is their child as reliably as mothers can. A recent study out of Israel found that men’s brains rewire for parenting just as much as women’s do when a new baby is born — a finding that challenges the long-held, cross-cultural assumption that women are biologically primed to be better parents. “Maternal instinct,” researchers say, is not innate, but socially constructed, an idea built around the post-Industrial age expectation that women should stay home with the children and keep house.