Your kid will be fine. Will you?
Thoughts on putting mothers' needs back into the equation
Children are resilient
I am so sick of the American brand of self-sacrificial motherhood. There is a popular meme circulating on social media these days that rings true: “mothers are expected to work like we don’t have children and parent like we don’t work.” In reality, more than 70% of mothers in the US participate in the labor force. We were told we can do it all but we can’t do it all perfectly. Trade-offs must be made. When the nanny calls in sick and you have a critical meeting, you’re forced to scrap the no-daytime-TV rule and apologize to your co-workers for the potential interruptions. We’re all just doing our best.
But here’s the thing: the kids (mostly) turn out fine. Study after study shows that children can thrive in a huge variety of caregiving arrangements and under differing parenting styles. Whether you choose to stay at home with your kids or work, to sleep train them or not, to allow them some screen time or not, to give them time-outs or not; these choices generally have very minor, if any effect, on their intelligence, behavior or well-being. Yet we are obsessed with doing the best thing for our children, no matter what the cost is to us as parents.
But mothers are suffering
Research shows that parents in the United States are consistently less happy than non-parents. If you’re a parent, you might not find this surprising. Worse, the rate of postpartum depression in the United States is now as high as 15%, and death by suicide is a leading cause of maternal mortality. This is not the norm elsewhere in the world. Most small-scale societies do not have this kind of “happiness gap,” postpartum depression is virtually unheard of, as is death by suicide.
Isn’t it time to take a closer look at why parents, and especially mothers, suffer so much in this country, and what we can do about it?
Towards a more mother-centric version of parenting
Think back to the last time you read a parenting book or article. I would be willing to be that, to the extent outcomes were discussed, they were all about the child, right? The same is true for public health advice. Even in instances where there are well-studied scientific benefits for both mothers and children, such as breastfeeding, the emphasis will almost always be on benefits to the child. And any behaviors or parenting choices that put children at the slightest risk (such as co-sleeping), even if there are huge inconveniences for parents, are disadvised.
This is true no matter what side of the parenting spectrum you fall on. If you are a gentle-parenting, baby-carrying, new-agey type, then you probably do it because you think this kind of intense bonding is good for your baby’s psychological well-being, even if all the baby-carrying is giving you a hell of a back-ache. If you are a more old-school disciplinarian, than you probably do it because you believe that it’s good for your child to learn to obey and follow rules and to be independent, even if sometimes you just want to cuddle them close and ignore their bad behavior.
And what about you? If it were all the same for your baby, what would you choose?
What can we learn from other cultures, and from our shared evolutionary past?
I have recently gotten quite obsessed with the anthropological literature on child-rearing, especially in pre-agricultural, pre-industrial societies, a.k.a. hunter gatherer societies. Learning about how parenting happens in these cultures is fascinating because it more closely resembles what parenting would have looked like in our shared past, before the invention of agriculture.
On an evolutionary timespan, agriculture is an extremely recent innovation: it has existed for only a few hundred generations in most parts of the world. Industrialization is even more recent. By contrast, evolution happens over a much longer time horizon. The genus homo emerged about 2.8 million years ago, and it wasn’t until about 300,000 years ago that anatomically modern humans emerged, and not until about 60,000 years ago that humans began to practice agriculture and form permanent settlements. And about 10 years ago that we got smartphones.
So from an evolutionary perspective, the way we parent is extremely weird, mostly because modern society is extremely weird. To be clear, I am not saying “bad.” Most of us would not choose to go back to the Paleolithic if we had the choice, where half of our children would have died before reaching their first year, and there was nowhere to get a decent oat milk latte. What I am saying is that there is a mismatch between the context in which we evolved to parent and modern society, which is an extremely recent invention: something that our minds and bodies have not really had time to catch up to.
So how did we evolve to parent? More specifically, how did we evolve to mother?(After all, ladies, we’re the ones with the equipment).
That’s the subject of this newsletter: what can we learn about how to take better care of ourselves as mothers, by investigating the behaviors and parenting styles of small-scale societies around the world? I will be taking a scientific, evidence-based, and mother-centric approach to this research. In other words, I am not going to advocate for a wholesale return to Paleolithic parenting because it is “better.” Rather, I will be surfacing areas of striking difference between parenting in Western, post-industrial societies and parenting in small-scale societies and asking the question: is there any evidence to suggest that there are advantages to doing it their way, for mothers?
A judgment-free zone
If there is anything I have learned from my reading it’s that there is no “one way.” Our extreme adaptability if part of what makes us human. Many aspects of motherhood are learned behaviors and, as such, are transmitted culturally. Each culture has it’s own way of birthing and raising children. That’s part of what makes this topic so interesting: what is universal and what is variable? For instance, in almost every pre-agricultural small-scale society studied to date, cooperative care of children by family, as well as unrelated members of the community, is universal. This is something we have lost since the industrial revolution, mostly to the detriment of mothers. Co-sleeping is also universal, as is prolonged breastfeeding (usually until the age of 3 or so). Other things, such as involvement of fathers, whether the mother hunts, who cares for children in her absence, what baby eats when they transition to solids, are much more variable.
Something may be a universal feature of hunter gatherer societies, but that doesn’t mean we should necessarily adopt it, nor that it’s good for children or mothers. In fact, modern society makes it nearly impossible for us to replicate most of what anthropologists have observed in these societies. Mothers mostly carried babies and breastfed because they had to: there were no decent alternatives. Conversely, mothers in post-industrial societies may not be able to, or choose not to, breastfeed for a large variety of perfectly legitimate reasons that make sense in the context of our unusual society. Once again, your kids will be fine either way, and you will get no judgment from me here. I am not looking to fuel the mommy wars. I am simply looking to bring an alternative perspective into view, to help us better understand ourselves, how we are wired, and why our experience and feelings are what they are.
I hope you enjoy learning with me.
Photo from Brooke Scelza of a Himba mother in Namibia via http://bscelza.weebly.com/photos.html