es3217w2

ES3217: Loss of Childhood

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Last updated 26.09.11.

Introduction

The phrase 'planned parenthood' may seem innocuous enough, but it does not require much reflection to realise that an immense weight of political policy, economic assumption, and social organisation presses down on this idea. In fact it constitutes what the anthropologist, Marcel Mauss called a 'total system', i.e. an imaginary/ideological system or focus/image within a culture around which are constructed political, economic, and social structures - if you like - different, integrated forms of life. Another phrase that you are probably familiar with is that of the 'nuclear family'. This is an associated idea, and taken together it is easy (for us) to imagine what is intended: a male and female adult in a permanent relationship within which have been born/will be born no more than two children. These children will grow up in a family context which is, largely, both financially and socially independent.

The general assumption (from the point of view of all present political parties) is that such families provide a stable basis for the maintenance and regeneration of shared attitudes towards, health, education, foreign policy, and work - to name only the most obvious areas of life which politicians aspire to control. Furthermore, such nuclear families constitute predictable economic 'units' in all demographic calculations about the mobility of particular sectors of the national work-force with regards to the provision of housing, transport, etc. And, finally, the nuclear family is typically posited as that social construct which is best oriented towards the reproduction of existing social values, e.g. moral, ethical, and religious traditions.

The implication of the above is that in all cases where family life risks moving away from this ideal, the community, if not the State itself, is threatened, either because the variant arrangement is seen to subvert 'normal' order, or because it is seen as an embarrassment - an indication that the State, i.e., the current crop of politicians, does not control as much as it thinks it does or should. One does not have to go far to find evidence for this. Most of the media players delight in presenting stories of single mothers being in various ways improper contributors to the present and next generation - if not outright parasites on the State, then certainly principal agents in the moral and social corruption of the next generation. Similarly, those who decide to have large families are typically depicted as having exercised no choice at all in the matter, as being irresponsible, and in general, another burden on the State and the community. One can expand almost endlessly on this subject, but it should be apparent that much of this discussion spins round a single question, 'How appropriate is the idealised image of the nuclear family?' In terms of economics, politics, and the assumptions of social life predicated on it, the answer is simple: 'Very!' As soon as you begin to question this cluster of assumptions about how men and women should organise their reproductive potential you very quickly begin to shake the foundations of what we currently conceive to be normal, civilised behaviour. Our problem, then, from the perspective of studying early childhood, is that while we might question such entrenched attitudes, if all we have to offer is alternative (minority) opinions, our arguments lack persuasive power - how might such arguments be strengthened?

Hrdy is very useful here. She offers a broad anthropological and biological perspective which allows constructive thinking on this topic to begin, based on evidence of 'human nature' which, if not incontrovertible, is certainly not 'mere' opinion. The following notes summarise some of the facts she identifies as having been firmly established (see also her chapter 8 entitled, 'Family Planning Primate Style').

Hrdy's background facts

The mother's expenditure, in terms of calories, minerals, and opportunities to invest in other children - present and future, is very great indeed. This 'investment' does not stop when the foetus is brought to full-term, as we saw last week, lactation is not only highly 'tuned' to the baby's needs, it is also very demanding on the mother's body and physiology. Despite this 'cost' to the mother, all primates adopt a strategy in which the young are retained in a close bond with the mother for some considerable time before weaning takes place (in fact, it lasts longer in primates than in any comparable species by body-size), and many primates continue to nurture their young in various ways beyond weaning.
Hrdy also emphasises the fact that all primate mothers carry their young - an additional problem in terms of mobility and ease with which foraging can take place.

Crucial Questions

What are the implications of this adaptation - one so very different from that of most animals, particularly herd animals such as cows, deer, etc.? Secondly, why is the commitment of a mother to her infant so much more contingent in human mothers than in all other primates? Hrdy's suggestion is that our own characteristics evolved during the last fifty thousand years. In the absence of evidence on child-rearing practices during the paleolithic she turns once more to comparative information derived from contemporary hunter-gatherer societies and from the living great apes. (N.B. The stone age is generally subdivided into the Old, Middle, and New Stone Age - paleolithic, mesolithic, neolithic - so the location and form of 'hunter-gathering' has to be constructed around a number of different technologies, as well as whatever was going on in the rest of perhaps multiple and isolated cultures and states of evolution.)

More facts

Hrdy uses the phrase 'life in the slow lane' to characterise primate reproductive strategy. The survival pressure was, as it had always been, to reproduce before something ate you, you died of old age, or caught some killer disease.
And yet in primates, birth rates, growth rates, and death rates are a quarter to a half of those found in comparable sized animals.
In a life spanning half a century, ape mothers rarely produce more than five widely spaced offspring. Recognition of offspring by mothers persists in most primates throughout life, rather than being lost after weaning as is the rule in most other mammals.
a critical distinction between humans and other animals, even other co-operative breeders, is the sheer duration of parental investment - weaning is only the beginning of this process - one step along the way.
Amongst monkeys and the great apes, commitment to continued support of the infant after birth is rarely dependent on the characteristics of the infant itself, beyond its capacity to cling on to the mother.
Because of this, maternal ambivalence in humans is striking. Hrdy compares this behaviour with the extreme level of attachment which is the norm amongst all other primates.
Across human societies, murder rates among men are always higher than those amongst women. Men tend to murder people they are not related to. But when a woman causes someone else's death (through a sin of omission as well as commission) that person is most likely to be her own new born infant. In this respect, women are utterly different from other primates that, like us, produce typically one baby at a time.
Infanticide is not unique to humans, but in other primates, the killer is almost always an unrelated individual, never the mother.
Twin births are rarer in primates than in humans, and when they do occur there are penalties in terms of survival: either one of the twins is favoured over the other, or more typically, both undergo delayed maturation.

Detailed questions

Hrdy reviews the difference between the primates' unconditional commitment, and our own 'contingent' commitment. Physiologically, for a mammal to breed as slowly as primates and humans do entails that the majority of pregnancies terminate before implantation of the embryo takes place. This being the case, doesn't the fact of contingent commitment seem bizarre? What happened in the course of our own evolution to make human mothers so much more discriminating than other primates?

The general picture is that for most of the Pleistocene, humans lived at extremely low population densities.
Modern genetic studies demonstrate a remarkable level of homogeneity amongst humans - a fraction of the genetic diversity demonstrated, for example, by chimps. This indicates that all living humans are recently descended from a small population which for most of its history grew very slowly indeed.

So what limited early hominid population growth and diversification? One possible answer - even proposed by Darwin - is that early hominids practiced infanticide. Hrdy indicates that although cases in settled communities have been recorded as high as 40%, in nomadic hunter-gatherers such as the !Kung the rates for infanticide is much lower - approximately 1 per 100. Practiced at such low rates, infanticide cannot account for the observed low rate of growth of the early human population. Hrdy's response is to answer under three headings: delayed maturation, a long delay between first menstruation and actual fertility (termed adolescent sub-fertility), and long intervals between births.

all apes take a long time to mature to breeding age, but humans are off the scale when compared with all other mammals.

Within the normal range of a particular species, better nourished females reach menarche soonest, conceive earlier, and reach full body size sooner. In most primates, including humans, issues of nourishment are dependent on social structure as well as the relative abundance of food within the environment.

As reproductive fat cells accumulate, some begin to secrete the hormone leptin. Soon, every ninety minutes the girl's hypothalamus releases regular pulses of gonadotropin-releasing hormone. These pulses are the critical event for puberty - without them menarche is not reached, but when they are released they stimulate the pituitary gland which in turn starts to produce follicle-stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone which stimulate the ovaries to begin the production of mature eggs.

The first menstrual cycles in humans and other apes begin before pregnancy is possible. In apes, the period of adolescent sub-fertility last anywhere between six months and three years, protecting the increasingly sexually active female from conceiving before her body is capable of sustaining the pregnancy and subsequent demands of nourishing an infant.

Late menarche and adolescent sub-fertility protects a young female from the dangers of a reproductive enterprise which is likely to end in disaster for the infant if not the young mother.

Hrdy's conclusion is that the 'problem' of teenage pregnancy is a symptom of a life-style which no longer produces the circumstances matching normal primate survival strategy - her 'life in the slow lane'.

You might wonder if there is yet more to menstruation - in terms of evolution - than is mentioned here. Interestingly, just as the close bond between mother and suckling child has been identified as forming a major pillar of our species' subsequent sociability, related claims have been made for menstruation, but in this case the claim involves one particular idea: what separates us from all other species is our ability to handle symbol manipulation. We will say more about this later in the module, but two books tackle this subject explicitly: Stephen Mithin's 1996 book, The Prehistory of the Mind: a Search for the Origins of Art, Religion and Science London: Thames & Hudson; and Chris Knight's 1991 book, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture New Haven: Yale University Press. And in case you were wondering, there is also one about culture being an extended form of grooming, i.e., now we don't pick the fleas off one another, we gossip ... see Dubar, R. (1996) Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language London: Faber & Faber.