It’s hard to help parent even other family members’ kids. You have to be willing to mesh each others’ beliefs.
I’m having a thought that’s hard for me to put into words — something about family sometimes being a personal disaster. Like, some people are born blind, and some people are born with a pain-in-the-ass hypochondriac perpetually unemployed sibling, and both of those things are a shackle around the ankle. In our society we’re told that all shackles can be and should be undone, but in fact, blindness can be reversed more easily than a sibling can be cast off. …A community can be like that, too. You only have a limited ability to choose your community; you could be dragged down just as easily as you could be pulled up. And I think that’s a big part of people turning their backs on the concept of community.
My youngest brother is mentally ill and going through a very terrible time and one thing that my husband and I have been fighting about is his expectation that I will remove my brother from my life. If we lived further away, if we were insulated from daily contact with my family, this time would be EASIER for me. But SHOULD it be easier? It’s an interesting question, if I can remove myself from the stark misery of what’s going on to answer it.
I recently read a book about the evolution of childrearing practices by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy called Mothers and Others, and I have all kinds of half-formed thoughts about families and community as a result. It’s a good book, incidentally.
Her basic thesis is that what makes humans *human* is our ability to read teh emotions and intentions of other people (body language and facial cues etc.), and that this is what underlies our ability to collaborate on projects that involve more than one person, from group hunting to building space stations. So that modern civilization arises at least in part from this ability to read people. And that this ability to read people evolved in a context of communal childrearing, where human infants were so costly to raise that even a mother and father cooperating couldn’t do it–and there’s no evidence anyway that mothers ever relied on fathers for childrearing. So, in a society where infants needed to be provisioned by people who were not related to them, the skill of reading the emotions and intentions of other people (will this adult feed/protect me?) became evolutionarily advantageous.
She also writes a lot about how we are unique among the great apes for this–that chimps, gorillas, etc., *never put their babies down.* They don’t let even siblings, their own older children, or their own mothers hold their babies, with very few very rare exceptions (essentially, when the known danger to their infant is so low that the risk of letting go of them is practically non-existent; trusting others to hold their babies is a trait that great ape mothers have but never use).
So I’ve been wondering what happens to the human species when we lose communal childrearing.
I mean, it’s all great and wonderful that we can each basically customize our own planet these days, and walk around in a constructed bubble where we rarely need to encounter the politics, values, religions, family formations or even musical tastes of people significantly different than we are. It’s certainly comfortable. But so is sitting on the couch and driving everywhere. What’s comfortable isn’t necessarily good for us.
There’s evidence that the offspring of other great apes are born knowing how to read the emotions and intentions of others of their species (and humans, if raised in captivity), but that they lose this ability after a few months (unless raised in captivity), presumably because it doesn’t benefit them in the wild. Their mothers never put them down, and they are very rarely provisioned (“parented”) by non-related adults of their own species, so the trait atrophies. So what happens to humans if the mothers stop trusting other people and, metaphorically at least, never put their babies down?
When my son was tiny and I was pregnant w/ my daughter, I was invited to join a babysitting co-op. I was invited by some women who had their children in the same daycare as my son. They knew each other well but I only knew them slightly. When the kids were young the co-op was really active; we kept spreadsheets with exchanged babysitting hours and had regular meetings (it was a ‘girls’ night out;’ we drank martinis and gossiped) and all that.
My neighbor eventually became a part of the co-op, but otherwise the members lived in different parts of town. It’s defunct now — now that people feel comfortable leaving their kids with inexpensive teenaged babysitters, and now that the kids have an opinion about who they play with. (The oldest child of one of the members is kind of, you know, a pain in the ass.) And I hardly ever see them anymore.
That co-op is a great example of the way that people these days come together for awhile and then go their separate ways. It wasn’t a community. It served a purpose, though. It was something valuable.
this – and the comments here – are absolutely fascinating.
there is definitely a challenging side to community and family, as Beck and Jen point out…a shackle quality or at least often an insularity that i think has led many of our generation (and our parents’) to run from the small-town mentalities we might have grown up with out into the seemingly cosmopolitan and accessible world.
but then, raising children in the isolation of that cosmopolitan world – and even just finding one’s own way, without the fallback of being known deeply and tied to people by bonds stronger than one’s own charm on a given day – damn, it’s hard.
for me, the online world has provided community i otherwise wouldn’t have in nearly so rich or diverse a form, during these years with young children. but having it in the flesh and accessible? fabulous. i hope the project does lead to friends.
I think we talked about the lack of community and support when we met, didn’t we? I think about this a lot, the fact that my husband and I chose to settle an hour from both our families. I often think about when I was home with two very young children and, in retrospect, I was not okay. I was easily frustrated and probably yelled too often because I was overwhelmed. Luckily, I had friends at the same stage. But it’s not the same as having your mother or mother-in-law two doors down.
It’s hard to help parent even other family members’ kids. You have to be willing to mesh each others’ beliefs.
I’m having a thought that’s hard for me to put into words — something about family sometimes being a personal disaster. Like, some people are born blind, and some people are born with a pain-in-the-ass hypochondriac perpetually unemployed sibling, and both of those things are a shackle around the ankle. In our society we’re told that all shackles can be and should be undone, but in fact, blindness can be reversed more easily than a sibling can be cast off. …A community can be like that, too. You only have a limited ability to choose your community; you could be dragged down just as easily as you could be pulled up. And I think that’s a big part of people turning their backs on the concept of community.
My youngest brother is mentally ill and going through a very terrible time and one thing that my husband and I have been fighting about is his expectation that I will remove my brother from my life. If we lived further away, if we were insulated from daily contact with my family, this time would be EASIER for me. But SHOULD it be easier? It’s an interesting question, if I can remove myself from the stark misery of what’s going on to answer it.
I recently read a book about the evolution of childrearing practices by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy called Mothers and Others, and I have all kinds of half-formed thoughts about families and community as a result. It’s a good book, incidentally.
Her basic thesis is that what makes humans *human* is our ability to read teh emotions and intentions of other people (body language and facial cues etc.), and that this is what underlies our ability to collaborate on projects that involve more than one person, from group hunting to building space stations. So that modern civilization arises at least in part from this ability to read people. And that this ability to read people evolved in a context of communal childrearing, where human infants were so costly to raise that even a mother and father cooperating couldn’t do it–and there’s no evidence anyway that mothers ever relied on fathers for childrearing. So, in a society where infants needed to be provisioned by people who were not related to them, the skill of reading the emotions and intentions of other people (will this adult feed/protect me?) became evolutionarily advantageous.
She also writes a lot about how we are unique among the great apes for this–that chimps, gorillas, etc., *never put their babies down.* They don’t let even siblings, their own older children, or their own mothers hold their babies, with very few very rare exceptions (essentially, when the known danger to their infant is so low that the risk of letting go of them is practically non-existent; trusting others to hold their babies is a trait that great ape mothers have but never use).
So I’ve been wondering what happens to the human species when we lose communal childrearing.
I mean, it’s all great and wonderful that we can each basically customize our own planet these days, and walk around in a constructed bubble where we rarely need to encounter the politics, values, religions, family formations or even musical tastes of people significantly different than we are. It’s certainly comfortable. But so is sitting on the couch and driving everywhere. What’s comfortable isn’t necessarily good for us.
There’s evidence that the offspring of other great apes are born knowing how to read the emotions and intentions of others of their species (and humans, if raised in captivity), but that they lose this ability after a few months (unless raised in captivity), presumably because it doesn’t benefit them in the wild. Their mothers never put them down, and they are very rarely provisioned (“parented”) by non-related adults of their own species, so the trait atrophies. So what happens to humans if the mothers stop trusting other people and, metaphorically at least, never put their babies down?
When my son was tiny and I was pregnant w/ my daughter, I was invited to join a babysitting co-op. I was invited by some women who had their children in the same daycare as my son. They knew each other well but I only knew them slightly. When the kids were young the co-op was really active; we kept spreadsheets with exchanged babysitting hours and had regular meetings (it was a ‘girls’ night out;’ we drank martinis and gossiped) and all that.
My neighbor eventually became a part of the co-op, but otherwise the members lived in different parts of town. It’s defunct now — now that people feel comfortable leaving their kids with inexpensive teenaged babysitters, and now that the kids have an opinion about who they play with. (The oldest child of one of the members is kind of, you know, a pain in the ass.) And I hardly ever see them anymore.
That co-op is a great example of the way that people these days come together for awhile and then go their separate ways. It wasn’t a community. It served a purpose, though. It was something valuable.
this – and the comments here – are absolutely fascinating.
there is definitely a challenging side to community and family, as Beck and Jen point out…a shackle quality or at least often an insularity that i think has led many of our generation (and our parents’) to run from the small-town mentalities we might have grown up with out into the seemingly cosmopolitan and accessible world.
but then, raising children in the isolation of that cosmopolitan world – and even just finding one’s own way, without the fallback of being known deeply and tied to people by bonds stronger than one’s own charm on a given day – damn, it’s hard.
for me, the online world has provided community i otherwise wouldn’t have in nearly so rich or diverse a form, during these years with young children. but having it in the flesh and accessible? fabulous. i hope the project does lead to friends.
I think we talked about the lack of community and support when we met, didn’t we? I think about this a lot, the fact that my husband and I chose to settle an hour from both our families. I often think about when I was home with two very young children and, in retrospect, I was not okay. I was easily frustrated and probably yelled too often because I was overwhelmed. Luckily, I had friends at the same stage. But it’s not the same as having your mother or mother-in-law two doors down.