When my son was born, I got plenty of advice about his eating and sleeping, too much about which gear to buy and hardly any at all about my biggest question: what it actually meant to be a dad.

It was the summer of 2017, a time of reckoning for fathers. Bill Cosby, known as America’s dad, had been charged with sexual assault, and his trial played on every TV in the maternity ward. The nation had just elected as president Donald Trump, who boasted of never having changed a diaper. As #MeToo swept the country, masculinity entered a time of crisis on the left. Meanwhile, the right was embracing traditional visions of gender roles.

I wanted to find a different model of paternal care, but this is not the sort of issue most parenting books address, and my own father, who had recently had a stroke, wasn’t available to help guide me in the way he always had. All my life he had been a safe and solid presence, but now he was newly vulnerable and remote. I didn’t want to fashion myself as infallible, as so many fathers do, so I did virtually the only thing I felt qualified to do as a historian: Whenever I could find a few free hours, I started researching the history of fatherhood, particularly in the West, in search of some lost ideal that I could emulate.

Over more than six years of study, a few themes kept coming up. From the very beginning of the written historical record roughly 5,000 years ago, fatherhood has been marked by what looks to a modern reader to be masculine insecurity. Many of the oldest surviving legal and religious texts work anxiously to establish a godlike mandate: I know what’s best, and if you do as I say, you will be completely protected and provided for.

Ancient Sumerian inscriptions tell the story of a father, Shuruppak, eager to counsel his son Ziusudra. Shuruppak gives his son all sorts of advice, but his real concern is his own tenuous authority. “My son,” Shuruppak pleads again and again, “let me give you instructions: You should pay attention! The instructions of an old man are precious: You should comply with them!”

In the centuries that followed, fathers would continue trying to reinforce their paternalistic authority, especially in times of crisis and social change. At a precarious moment in ancient Athens, when it seemed as if the great city might not survive, Aristotle formulated policies to increase a man’s power within and beyond his household. The first Roman emperor sought to stabilize his empire after years of civil war by bolstering the patriarchal family and “traditional” morality. Five hundred years ago, Henry VIII’s anxieties about succession drove him to claw back the power to pass property and status to favored heirs. Again and again, the message has been the same: Fathers know best. Except in hindsight — whenever patriarchy ushered in war and destruction — it seemed clear that they did not.