Couvade names a cluster of customs, reported by ethnographers across a strikingly wide and geographically unconnected range of societies, in which a father observes restrictions around the time of his child's birth that mirror or substitute for restrictions more commonly associated with the mother: seclusion at home, dietary limitations, avoidance of strenuous work or of weapons and cutting tools, and in some documented cases the father taking to bed as though himself recovering from labour, behaviour that gave the practice its name, from the French couver, to hatch or brood. The term itself was popularised by nineteenth century anthropologists working within an evolutionary framework that read couvade as evidence for stages of social development, associating it variously with claims about establishing paternity in societies transitioning from matrilineal to patrilineal descent, an interpretive framework later anthropology has treated with considerable caution, since the explanatory claims often said more about the assumptions of the scholars proposing them than about the actual beliefs of the societies practising the custom.
Reported instances span Indigenous societies of lowland South America, the Basque Country of Western Europe, parts of China, and other locations without evident historical connection to one another, a spread that has made couvade a frequently cited case study in debates about whether widely separated societies can independently develop strikingly similar customs.