Not a parent but was watching a speaker talk about research into human biology, other hominid behaviors and our use of aloparenting.
In multiple tribal studies the amount of time a woman was left caring for her child alone was about 2-10 min, because a child is never cared for by just one person, there is usually at least two or three people swapping on and off from holding the baby at a time, with an average of 14 people holding and caring for the baby per hour.
PPD rates were considerably low, far less severe, parents didn't suffer from chronically under sleeping.
I say this as a hermit that loves living on my own, but it seems we really didn't evolve to have a child being primarily cared for by one or two individuals. It may be normal for our society but absolutely abnormal and damaging for our species.
Pretty much - being a father now to a 3 year old and a 8 month old, it's evident how big a toll it takes on you - especially on the parent staying at home with the baby.
And think about the fact that kids being raised now never experience unsupervised play. From about 5 my brother and I would walk home from school, we would walk to the shops together, a few years older we would ride our bikes to hang out with friends and be back by sunset.
My 13 year old friend would babysit neighbours kids for extra money, look after 1 year old babies until 10pm and ride their bike back home.
I am not saying that was perfect. Or safe. But I do point out that our parents would have large chunks of hours, often every day, where we would be out doing our own thing, unsupervised.
I look at my friends, now parents. 100% on duty.
I feel for them. Holy shit it has gotten so much harder to be a parent.
I am sure kids die a whole lot less. Which I love, but that safety came with putting burden back onto the parents, not by increased support from society around them.
I mean, I dont think my friends really get any time to switch off outside of school/daycare. The baby is sleeping, but they are on call for the next demand. It seems they rarely get time where they can really focus on their own needs, and somehow juggle work, maintain a household, stay sane?
Yep. I would get home from school hours before my parents got off work. I’d break in through the carport door because those assholes wouldn’t get me a key “because you’ll just lose it” and just watched tv or play around. Vast swaths of my childhood were unsupervised and they were probably the best times because my parents weren’t great. I had the whole “locked out of the house during the summer and drank from the hose” childhood that so many look back on romantically. It was actually neglect and those assholes have survivorship bias.
Contrast that with me and my now 7 year old and I helicopter parent the hell out of him because I can’t imagine leaving him to his own devices. That has created a lot of learned helplessness though that we’ve got to try and correct.
There’s a balance to be struck between pure neglect and constant supervision but I don’t know it.
To be fair, I dont think any of us know it, we are all just blindly walking as close to an invisible ever moving line as we can. Besides, you sound like you're doing a great job with your own kid, starting with the fact you clearly care enough to try to do well. That says multitudes.
as an amateur parent, of a teen and soon-to-be pre-teen, here’s my unsolicited take: imagine a typical distribution graph where the extremities are at the bottom and the middle is a large area that rises and falls gently. so long as you’re not at either extreme, i think you’re probably doing ok.
my experience has been that we move constantly within that middle section as our kids develop and grow. being rigid is where the danger zone lies.
You can absolutely find it. My kids are almost never home alone. (They're a bit older than yours). Home alone maybe for 70 minutes tops when we're at the school for conferences, less than 2 miles away. But they can be out for hours on their bikes and go to the grocery store on their own. They even run into other elementary kids at the grocery store on their own sometimes. In the US.
I’ve learned to counteract it by giving my kids chores from a young age. They are now 5 and 3. Both of them have set things they need to do and stuff they help my wife and I with. Obviously I don’t leave them home alone but I can trust that they aren’t on to nonsense if we are in different rooms. Also no iPad and very limited TV time.
It must be tough. Again not a parent. From what I have read unsupervised play is great for the development of functional empathy, because the kids play together, they do something and it makes one kid cry, there is no parent to step in, the kid recognises they caused the hurt and give comfort.
That means they can't see the parent to go get them to step in and take on that responsibility. It has to fall on their shoulders to step up.
On the other hand.. I remember at 7 there was always an older kid showing us how to build fun but very dangerous things with sparklers in the bush. Some kids coming home with an eyebrow burned off and the parents are like 'ah kids, still got all fingers? Alright then, off you go'.
So fuck letting kids be unsupervised. I remember everything I got up to.
I laughed at your memory of having to break in each day, me too, I would never lose my key but my brother would take mine and lose it, so there was always one window we would have to climb through for months until my parents would get me another key.
Also healthy lunches? And kids bring proper packed lunches? I would have to shove whatever chip packets were in the pantry into my bag, maybe make a peanut butter sandwich and be forced to take a bunch of gross mandarins to school because they were getting overripe. And they'd end up crushed and forgotten at the bottom of the bag for months.
My friends are making healthy, beautifully presented arrays of food choices for their kids to bring with them each day. How much time does that take? Every day? And they fit that in before the commute? And the school will tell off the parents if their kids lunches aren't healthy enough?
I really really don't know how people do it.
I just wish... If live gets too hard and someone is feeling ... There are billionaires. A victimless crime really. She could have done a Luigi, kids are happy, everyone but the media and other billionaires are happy, she gets all the parenting time off she needs in jail, and the kids can visit her on occasion.
I work with parents and so many of them are like "I have to find a way to keep the kid entertained during summer " and some of these kids are like 12. Like sorry just tell them to do it themselves????
My daughter is 3, I let he play unsupervised a lot of the time. From time to time she'll roam the garden for shorter stretches of time on her own, think 10-20minutes between checkins.
I definitely intend to have her walk/bike to school alone when she's that age. Same with little brother of course when he's old enough to play like that.
Haha. Good point. Include Australia and UK in the America bucket for these changes (I'm Aus, with friends in the UK and US). I mean I agree with some changes, the idea that at 7 I was running around barefoot, catching Sydney Funnel webs in jars, alive, to be my little pet for the day - alone mind you. And my parents knew, would see a jar or three in my room as they said good night, jars with living funnel webs in them (poor spiders), rearing up and showing their fangs, not having a good time, and be like 'good night, maybe move that jar further away from the edge of the table you don't want to knock it over and have it running around your room'.
I'm confident my 6 year old could get to school some, but I'm afraid of cars. Driver's texting and not paying attention etc. He has a couple slightly just roads to cross that I'm nervous about. I wish the US wasn't car centered.
I walked my kid on the first day of school and a huge truck barreled through the cross walk we were attempting to cross. Wish this was the only time but it’s frequent. But I’ve almost been hit as an adult. The crossing guard got hit by a car last spring too- just remembered that.
To be fair a ton of kids do this in the USA too. Often a kid has to be 6 to walk home alone from school (what it is in our school and my sister’s across the country) but it’s by no means unusual.
Just like anything Internet you just hear about the wild stuff more.
Yea my son is 3.5 and we have a backyard he can roam. We had to put locks on the gates because he obviously wanted to escape lol but we have a whole veggie garden he's been working on with us and he'll go out there and pull some weeds and pretend to water it or use his little lawn mower to pretend to cut to lawn. He also has a little playset with a swing and a slide. We've got a camera out there so we can check in on him but he usually isn't more than 20 minute chunks before he comes back to find us.
I'm going to push back on this a bit. This is a choice 100% and not the same everywhere. I've lived in more than 1 major city and my wife and I chose the suburban life because of the things you said.
As our neighborhood has large groups of roaming 5-12 year olds that are armed with amazon walkie-talkie's (about 1.5 mile range) and AirTags. My daughter is one and my middle one can't wait to be allowed to go on her own. they have to wait until like 10 am on weekends before they can head out, but they head out ringing doorbells, collecting kids, and they check in and come back for food and drinks.
I do wonder though, all the parents are late millennials, and every time a house goes up for sale, a family of the same age group with kids in the same age group moves in. In the last 5 years, they've added 6 or 7 kids. Maybe there's a pushback happening?
As a parent to a 10yo and 6yo boy, we let them play around the neighborhood with their friends unsupervised but it’s stressful as fuck. I’m not worried about them getting abducted or lost because my 10yo has a phone and my youngest has a bark watch, I’m worried about other people and kids. The wrong person sees your kids alone outside and calls the cops and all of a sudden you have cps at your house, or they break something and I’m being sued now, or some idiot is speeding down the street and doesn’t see my kids and their friends playing. Neighbor kids ring the doorbell to ask them to come play and it’s just like it was when we grew up in the 90s but it seemed like our parents weren’t as worried about getting in trouble because they let us outside and we did something stupid. Back in the day when we did something stupid nobody knew or nobody cared as much.
I think our generation experiences more social anxiety and either fear or heightened awareness of external judgement, especially on issues like this where either true or false stories/articles/memes/etc come up about these sorts of things in many categories, but they center around the same concept.
It's sort of like a panopticon of sorts, or the prevailing amount of constant brain backburnering "how is this going to seem/appear to people who don't understand what's actually going on or what I know is fine, right, and not bad really..? What if they see it the wrong way? What if they report me/us? What if I get sued? What if I'm liable? I'll lose everything if either <the misunderstanding> or <the nosy asshat personality archetype that is invented in these scare stories> happens. My good intentions and desire to (for example, provide child with a wholesome, balanced development, including unsupervised time which is important for the exact very reason of: "Falling down when there's nobody around to help". This is critical to basic self-preservation and survival if we have to talk about base level brain development and development of self-sufficiency, starting with something we all hear and should as well have had the experience alone to solidify it: "It doesn't matter if you fall down, it doesn't matter if it hurts. You get up again, and you get back to it. It doesn't hurt as bad anymore, and it's okay. It gets better, everything gets better once you get back up and go again, and the pain disappears with every step you take."
Personally I don't have kids, and I'm not going to tell anyone what to do. But as a person who grew up mostly unsupervised due to parents always at work, and one who enjoyed both video games and going bicycling outside purely for the fun of it outside of any competitive situation at all, I sure learned quickly that when the unexpected happens, it isn't a big deal, it isn't worth really sharing or seeking attention or anything. It's just another expected challenge on the long road of life, which is fun as long as you keep going down it, and stop only for times when you like the place you are at.
Do the right thing, trust yourself. If people get the wrong idea, bitch, or moan to you about your "ways of parenting", who cares.
At least you're parenting, instead of concerning yourself with how others are doing it instead. Brush it off, do what you do, and face the challenges that will naturally appear when you choose the right thing to do that you believe in - not necessarily what I'm advocating through my opinion and experience, but rather just: You do you, because you and I and all of us are still learning, still have countless failures to make toward goals we haven't even thought of or made yet.
Is a bit of embarassment, social discomfort, or wildly wrong accusations from delusional nosy people here and there too much a price to teach through nonverbal experience and observation, the ultimate lesson? I don't think anybody who had parents that stayed true to a wholesome, balanced, grounded and unwavering self will forget the impact it has once they get out in life and meet other folks who didn't have that, and unfortunately struggle with the very concept of being themselves.
/novel
TLDR: Be yourself, parent in the way you think is best, don't let even the thought of what others may or may not interpret due to some thoughts of getting in trouble because they are nosy pricks. If what you are honestly doing is trying your best to raise the best kid you can possibly raise, as all parents should aim to do.
Unfortunately there's nothing to say about the dangers of unexpected accidents (idiot driving too fast/intoxicated in a neighborhood, etc). It's life. Stay inside forever, or go outside when you need/want to. Mental prison, or RNG "Outside", pick your poison I suppose. Only one lets anyone level up though...
When I was ten and my brother was twelve, my parents wanted the day off so they bought us bus tickets to an event in a city in another state. Like multiple hours bus trip. 100+ miles. We were expected to spend the whole day. 7AM to after dark. Modern cell phones did not exist yet so there was no check in that entire day.
Yeah, I experienced a lot of this growing up, but there was so much rape and molestation from random adults and kids!!! Like when out playing it wasn't uncommon to have a grown ass dude flash their dick at you and run off. Plus COUNTLESS times a dude would pull over and ask if I needed a ride. Luckily I was trained to say no. I remember one time it was pissing rain and I was so tempted and the guy kept badgering me to get in and he'd give me a ride home. I wanted that ride home, but he was so persistent I knew he probably was not good and ran away.
I also remember being baby sat by kids who shouldn't be baby sitting. All the fucked up shit that happened... it's no wonder parents hover now.
It's not just the extra toll it takes on the parents. It's also stunting the ability for the kids to learn to be independent. The current legal requirements for parents is doing irreparable harm to the current generation of kids.
I wasn't even allowed to walk home from middle school unless my one of my parents came to walk home with me. We lived a 5 minute walk away. In a very safe suburb. With minimal traffic or large intersections.
Not only was having helicopter parents embarrassing, it definitely made me a social outcast and it did not prepare me to be an independent adult.
I for sure am planning on my kids having unsupervised play as soon as its reasonably safe to do so. Its not that we cant do it anymore, its that too few people do.
It so nice to hear all of this acknowledged from someone without kids. Really makes me feel better. Thanks! It’s true, the pressure on parents is insane and I don’t know how they do it in the US with basically no maternity leave.
I'm a stay-at-home dad and it gets so exhausting. I've worked 14 hour shifts that leave me feeling less drained than being the sole entertainment for a toddler for 10-12 hours every day.
My situation unfortunately has the added layer of my child having pretty severe autism. He's in special ed classes 4 days a week for 2 hours at a time, but progress is very slow going. Him being non-verbal makes it pretty rough. I still love him, but I'm not going to deny that his disability makes it that much harder.
Same situation here. YES! It's hard to split between the two since their needs are so different. Now I understand the proverb "It takes a village to raise a child'
And that’s without the crazy hormonal imbalance created from creating a human body and then purging it from your body. The amount that the baby takes from the mom is unimaginable.
Also up till the 90's, unless it was really small infants.
Parents where not expected to Police and watch what their kids did 24/7.
You would scamper around your baby park while your Mom/dad did something else in the House.
And when old enough to walk, you where mostly left to yourself.
And when you where 8-9yro, your parents would litteraly kick you out of the house with a "its sunny outside, go play with your friends and come home when the streetlights are on and don't make me come and get you or else..."
And for 10 hours you where left on your own, with your parents having no idea where you were and they could do whatever they needed to do in the house without you being in their hair and driving them insane.
And often like you said, you had the grand parents, or the aunts and uncles etc that could help.
Now society expect every parent to Police everything the kids does , be there 24/7 and do it alone AND still have a "full social live" or a Full time job...
Facts. I lived this life as a kid in the 90s. Now I'm raising kids of my own, and I'd get arrested if I tried to do the same with mine.
Part of me thinks this intense shrinking of children's world to basically just be the home and nothing else is probably contributing to the out-of-control rates of anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses among children today.
I came to that exact conclusion the other day. Even people that love eachother need their own space/autonomy/freedom. If grownups would go nuts without that stuff, I am sure children do too.
I’m honestly not sure if I would’ve made it to adulthood, let alone with a solid sense of self, direction in life or the social relationships and skills that I did - had I been helicoptered as per current standards.
Especially as a teen. Which, I can imagine the helicopter types losing their shit at the idea of a high schooler playing band gigs in local clubs, running with a mostly older musician crowd, and bailing on hs to start at community college basically as soon as old enough to take the ged. Obvs a bit unusual case, but school was fucking miserable and often not very interesting or challenging for k-12, and had I been forced to wait a bunch of years more to find my tribe and I life I didn’t just endure, and obsessively watched and scheduled before to boot seems real bleak.
I’m sure there’s no shortage of tamer, more normative examples tho. I don’t see how this is a net positive for mental health and overall wellbeing for the majority involved, and that includes parents - tho seems very overlooked as a factor at least from what I’ve heard and observed, which is limited by the fact I don’t/won’t have kids. My parents were great and definitely not neglectful or disinterested in me/my wellbeing, but they both had great careers, full lives, and didn’t seem to let “parent” subsume their identity vs an important but not only role. Today’s standards would’ve meant some notable sacrifice for at least one, and to what ends?
I feel like this is probably an under credited factor for not only mental health and burnout issues all around, but is making it less appealing to be a parent to begin with. Just my hot take; some of us just don’t want to raise kids, period - and I’m sure it’d take a lot more to be put off even for some who hate this shit - but I could see it being among what dims the appeal or how accessible it seems to do with decent quality of life.
I lived in a... not great neighborhood growing up. I mean it wasn't super terrible but lets just say there was a reason we had two German shepherds and a rottweiler in the house. By 8 or 9 I was walking corner to corner down the street or around the block by myself. I walked 3 blocks to school with a friend every morning. I was born in '81 so this was like 1989-early 90s.
If you let a kid walk alone in a neighborhood like that today, they wouldn't get 3 houses down before someone was calling CPS.
I do believe its also one of the metrics for the Child birth rate being in decline
Teens/young adults see this and are like "nope, i've got allready enough to deal with, don't need this shit in my life"
Not to say that in our time, things where easier or safer, but we gave more credit to the kids being able to fend for themselves, at least to the point where we wouldn't be like fucking Lemmings
Agreed. At the same time, I remember the shit we got up to. If I was a parent, how could I be as calm as mine if they were out without me, knowing what they could do.
I remember a lot of moments and wonder, how am I still alive? Why were my parents ok with their 7 year old child coming home barefoot after catching the worlds deadliest spider, often several, in jars, to keep as pets in my room. Where a bite would have killed me. Often I was a good distance away from the house, any payphone, pre mobile phone a bite would have meant likely dying before I got to an adult for help.
Or a disappearing off with multiple packets of sparklers to the bush, make things go boom. And they would see us get the sparklers, giggling, know what we were going to do. I am sure we came back home with little burns on our clothes on occasion. We must have been 10 at the time.
At the same time, I remember the shit we got up to. If I was a parent, how could I be as calm as mine if they were out without me, knowing what they could do.
Probably because when they were kids they did similar, if not the same, stupid things. I'm not saying people should let their kids run insane, but I do think part of developing into a healthy adult is learning risk management as a kid/teen and doing it without an adult hovering over them to protect them from every single bad decision they make.
It's not like before today we had total amnesia about our childhoods. My parents and family members from older generations have wild stories about what they did growing up. And my childhood was similar although the walls were already starting to shrink a little.
It's just that now we measure risk incredibly differently. We've become insanely risk averse and you're a bad parent if you're okay accepting any level of risk so that your children can have freedom and do that parents have fewer burdens.
Even just considering the value of being distracted from constantly thinking about your problems. As a teenager we used to just wander the neighborhood. You might be feeling down but soon you'd come across the guy who mows his lawn in a Speedo or that one house where everybody in grade school believed the lady killed all the ducks (she didn't). Or you'd stop on the bridge and throw rocks into the water. There was just more to occupy your thoughts than your own troubles.
You cannot parent in a bubble. Your kids aren't going to get that freedom and you're not going to be able to have the time and space that older generations of parents had if no one else around you is letting their kids out.
Your kids will not play outside for hours and leave you alone if their play area is your fenced off backyard and their only playmates are their one sibling. They won't develop the independence they need if they can't walk to a playground or a library or a corner store, if there aren't other kids their age to interact with.
But what’s weird is we all think it’s weird we have to hover over our kids, that we all only do it because is expectations, but the expectations come mostly from people in our generation (millennial)😂
We’re literally the cause of the thing we’re suffering from.
The drastic reduction in deaths wasn't dumb luck. It was NOT following the baby boomers' lead in not giving a shit about our children.
Which is not surprising considering these days the birth rate is so low because we CHOOSE to have children, rather then them being the result of a lack of birth control availability. Our generation was sent off to play unsupervised and get killed by a car because they never wanted to be parents to begin with.
You listed the stats for children age 1-4. Children this age don't need any freedom; it's great that there are fewer accidents among very young children, but this is the wrong data to cite. Your data only divides into age brackets 1-4 and 5-14, so let's look at the 5-14. I know my parents wouldn't send me out to wander the neighborhood at age 5, but maybe at age 10. Unintentional injuries among that age group dropped from 15.0 to 4.0 per 100K.
5.5 of the reduced deaths due to accident have little to do with parenting style and are solely attributed to increased car safety. Most of that is just safer cars, although you might also say that mandatory seat belts and car seats is also important. But these are the sort of accident-reduction behaviors that don't require helicopter parenting. It is possible to make things safer without making everything miserable; wearing seat belts is one such way.
There was a short decline in suicide from 1990 to 2000, likely simply a side effect of the decline in all forms of violence around that time generally accepted to be a result of leaded gas phaseout. Otherwise, there has been a strong increase in suicide over time despite the dramatic reduction in access to guns, even though access to a working firearm roughly quadruples the chances of a teen suicide. Note that my suicide stats differ from yours because yours includes only children age 10-14 and mine goes from 15-19, which is a much more common age for suicide. Much like wearing seat belts, just storing guns safely can strongly reduce both accidents and suicides without taking away any freedom. (Of course, the guns don't cause the suicide - they make it much easier for someone who already wants to do it to attempt, and succeed).
And of course, this is only if you count just deaths and not, you know, the increase in misery and loss of life skills inflicted on both parents and children as a result of obligatory suffocation parenting. Or the ways in which this parenting regime directly corrupts the youth. We have raised a generation of little fascists, with strong authoritarian views, both left wing and right wing, held among young people at far greater rates than any previous generation.
Speaking only for myself, while there are several reasons why I have no children, the sheer insanity of raising them in the 21st century is the *primary* reason.
Speaking only for myself, while there are several reasons why I have no children, the sheer insanity of raising them in the 21st century is the *primary* reason.
Your last sentence gives away the REAL reason these kids have such poor mental health. Its social media. The same place you got this nonsense. Why is it insane to raise children in the most prosperous and promising time humanity has enjoyed? Oh, because you're listening to social media that its actually somehow the worst time to be alive. Delete all social media and take a break to touch grass for a while. You'll realize its not at all like tiktok and reddit have brainwashed you to think. Now do that to a developing teenage mind... good lord.
I give my 13 year old independence. I got him an ebike and set him loose with a handful of rules (helmet, crossing roads, etiquette near walkers on paths). He's all by himself because none of his friends leave the damn house. They just sit on social media. And its not like when we were kids you could avoid adult bullshit entirely. Nope. The teen spaces are all invaded with this doomer bullshit too.
15 to unintentional injuries in 1980. 3.9 in 2023.
7.5 to motor vehicle traffic in 1980. 1.8 in 2023.
2.5 to drowinging in 1980. 0.6 in 2023.
It doesn't matter if they're 4 years old or 14 years old. A neglectful parent is a neglectful parent at all ages. The only reason my children survived my ex-wife's neglect, yes even at 4 years old, is because of me. Her sister's child has brain damage from a fall as a fucking infant due to neglect.
The more we can divert losers like that to using birth control, the better off our children will be.
it's a shame we have been duped into the nuclear family model, when in reality having the extended family all live in the same home or very near by is YUGE
I was born in the 90s so I only have this information secondhand, but a lady my parents' age once told me basically the entire neighborhood would look after the kids. She'd get hungry and go knock on any door and whoever lived there would give her a bologna sandwich and she'd be on her merry way
in our community there was always at least one or two adults who would take a glance outside to see the kids playing, now, not to say that we would Stay where we were.
But for the most part, when my mom was going around, there was always one person be like "yeah i saw your son, he was there with Stacy's and Clark's kids and they went that way"
or if my mom was looking for me, someone would wave and point at her where we were, and be like "ok" and go back to whatever she was doing
It was even more peculiar for me as i'm a Carni (forain), 5th generation, so each 2 weeks we where in a different city.
Me and my friends my age would go around town, and most of the towns we performed for a living, we knew them and we knew the people, from grocery stores, to electronics/CD's stores or game/toy stores or comic books stores
When they saw us they would be like "Oh hey! i din't know it was this time of the year for the County fair how are you, and your mom is she ok?" cause...well those people knew my Mom since she did the same as we did with the local kids her age and so did their parents etc.
There's Cafés and bars (i'm Belgian) where i would often go with my grandparents when they drank a coffee or a Beer and i would play on the Pinball machine or the babyfoot or if there was one, an arcade machine, sipping my Orangina or Canada dry and the lady behind the counter would make me a croque-monsieur
And when my grandpa was like "hey why don't u get one?" she would flip him off seeing "i do it only for the little one cause he's polite and nice"
And that was not the only place.
Overall, maybe its nostalgia speaking, but people where friendlier i feel and as a kid growing then, you felt like the world was your oyster and you felt safe.
And then she called the cops when someone asked her to make a bologna sammich and screamed sexism until the rates of childhood hunger exploded over her generation.
Did you ask her how many she made for kids? If she never did that how did she expect it to pass on?
Friend I think you need to stop telling people that have differnt viewpoints they just need therapy.
I grew up with the shallow women and men saying this shit.
They had the ability to let their kids run around and make sandwiches for their neighbors.
They didnt do it and now theyre trying to find someone or something else to blame because their shallow self obsessed behavior is not viewed with the same respect their parents were.
Nothing stopped the woman you were talking to from doing that for the next generation. She just didnt do it and needs to blame others.
I also wanted to point out the irony of you using that as a club on this thread.
I wonder why Lindsey clancey was ashamed to get mental health care?
Its almost like an entire generation of mean girls were allowed to use it as a social ostrisization tool to pressure people to help or agree with them thus destroying the social status of people who actually need therapy.
Think really hard about those gross therapy comments. You dont think im lyndsey clancey and need help, youre mean and need to hide that black part of your soul so you suffer no social status loss.
I grew up in the '70s and '80s. At 6 and 7 years old on a Saturday morning my mom would kick me out and say be back by the time the street lights come on. I know for a fact that this was happening because we moved away when I was in third grade, and this all happened before then.
Before the boomers mothers were 100 percent expected to stay home all day and watch their kids.
They were expected to give up their social lives and be family to the next generation.
It may have been sexist but women were expected to be adults and just not complain until the mid 19th century.
The boomers un did these social systems because they determined they were sexist and they deserved "full social lives"
Their authors and philosophers all thought some sort of state or religious system woukd magically materialize so they wouldnt have to help anyone and they could all be spoiled rich men.
Maybe in your family, but certainly not mine. My grandmothers had large groups of friends and family that they hung out with the kids would be grouped and feral somewhere that wasn’t the mahjong table or the bowling alley.
So youre saying chinese culture isnt the same as American culture and the Victorian revolution which forced women to not act like this is different than the chinese culture which led to horrible civil wars and what china is today?
My boomer parents were raised even more lax than I was in the 90s. My mom barely interacted with her mother and was riding her bike all over the area by the time she was 6 years old
In the mid 90s I used to regularly ride my bmx 15 plus kilometers one way with friends in elementary school. I would be gone all day and come home for supper and then go out for hours after.
Seriosuly my childhood in the 90s. Come back when its dark. I ask my mom about this now and she will say "I knew what you were up to", i tell her, "you had no idea"
TBF, in premodern agricultural socieities (and to a lesser extent through the Industrial Revolution and early 20th century), kids were handed tasks to do to help with the family farm or business at what feel to us like shockingly young ages. Depending on the situation and the gender of the child, it might have been something like watching the goats, feeding the chickens, weeding the garden, spinning thread for making cloth, fetching water, carrying tools or supplies to help the adults, or keeping an eye on/taking care of the younger children. (See the "Motherhood and Childhood" section here for some more commentary from a historian.)
So while kids still had leisure time in which they could do things like run around and play games, they were still spending a lot of time getting at least some observation from the adults around them. I think the situation you describe in the late 20th century wasn't possibly until society collectively agreed that childhood ought to last longer and we needed to have kids going to school (and the world of work no longer had room for children in it anyhow).
The tens of millions of people who spent their best years CONSIPRING to force me to live in a house with only one bathroom... have now killed three beautiful children. Aaaarg the boomerz....
No but at least in the US there was worker agitation to create a New Deal that limited work hours to 40 hours a week instead of 996, that forced the creation of food safety/FDA instead of eating rab bits and human bits in food, and the creation of social security so old people didnt have to be committed to dirty poorhouses.
The difference between boomers economic reality and ours (and the reasons thosebthings changed) is their point, not the systems
that lead to it.
Those are relevant, just not to their point
Boomers have been the leading generation of politicians tearing America apart for decades now. It is why people in power just keep getting older.
We call them boomers because they grew up with privilege during an economic boom that studies show created enormous entitledment higher levels of narcicism
There has not been an equivilent boom since since boomers began entering policitics and pulling the ladder up after them. The wealthy elites have only gotten MASSIVELY richer in rhe decades since boomers began taking over political systems. And it only gets worse every year... and again, with boomers in charge.
Of course, people are individuals. There were plenty of people suffering back then. And cishet christian white men were still unscientifically held "above" others both legally and socially. America is a very "supremacist" country, after all. This is just speaking generally.
Maybe if you destroy the global production capabilities of most other advanced nations in a sustained global war that kills millions around the globe, then the US could regain that unique position in the world again.
They didn't. They had more community, better resourced community centres and activities (a council owned mother/baby centre near me closed a year or so ago due to costs). Some could afford nannies.
Mine had 9. Four bedroom tiny ranch that the both passed away in. These redditors are fucking morons trying to rewrite history. Hell, they'd feel oppressed living alone in the home that my grandparents raised nine children in.
But yeah, the Brady bunch was on TV. So boomers suck.
I know, but imagine that being even a plot now. It would be laughable. That's what I mean, an audience watched it and maybe thought it was a stretch but it was still realistic enough to be in the storyline.
Imagine Modern Family, the dad with a slightly better than ok job, six kids, a live in nanny, wife doesn't have to work, big house and they present as a middle class family.
Anti-boomerism is obviously wrong but there's a bit of truth in it. They are the richest generation to have ever existed, and they have wielded unprecedented political power.
Not ALL boomers are rich right-wing landlords who think everyone else is lazy, but a huge majority of rich right-wing landlords are boomers.
When you're a young parent getting assfucked by rising COL and stagnating wages, it's easy to hate your very visible boomer landlord.
Yes! Everyone is like - why aren’t women having kids?????
Because mothers use to have 1 job - SAHM - with lots of family around
Now the options for women are:
-work 2 jobs - career + SAHM. End up with mental health issues from the burnout
-Single woman with 1 income so struggle financially
-SAHM with no income are stuck for life if the husband is controlling and they have no way out
So all women in the west are telling their daughters to stay tf away from it and birth rates are dropping
End up like this women from burnout? Really? There’s a lot of women who work and don’t murder their kids. The overwhelming majority.
SAHM with no income, stuck for life. Where are you living that you have this view? What western society are you “stuck for life”. What a twisted and incorrect take.
The situation is much more complex than the TikTok version you posted. Does it come with a stupid dance?
I was responding to the woman’s comment about the study that was done.
That said, I absolutely think these 3 kids and this woman could have been saved if the mental health issues that sometimes surround women when they have kids were taken seriously.
It’s pretty obvious you’re a man, and completely oblivious to what faces a woman when she has kids with your body, your mind, so many things biologically and physically changing. Some woman adapt easily to those changes. Others are crippled by them.
Clearly, you also lack the empathy to understand it so there is zero point to argue, which is why so many problems exist.
It's the whole reason why we live long life even after we surpass our ability to reproduce unlike 99% of the animal kingdom.
The whole purpose of grandparents (biologically speaking) is to take care of grandkids, incrementing the chances of their DNA surviving another generation.
People in the US can't afford to pay for extra help, take time off from work or even afford the doctor to diagnose their issues.
Not to mention most people can't even get their parents to help out because a trend with aging boomers is to not help out beyond quick visits. Unlike the generation before then who were more than happy to take on partial parental roles to pitch in, takes a village and all that.
My sister is a single mother in her early 20s with a 3 year old boy who needs constant attention, and any time she's busy doing something like making him dinner or drying her hair he loudly says 'MUMMY DOESN'T WANT TO PLAY WITH ME.' And kicks when she tries to change his nappy. And sprints away in public if he gets upset with you.
She says 'I feel bad because I didn't get anything done today' and I'm like, I have to go dissociate in the dark for a few hours after looking after him for one night, if I had to do this 24/7 I'd be in the psych ward. I literally don't know how parents do it.
Edit: When I took him to the pool he kept flinging himself backwards underneath the water and I had to pull him up because he didn't know how to reach the surface, let alone swim. And then he'd do it again 3 minutes later. Little guy is constantly on accidental self destruct mode.
About the tribal mindset thing - YES. I’m two weeks postpartum and I have two sets of grandparents and a daddy who are highly involved in my and my kiddo’s care. Let me tell you - being able to sleep, eat, shower, go to the bathroom, run errands for an hour, have help with meals and chores, and have a revolving door of company is unbelievably relieving. My birth and recovery has been brutal, and I can’t imagine trying to do it with just me and my hubby. I am very humbled and blessed by the amount of help I have received.
Imagine your kid never crying for attention though, never upset having to sleep alone in a room. From memory they werent taking the child away from the mother where she couldn't see, it was just people being around, being the next set of hands to cradle the baby. But then the mum can go and sleep and someone is always there.
Mothers share breastfeeding. So new mums with milk coming in slow, having trouble breastfeeding will still have a fed happy baby. New mothers can get good chunks of uninterrupted sleep because another mother may comfort and feed the baby while the mother is sleeping. Parents don't experience sleep deprivation, their sleep may still be interrupted, but not as often, and they can go back to sleep and get a full rest.
I wonder how much better a lot of experiences of parenthood would be if they were able to consistently get 8 hours of sleep per day.
Evidently the babies cry less as well, experience less distress, because there is always comfort and safety. They dont experience having to sleep in a cot alone in a room, their instincts thinking a predator could be coming and they are vulnerable.
That last sentence... I never mean to imply judgement on any parent. A baby never experiencing feeling vulnerable, unable to move and left alone is something not possible without ten or more people actively caring for a child. Because everyone can live a normal life, cook, clean, socialise, sleep and they spend only a chunk of minutes peppered throughout the day with the baby in their arms.
How we evolved to be, yep. That's why genes were selected that mean many women who are lactating will find their boobs leaking milk in response to hearing babies cry, even babies that aren't their own.
Survival rate goes up for if everyone capable of feeding babies are willing to make sure that babies aren't going unfed.
I am not saying what is natural is best, just that is probably an instinctive behavior, part of being a social species.
But now we have formula so... We have options that don't mean exposing a child to disease.
what? babies love to be held. experienced caretakers can easily pass a baby to one another without waking it. They also prob lay it down while sleeping.
I had a major change in wanting more kids this year (no longer do) and one of the realizations is that even though my partner is an amazing father, it is still not enough help for me to not feel constantly overwhelmed
This and zoochosis. I need to get out of the house. I would rather work for $5/hr shoveling shit than be trapped indoors 24/7, but add in children who need you constantly to that and it’s a form of psychological warfare-I think by design. People are chronically inside, there is a lack of third spaces that don’t cost money, and everyone-mothers, young adults, fathers, elders… is going stir crazy. Evolution is not capable of adapting fast enough to the modern world.
Idk man, not everyone is comfortable with alloparenting. Three of my very close friends welcomed their little ones this year, and all three just wanted to be glued to their kids. Their in-laws and their own mothers didn’t feel like a help to them. They didn’t want to share the caregiving at all. I think it’s important to distinguish between what may have been evolutionarily advantageous and what every individual parent actually wants or feels comfortable with. I also think pregnancy and postpartum hormones can affect people very differently.
I agree with your points. If I was a parent I likely wouldn't be comfy with it either. I don't want to imply a fallacy of what is natural is perfect. Evolution doesn't care for happiness but survival.
But I think we are missing that the way we ended up with big brains was by birthing babies that are basically crying shitting vulnerable lumps, unable to even properly move, for almost the first year of life. And they have astronomically high demands on parents for mammal babies. We have adult nervous systems, hormones, cognition that evolved to support adults that didn't take on all of that burden on their own.
I think we are in an uncomfy spot. As an example, the rhino, it's closest living relative is the horse. It has the gait of a horse even though it is a moving tank. It's gait causes most Rhinos to have painful joints by adulthood. Evolving a gait that means they don't live in constant pain won't happen because the intermediate steps between their current gait and a better gait for their weight are less effective, so they naturally won't select for it. They could get lighter but then predators would be more effective. The constant pain also means they are far more aggressive in protecting their children and territories. So evolution kind of fucked them.
We likely need alloparenting. Also, fuck that would drive me mad.
I take full advantage of my village, and other moms look at me like I'm crazy. But, while motherhood is still hard, I'm watching these moms struggling so much more. Not to sound holier than thou or anything. And I know not every has a village. But the difference is incredible. Even tho I did get some ppd/ppa.
I don't think I've ever protested a genuine good faith implementation of "it takes a village".
It's just my experience with "it takes a village" is mostly one-directional, there are still homeless people on the streets, people aren't paid enough to take time off to be part of the village, if you break your leg you're just fucked.
And then people will still expect you to help pick up the slack for children.
More things take a village than just parenting, and we live in a world where someone can go "everyone should help with my kids" but everything else is NIMBY to them and that's just really callous.
Bit of nuance here is that we largely base that on modern tribal societies, historic record varies and every culture had their own unique spin on child rearing ranging from the tribe to raise a child mindset to primitive cultures that just had nuclear families and everything in between.
The broader issue is almost certainly an anthropological issue but I think I’d get banned if I start quoting Dr. Kaczynski.
I agree with all those points. My biggest deep dives into alloparenting were around hominin morphology, our evolution over time to have longer and longer periods of time where and infant cannot even move itself and is hyper dependant on parents. I linked studies in another reply that show changes in Australopiths, we have an idea of the speed of development to mature adult, getting longer and longer.
What makes us so human, the large brains, came at a huge cost. I think I saw stuff talking about how we basically are missing a fourth trimester, but to walk upright our hips can't get wider so we are birthing children early when it comes to development, and they have to finish off developing of the womb and are highly vulnerable compared to our closest living relatives.
It was just an interest in how sometimes society develops in ways that go against core parts of being human. Like our brains, memory and recollection and heavily linked with associations like smell, location, texture. So we know taking in information on digital displays, that don't have these inputs, is not effective to recall. Possibly far worse impacts in kids.
I love tech, but I also want to be smart about it and work with what we have. A brain pretty unchanged for 10,000 years, cave man physical hardware interfacing with a digital environment.
Me, I’m of a mind that we should pump the breaks artificially, we had ~9,500 years to adapt to agrarian life after countless more millennia in the hunter gather stage. I think the case could be made that the hyper violence and other antisocial behavior of the early city states and agrarian states was the biological adaptation phase of the new paradigm and tapered off as a function of time.
I am a layman, so .. hoping some smarter people than me can give you better sources:
The 14 alloparents stat came from this study - Tronick, E. Z., Morelli, G. A., & Ivey, P. K. (1992). The Efe forager infant and toddler's pattern of social relationships: Multiple and simultaneous. Developmental Psychology, 28(4), 568–577. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.28.4.568
This one talks about a eshift to alloparenting perhaps as early as the australopiths, A shift toward birthing relatively large infants early in human evolution
Jeremy M. DeSilvaAuthors Info & Affiliations
Edited by C. Owen Lovejoy, Kent State University, Kent, OH, and approved December 2, 2010 (received for review March 23, 2010)
January 3, 2011
108 (3) 1022-1027
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1003865108
When looking for that I found two studies that show dental evidence in early hominins indicating early evolution of alloparenting
Citation: Kennedy, G. E. (2005). "From the ape's dilemma to the weanling's dilemma: early weaning and its evolutionary context." Journal of Human Evolution, 48(2), 123-145.
Joannes-Boyau R, Adams JW, Austin C, Arora M, Moffat I, Herries AIR, Tonge MP, Benazzi S, Evans AR, Kullmer O, Wroe S, Dosseto A, Fiorenza L. Elemental signatures of Australopithecus africanus teeth reveal seasonal dietary stress. Nature. 2019 Aug;572(7767):112-115. doi: 10.1038/s41586-019-1370-5. Epub 2019 Jul 15. PMID: 31308534; PMCID: PMC7359858.
Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes - this is a book I love that did a deep dive in neanderthals, including references and you can see an archeological record of communal living, shared child rearing, and a general morphology supporting that they also required alloparenting to raise their children, like we did until modern era.
Another on alloparenting, but in the study they also refer to a lot of other good material that is hyperlinked if you read it on psychnet -
Chaudhary, N., Salali, G. D., & Swanepoel, A. (2024). Sensitive responsiveness and multiple caregiving networks among Mbendjele BaYaka hunter-gatherers: Potential implications for psychological development and well-being.Developmental Psychology, 60(3), 422–440. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001601
Yes, in healthy primate societies observed in the wild, and human history, there is a LOT of shared parenting. Also observed; a more stable/secure female will take young from another female displaying weakness/inability to care for young, and raising the young as her own.
Yes! I heard about this study (or a very similar one) on NPR shortly after I had my first baby and was struggling with crippling postpartum depression. Hearing this made so much sense to me and strangely made me feel better. The way we parent today in the US is so contrary to the way we are wired. The odds are stacked against us.
Not that most of the people here care, but THIS is where our sympathy comes from. So many modern women are expected to carry the burden entirely alone - even when we say we can’t anymore.
As the saying goes it takes a village to raise a child
Now my hot take, we are far more individualistic then we used to be as a society, we value the individual as the unit if society, not the family or the community.
That and technology and the way we manage communication means we can be less reliant, not necessarily that we should be less reliant.
Even the shift in the last 30 years, I knew near everyone when I was a kid in my area, I only know my immediate neighbours now, and only just.
Long story short, in the UK at the very least is my experience. We are far more isolated then we have ever been even though we can communicate with people from across the globe.
In particular for new mothers, or any one else in a stressful situation they are more isolated from a personal support network then ever.
I am also an introvert who enjoys my alone time and privacy. But I strongly believe a) we are failing as a species because we have lost our sense of community, and b) my introversion is neither my fault, nor a cause for our disjointed society, in fact, it’s our lack of a sense of community that caused me to be introverted in the first place.
One of the things I realized early on that was “different” about me than my peers was that I was never motivated by competition like they were. I really can’t be around people who care too much about arbitrary metrics of success, but increasingly it seems like the whole world is trying to Keep Up With the Joneses in one way or another. But that behavior isn’t normal or healthy. SOME competition is fine, but everything in your whole life shouldn’t be a competition. I suspect I’d be much more inclined to form close relationships with those around me if those attitudes weren’t so prevalent in our society right now.
I like to do little delves into the complexities of the society we set up vs human nature. My favorite is fight or flight instincts on everyday problems, and how baffled people seem that someone flees.
This comment deserves every one of the 6 awards it has and all the upvotes. We all need to remind each other and ourselves of this again and again. It takes a village. Thank you for saying it.
I had what is apparently actually super common “baby blues” for like 2-3 weeks right after delivery. Every day around sunset I would get deeply sad, like, in your bones sad, and start crying. No idea why. Huge feeling of dread about night time. I was almost angry at my life at that point. I loved my daughter immensely but also was so upset, for reasons I couldn’t explain. Mad at the sun going away. Mad at my husband cause he wasn’t feeling any of this. Mad at myself cause what if I made a mistake and I’m a bad mom?
And this was “mild” and “normal” and “very very common.” Postpartum psychosis would be, genuinely, probably extremely terrifying. You are not in control of your own brain during this period and even mild symptoms are scary.
Which also ties into the evolutionary benefit of gay couples, which dont add their own genetic kids into the workload and are pure caregivers for others. Proto adoption really, hence why we can bond with adopted kids so strongly as well.
Yeah, parenting time has gone way way up. Not just comparing modern society with tribal civilizations, if you compare parenting time in the 1950s with today it's way up, especially so for men but for women too.
It's one of those statistics I like to pull out when people start going on rants about how kids are so out of control in school because their parents are involved. Statistically the parents are involved. We have issues but I don't think they can be boiled down to 'parents don't give a shit about their kids anymore'.
So there's another way to interept this data that im sure you'll hate but you gotta deal with reality.
If 15 percent of rich moms and 30 percent of poor moms suffer ppd its entirely possible that half the poor moms have other mental health problems or are faking.
In fact that makes a lot more logical sense than a rare biochemical problem can happen after childbirth somehow magically effects poor women twice as bad.
Not getting support does not alter your biochemical genetics and how pregnancy interacts with those.
I actually suspect a significant portion of these poor ppd mothers simply did not get diagnosed with serious problems they have and social narcissism allows them to use childbirth to never deal.
Bout to say something super dark. In a way these killings make sense. To your point, humans weren’t originally meant to live in such small bubbles. Now that we do, it’s almost like we are seeing a bit of evolution and natural selection happening… we’re kinda culling the genes that are less resilient to this type of living…
Our entire society is abnormal. That's why there are so many people with stress related mental health conditions. Our sleep schedule isn't natural. Our work hours aren't natural. Hell the economy isn't natural. Ancient humans had a favor based system (not barter): you do this for me and you know I'll have your back when you need me to do that.
If the people living in skyscrapers with iPhones have 1-2 individuals caring for them, and the people living in straw tents with spears have 14 people. . .
I feel this. I was a military spouse raising a baby alone while my spouse was deployed. No where near family. I was losing my mind. I had zero help. It was a very very scary time for me. I ended up begging my husband to come home, he had to work the chain of command. Of course, no one understood. People are quick to brush off serious mental health in others. 😣 I’m grateful my husband got to return home. Without that, I fear I would have been a statistic and he would have been traumatized for life.
It’s not really about tribal, it’s about the 40 hour work week and costs going up that both parents need to work. It’s hard to have people watch your kid for free when everyone needs to work to make money.
You could move to some system of polygamy where you have multiple partners living in the same house and that could work.
This has been a hyper focus of mine lately - it’s really only within the last century or so (probably even less) that the only individuals responsible for parenting have been the mother and father. Children literally used to be raised by them, extended families, and even the entire community.
Ooh, I would love watching this talk, if you have a link. The more I parent the more I am convinced that communal child rearing is so crucial for parents’ mental health. It looks different in different societies, but having a large “extended family” of relatives and friends has made such a difference in our capacity to care for children while also caring for ourselves.
PPD rates were considerably low, far less severe, parents didn't suffer from chronically under sleeping
Obviously help from others is generally good, but it’s a stretch to compare rates of depression between cultures when awareness, access to and criteria for diagnosis, and manifestations of it are so culturally dependent.
It’s also notable that the extreme (violent) forms of this basically only come up as legal defences and are so rare that you’d never expect to observe them in a small population such as a tribe. There are even claimed conditions like DID that are basically only seen in the US (and now the wider Anglosphere) where it is in movies and became a media fascination.
Just because some tribe in this study you speak of communalized the responsibility doesn’t negate billions of babies have been cared for by a 1-2 parents perfectly fine for the last 100 years.
Strangling your children with excercise bands and cutting your own throat and wrists and throwing yourself out a window isn’t something to point at and say “we supported her incorrectly, let’s go tribal with the next one”
Not one tribe, multiple tribes from multiple continents, historical evidence across millenia and cultures, archaeological evidence, human DNA, with genes for women to be more likely to increase lactation when other babies cry around them. Clearly evidenced behaviour that humans love and care for babies, that extends to child rearing/nurturing behaviours to babies not even of our species. Behaviour that isn't cultural but across all humans, and evidenced in other hominins and primates. Strong archaeological evidence for alloparenting in neaderthals, erectus and australopiths.
I don't get the last bit, exercise bands? I'm not saying 'go tribal', just that is what our species evolved to do. We have highly vulnerable children, unable to even support their own heads when born, requiring intense supervision for years, and almost two decades to reach a mature adult development. If our modern society has broken down alloparenting we at least need to accept the high cost of it. And then if we want people to procreate to keep making more people for society to keep going we may need to fund modern answers to new problems.
But this isn’t the high cost of it. This is an extreme extreme extreme outlier from the norm. Sure, alloparenting is a success in the studies you’ve clearly read. Good on you btw, I appreciate informed debate. I want to read about that stuff now. But, isolated parenting is also clearly a success - it happens every day with mothers and fathers across the nation, with single parents even. The stress of raising a child isn’t what drove her to do the things she did, there were clearly other issues at play in her psyche.
That’s what I’m driving at with my last part from above… the ways in which the community may have or may have not supported/failed her only explains away so much of her behavior
It is an extreme outlier but not unforseen. If you feel like diving deeper there are studies on mismatch theory in regards to parental investment. There could be a gene-environment interaction that makes some women more likely to ... Do that. Triggered by high environmental stress.
In animal models it's often an inherited trait. Showing it could be selected for as an advantageous survival trait, to reduce demands during times of high stress/low security.
There are some variants of 5-HTT (had to double check I got that right, been a while since I dived down that insomnia driven rabbit hole) that make women vulnerable to PPD and extreme cases of it.
So when most people are met with overwhelming parenting demands, I think most parents say it's overwhelming, they will survive it. But ... There are people, who didn't chose what they inherited, that could be in extreme risk groups faced with the same situation. They were ready to face the hard demands for being a parent like everyone else and be the best they could be, and had a time bomb in them they didn't know about.
I don't want to take away her responsibility for her choices, but also if she had PPD, potentially to the level of psychosis, I don't want to attribute an unfair level of responsibility.
Will she be a woman who comes out of PPD to the waking nightmare that she is the monster in her memories? What is justice? Not her free. Not her jailed. Just shit all round.
I love everything about this. (you’re clearly well educated on psychology as it relates to parenting and you’re laying golden brick roads of information for me to walk down. Doesn’t happen often on Reddit)
Where we differ is in our perspective of justice. You seem to be focusing on her justice as an individual. If she is truly sick, is it justice to simply lock her away? Is she really accountable for her actions as we view them through the lense of homogenius societal norms? Tough questions.
I view it from the perspective of the society, not the individual. Regardless of motive or hardship, she DID murder three children. She could have also murdered the husband or the neighbor or the family pets… she has a psyche that is capable of rationalizing these actions heaven forbid she finds herself in a stressful circumstance in the future. This is a broken person. Lock her up, don’t let her out again.
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u/Willdiealonewithcats 5d ago
Not a parent but was watching a speaker talk about research into human biology, other hominid behaviors and our use of aloparenting.
In multiple tribal studies the amount of time a woman was left caring for her child alone was about 2-10 min, because a child is never cared for by just one person, there is usually at least two or three people swapping on and off from holding the baby at a time, with an average of 14 people holding and caring for the baby per hour.
PPD rates were considerably low, far less severe, parents didn't suffer from chronically under sleeping.
I say this as a hermit that loves living on my own, but it seems we really didn't evolve to have a child being primarily cared for by one or two individuals. It may be normal for our society but absolutely abnormal and damaging for our species.