Never let anyone tell you male cats don’t care about kittens.
Boo does.
I knew some people who saw their tom cat carry several somethings one by one into their garage. When they went to check they found a litter of 3 to 4 week old kittens. They concluded they were his and that something had happened to the mother, so they raised and rehomed the kittens.
My 15 year old neutered male, has been a foster mommy to every kitten I have brought home. He licks them and will even let them pseudo-nurse on him (they just knead and nuzzle). He has become less tolerant of kitten playfulness as he has aged but he will still give them a good licking if they hold still long enough. Some of the older cats will still come to him for a nuzzle and licking. He learned this from a previous cat, Stevie, who did the same thing to him.
My aunt’s grumpy old siamese tomcat tried to teach her new puppy how to be a proper cat. The dog, unfortunately, was a spectacularly stupid golden retriever, so the enterprise Just Didn’t Work.
My other aunt’s friendly old somethingorother tomcat tried to teach her new puppy how to be a proper cat. The dog was an intelligent German shepherd, so the enterprise did work. Damndest thing I ever saw, a big burly German shepherd trying to purr.
Do you have any pictures?
I ended up adopting one of the kittens I was fostering this past summer but I didn’t have room for her brother. She latched onto one of my other male cats and he doesn’t seem to mind. I’ve frequently caught him holding her down with his front paw while giving her a good wash from head to tail and she likes to burrow in close to him when she naps. It’s really cute.
About five years ago, when we had three cats–all neutered toms, we heard a stray kitten mewing in the alley so we took him in. Of the cats already in residence, the two younger ones growled and hissed quite a bit, but the oldest one immediately started acting maternally towards the newcomer. In addition to just general licking and other displays of affection, he would take him to the food bowl so the kitten could eat without having to be afraid of the others. And the kitten used to “nurse” on the older one’s paw, always on the same spot, and purring and kneading as he did so. The older cat’s paw would frequently become soaked from this activity.
Judging from this thread it seems that this is not so uncommon in neutered tomcats.
My neutered tomcat grooms my dog. And all the other cats. He’s weird.
I am completely disgusted by the people that make judgments about male cats on the basis of human customs.
Cats don’t pair-bond. Period. That means that, the quean [adult female cat] being the one which gets pregnant, she is the one who has and who ordinarily tends the kittens, the tom having gone about his business long since.
But a tom cat, father or not, who is a part of the same household as a litter of kittens, will ordinarily undertake to care for the kittens as far as he’s permitted to by the quean. It’s an element of cat socialization, which is very poorly studied for as connected as they are to humans. When we had cats, I observed this behavior in at least seven toms, only two with genetic links to each other, so it wasn’t coincidental.
I’m curious about your spelling Polycarp. I’ve always referred to a momma cat as a brood queen. Your spelling is typically associated with women of ill repute. Please clarify, Sir.
Took it from a couple of cat books we used to own – I wasn’t aware that it was unusual or had any ill flavor to it!
CrazyCatLady or other feline-expert: Any comments on the normal usage here?
I’ve never seen the “quean” spelling, only “queen”. I also wasn’t away it had another meaning. Could it be a British spelling? They like adding extra vowels or using different ones.
Although, we almost never use the term at work because most people don’t know what “queening” is so we just say that their cat is in labor and we refer to the queen by her name.
We also tend to avoid calling female dogs, “bitches”, uninformed owners usually take it the wrong way. 
Now why did I think this thread was about your husband giving the kids a bath?
Let me be the first to say it:
Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!
A television study of a year in the life of a group of feral farm cats found that toms made repeated visits to queens they had previously mated with, doing the rounds so to speak. One male frequently visited the same female and her litter of kittens that lived five miles away from “his” farm. The tom in my anecdote, who brought the kittens home, lived in the city, probably in close proximity to his, presumably deceased, feral mate. Anthropomorphisation is not neccessary to presume that
the cats did have some social relationship similar to that of cats in the same household.
One of the things that always amuses me about cats is the “playtail” signal. Cats that are chasing each other in fun or dashing about for the hell of it will carry the tail upright with a trailing tip. Seeing this the older staider cats, dozing in the sun, know that there’s no need for alarm and just let them get on with it.
My five-year-old neutered male nurses on my fifteen-year-old neutered male every day and has since he was a kitten. Full on sucking and kneading and purring - and very noisy. Timmy (the five-year-old) tends to do this at 3:00 AM, on the pillow next to mine, waking me up. The older cat seems to take his nursemaid duties in stride.
Back in the day when we lived in a duplex smack-dab in the middle of a giant feral cat colony, Jack and Dottie’s clan lived under our porch. Jack would take the kittens out on romps a few feet from the porch. If they were being good, they could hang out by themselves for a bit while Dad went off and did Dad things. However, as soon as there was any sign of danger, he would come back, look at the kits very pointedly (possibly saying something in a cat frequency we can’t hear) and those kits would dash back under that porch like their tails were on fire. Jack, Dottie and the one kit that survived (Mollie) live in our new home - all spayed and neutered now.
I was curious so I looked it up at dictionary.com (the fancy pronunciation marks didn’t come through correctly, the old english roots are pronounced differently) Look up Queen for the exact text.
Fun stuff. Female cat was listed under queen, but not quean.
BTW, when we got a tiny 4 week old kitten, the only one of our three cats to bond with him was the big, young, neutered male. The older male and spayed female couldn’t be bothered with the little guy. It was sort of scary seeing this big clumsy cat holding and cleaning the tiny fragile kitten. 5 months later, the young male still cleans the kitten, the older male tolerates him, and the female hisses everytime he comes by. 
FTR, Polycarp, my surprise at the grooming behavior comes from watching unneutered male cats kill kittens so the female will go into heat again. I know that as a neutered male, my cat has no such thought in his furry little head, but it’s still surprising to me to watch him (all 12-13 lbs.) grooming other animals, particularly my dog, who outweighs him by about 35 lbs.