Thank you for this! I am one of the outliers who nurses well beyond two and does not leave any of my children for longer than a few hours till they’re about 3, and I am definitely in the teeny tiny minority—even among SAHMs who could (theoretically) parent in a more biologically normal way but choose to schedule their babies, sleep train, wean them at 1, etc. What I find most difficult about trying to parent according to biological norms and also live in contemporary western society is that I lack the consistent company of other women who are living similarly and often feel very much alone. I recognize that this is not how I was intended to live and have done everything I can to build a robust social network—but it’s still hard!
Gosh! I feel you. I’m a mother of two and am currently a SAHM to my youngest who is 18 months old. I enjoy being around other adults (surprise surprise!) and could absolutely see myself doing something productive with my time outside of child rearing but finding something that I can do with my son nearby has so far proved impossible. Keeping kids at home until they’re 2-3 years old is slightly more common where I live so I’ve been lucky to find a few likeminded mothers but my wish is to have a network of parents where we can lean on each other more and not be alone at home with our kids so much of the time…
Same here… I am probably less responsive than these parents BUT we have very little community, no family to help, I’m home majority of the day, alone, with my 3 kids, in a more rural setting. I so wish we had a community to raise our kids in!
I’ll add: Last Saturday I attended a 60th bday party and there were four of us who had our babies around the same time who mothered more or less this way. We met at LLL and had playgroups/mom groups. Gave us something akin to what our foremothers had. Yes, I nursed each kid 3-plus years and am proud of that!
Thanks for writing this and for quoting me! I think you make a lot of great points here, although I would argue that there was a lot of collective and alloparental care in hunter gatherer societies, and mothers were engaged in socializing and productive labor (I hear you that we shouldn’t necessarily call it “work”), more so than a single mother whose attention was focused exclusively on her children. Anyway, I think we diverge on a few points but I’m glad you wrote this and I do agree on the timescale piece!
Thank you! It does sound like we agree on a lot. I think collective and non-maternal care is also important but in those first three years it seems that it is largely in support of the mother-infant complex since that relationship was so crucial for survival. Because of this, the traits for mothers and babies to be together are highly conserved and when we ignore them or suppress them due to cultural constraints, it results in a lot of dysfunction.
I agree with this and it is one reason why I think the short maternity leaves in the U.S. are genuinely inhumane and create downstream costs for society.
Excellent writing, Kristin! The “deep time” perspective is hard for many to grasp, but thinking of our post-agrarian/industrial world as the “normal” human experience is a distortion. The fossil record leaves a lot of things cloaked in mystery, but better to admit ignorance than be confidently wrong about human nature/behavior!
Excellent analysis: the Holocene-centric model of parenting by definition discounts the bulk of both our biological and cultural evolution as a species
Thank you for always holding the line on what is biologically true, even if inconvenient or upsetting. We cannot simply avoid and ignore these topics just because they ruffle feathers, because doing so would be abandoning something very important (even if society today doesn’t deem it so).
I also found Konner’s work you quoted here quite interesting and will have to order that book!
Also, I think you are right about the way Komisar is received by many, her statements are very confronting but I think well worth considering, especially by those who discredit her.
I love how you say “holding the line on what is biologically true” I will always hold that line and soon I will have a whole book on why holding that line is of crucial importance for the survival of our species
Very interesting! I recommend Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel and The World Until Yesterday. Also Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World and Dr. Katherine Dettweiler’s chapters in Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives.
@kristinlawless I just heard about this new book on The Fifth Column podcast that sounds right up your alley. It's called "Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse" by Luke Kemp.
I'd like to hear more about what happens with advent of agriculture to change this. It may help us figure out how to resolve these contradictions of our biology and contemporary society.
Some women want to work. They return from maternity leave before it’s over. And until we realize that some women are prevented from spending time with their children, and some do not want to, the conversation will have little bearing on reality.
Physical proximity to mother is not sitting on the floor playing with lego. It’s physical proximity. And the sitting on the floor playing with lego version of mothering is rooted in “quality time” and other ideas that stem from mothers separated from their children for long periods of time.
“Work” in an outdoor sense would have a limited meaning for a woman either pregnant or in constant proximity of a baby, or both. I have never seen this acknowledged.
I sleep trained early etc. (I don't like babies that much; I like them once they're 2), but I did do the whole EBF thing even though I prioritised sleep. I HATED breastfeeding. Yet I'm still planning a 3rd (which will also be sleep trained immediately, but I intend to breastfeed, just in case it really is important for longer term health).
I would point out that many western countries have much better mat leave than the US - but most have worse breastfeeding rates. Where women can choose, they choose not to breastfeed (mostly). There is no way to recreate the idyll of the hunter gatherer society as you describe it. Women are either with young children, alone, for long periods of time, or without young children, at work. We live with artificial light, phones, TV, expectations of "normal" life.
Inevitably the idyll also fails to mention the high death rates of children in the pre-modern era. Annoying young children were often exposed, or abandoned (I remember one anecdote about an annoying 4 yo child being murdered by a man in a hunter-gatherer group giving me terrors. Everyone's indulgent until they're committing infanticide).
In any case, why is it necessarily good to parent in the way all humans were parented for 40,000 years? We accept that domesticated animals can have longer, seemingly happier lives in an artificial world completely and totally removed from their biological norm. Why not humans? Evolution just is; it isn't optimal or designed for.
I thought I saw Lyman Stone argue elsewhere that Darby (in a different post) was making the mistake of inferring too much from what humans were like as hunter gatherers because in his view we had evolved so much since the HG stage that those patterns of living were not very informative of our natures today.
Maybe I am misreading you (or Lyman) but do you think there’s anything to that argument?
Thank you for this! I am one of the outliers who nurses well beyond two and does not leave any of my children for longer than a few hours till they’re about 3, and I am definitely in the teeny tiny minority—even among SAHMs who could (theoretically) parent in a more biologically normal way but choose to schedule their babies, sleep train, wean them at 1, etc. What I find most difficult about trying to parent according to biological norms and also live in contemporary western society is that I lack the consistent company of other women who are living similarly and often feel very much alone. I recognize that this is not how I was intended to live and have done everything I can to build a robust social network—but it’s still hard!
It’s so hard! And it will continue to be hard until these biological norms are understood and valued by our culture.
Gosh! I feel you. I’m a mother of two and am currently a SAHM to my youngest who is 18 months old. I enjoy being around other adults (surprise surprise!) and could absolutely see myself doing something productive with my time outside of child rearing but finding something that I can do with my son nearby has so far proved impossible. Keeping kids at home until they’re 2-3 years old is slightly more common where I live so I’ve been lucky to find a few likeminded mothers but my wish is to have a network of parents where we can lean on each other more and not be alone at home with our kids so much of the time…
Same here… I am probably less responsive than these parents BUT we have very little community, no family to help, I’m home majority of the day, alone, with my 3 kids, in a more rural setting. I so wish we had a community to raise our kids in!
I’ll add: Last Saturday I attended a 60th bday party and there were four of us who had our babies around the same time who mothered more or less this way. We met at LLL and had playgroups/mom groups. Gave us something akin to what our foremothers had. Yes, I nursed each kid 3-plus years and am proud of that!
Thanks for writing this and for quoting me! I think you make a lot of great points here, although I would argue that there was a lot of collective and alloparental care in hunter gatherer societies, and mothers were engaged in socializing and productive labor (I hear you that we shouldn’t necessarily call it “work”), more so than a single mother whose attention was focused exclusively on her children. Anyway, I think we diverge on a few points but I’m glad you wrote this and I do agree on the timescale piece!
Thank you! It does sound like we agree on a lot. I think collective and non-maternal care is also important but in those first three years it seems that it is largely in support of the mother-infant complex since that relationship was so crucial for survival. Because of this, the traits for mothers and babies to be together are highly conserved and when we ignore them or suppress them due to cultural constraints, it results in a lot of dysfunction.
I agree with this and it is one reason why I think the short maternity leaves in the U.S. are genuinely inhumane and create downstream costs for society.
Yes, so many downstream costs!
Wow it feels refreshing to see people disagree in such a humane way these days!!
Excellent writing, Kristin! The “deep time” perspective is hard for many to grasp, but thinking of our post-agrarian/industrial world as the “normal” human experience is a distortion. The fossil record leaves a lot of things cloaked in mystery, but better to admit ignorance than be confidently wrong about human nature/behavior!
Yes exactly, thank you!
Excellent analysis: the Holocene-centric model of parenting by definition discounts the bulk of both our biological and cultural evolution as a species
Thank you!
Thank you for always holding the line on what is biologically true, even if inconvenient or upsetting. We cannot simply avoid and ignore these topics just because they ruffle feathers, because doing so would be abandoning something very important (even if society today doesn’t deem it so).
I also found Konner’s work you quoted here quite interesting and will have to order that book!
Also, I think you are right about the way Komisar is received by many, her statements are very confronting but I think well worth considering, especially by those who discredit her.
I love how you say “holding the line on what is biologically true” I will always hold that line and soon I will have a whole book on why holding that line is of crucial importance for the survival of our species
Cannot wait to order your book and recommend it to many women!
Very interesting! I recommend Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel and The World Until Yesterday. Also Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World and Dr. Katherine Dettweiler’s chapters in Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives.
@kristinlawless I just heard about this new book on The Fifth Column podcast that sounds right up your alley. It's called "Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse" by Luke Kemp.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/219301731-goliath-s-curse
Thanks, I will check it out!
This eye-opening for me. Thank you.
I'd like to hear more about what happens with advent of agriculture to change this. It may help us figure out how to resolve these contradictions of our biology and contemporary society.
Some women want to work. They return from maternity leave before it’s over. And until we realize that some women are prevented from spending time with their children, and some do not want to, the conversation will have little bearing on reality.
Physical proximity to mother is not sitting on the floor playing with lego. It’s physical proximity. And the sitting on the floor playing with lego version of mothering is rooted in “quality time” and other ideas that stem from mothers separated from their children for long periods of time.
“Work” in an outdoor sense would have a limited meaning for a woman either pregnant or in constant proximity of a baby, or both. I have never seen this acknowledged.
I sleep trained early etc. (I don't like babies that much; I like them once they're 2), but I did do the whole EBF thing even though I prioritised sleep. I HATED breastfeeding. Yet I'm still planning a 3rd (which will also be sleep trained immediately, but I intend to breastfeed, just in case it really is important for longer term health).
I would point out that many western countries have much better mat leave than the US - but most have worse breastfeeding rates. Where women can choose, they choose not to breastfeed (mostly). There is no way to recreate the idyll of the hunter gatherer society as you describe it. Women are either with young children, alone, for long periods of time, or without young children, at work. We live with artificial light, phones, TV, expectations of "normal" life.
Inevitably the idyll also fails to mention the high death rates of children in the pre-modern era. Annoying young children were often exposed, or abandoned (I remember one anecdote about an annoying 4 yo child being murdered by a man in a hunter-gatherer group giving me terrors. Everyone's indulgent until they're committing infanticide).
In any case, why is it necessarily good to parent in the way all humans were parented for 40,000 years? We accept that domesticated animals can have longer, seemingly happier lives in an artificial world completely and totally removed from their biological norm. Why not humans? Evolution just is; it isn't optimal or designed for.
What’s the reference for P. Gray?
Here you go, I did mean to link to it: https://petergray.substack.com/p/why-hunter-gatherers-work-was-play
I thought I saw Lyman Stone argue elsewhere that Darby (in a different post) was making the mistake of inferring too much from what humans were like as hunter gatherers because in his view we had evolved so much since the HG stage that those patterns of living were not very informative of our natures today.
Maybe I am misreading you (or Lyman) but do you think there’s anything to that argument?