Mother

The hope is that you'll read the title in Glen Danzig's voice

Hi everyone. I know it’s been a few days since my last piece, and for that I apologize. A few non-work-related things have been imposing themselves. I’ve been working on putting together a talk on Nietzsche & Dostoevsky for an event at which I’ll be speaking in November. You’d think that would be easy since I’ve already done a five-hour podcast on the topic, but picking which parts to leave out in my one-hour talk feels a bit like sacrificing a few of my fingers. That project is driving me a bit crazy, and I need a break, so let’s shake my head a bit and see what falls out. This is my first attempt at writing shorter, off-the-cuff pieces more frequently, instead of always committing myself to long projects that end up consuming time I should be spending on the history podcast. I will continue this discussion, though, using your comments as jumping off points for subsequent posts.

(I am going to try to keep releasing these shorter pieces for free to everyone, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t help support the podcast! If you can spare a few bucks, become a paid subscriber and help keep MartyrMade going.

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Since I recently spent some time on the mythological significance of the mother-infant dyad, I’ve been thinking about how different child-rearing practices might result in different personality structures, and, collectively, in different cultures.

I suppose the first thing to keep in mind about human babies is that, despite the long gestation period, they are born at a far earlier developmental stage than almost any other mammal. The predominant theory goes something like this: Back in our evolutionary past, as our brains grew and became more central to human survival strategies, the cranium containing that brain had to grow as well. Delivering a baby with a bigger head requires a mama with wider hips to survive the process, but at a certain point wider hips began to take an evolutionary toll of their own. Past a certain point, wider hips had a sufficiently negative effect on a human female’s ability to move (that is, to run and swim, to avoid predators and enemies, to do meaningful work, etc) that they became an evolutionary liability. Nine months seems to be the compromise. Babies born much earlier than that have a much lower chance of survival, but few mothers would survive a much later birthing process without being built in a way that made them vulnerable on the veldt.

As a result, human babies are born much less further along on the path to what they’ll ultimately become. Tolstoy wrote, “From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the newborn to the child of five is an appalling distance.” The same cannot be said about most other animal young. Baby gazelles that can’t get their act together and figure out four-legged locomotion within a few hours of being born don’t last very long. There isn’t much to being a gazelle besides running, grazing, mating, and avoiding predators, and by the end of its first season a fawn is able to passably accomplish three of the four. 

Marsupials employ an interesting alternative strategy. Their babies, too, are born very young, long before being anywhere close to being able to look after themselves, but immediately after birth they crawl into mama’s pouch, latch themselves onto a nipple, and finish the rest of their fetal development in a sort of halfway house (or, “a womb with a view,” as Campbell used to say). Human mothers don’t have pouches, and their babies are born so early that they remain entirely dependent on parents for… what… ten, twelve years, at the very earliest? At what age would you drop a child into the wilderness and expect its chance of survival to be better than 50-50? Of course, humans live in groups and rarely bear sole responsibility for securing necessary resources and physical security. Our survival strategies are based on our ability to cooperate, which requires language, and language takes a while for even child prodigies to master. The point is, what kind of adult a human baby eventually becomes is more affected by what happens to it after it’s born than any other creature, and the range of potential outcomes is wider than we can imagine. Most animals do not employ a diverse array of parenting techniques. How a gazelle mothers her young in one place is likely to be quite similar to any other. Human societies, on the other hand, employ wildly different parenting techniques that produce an almost endless variety of human types.

For example, parenting styles of hunter-gatherers tend to differ from those of sedentary folk in consistent ways. Traditional sedentary societies have tended to produce as many offspring as nature will allow, and women were often pregnant more often than not throughout their fertile years. Not so in hunter-gatherer societies, whose nomadic lifestyle makes frequent birthing maladaptive. Morris Berman writes:

Every time a !Kung woman moves, she has to carry all of her children who are less than four years old. Over a four-year period, she will carry a child nearly five thousand miles. If she has a child two years after the previous one, it will be a great burden to her.

In order to avoid the circumstances just described, !Kung parents refrain from sex for up to two years after the birth of a child. Other groups put off weaning a child in order to keep the mother lactating and suppress ovulation. In some cases, children continue to breastfeed until four, five, in a few cases, even six years old. !Kung children are typically weaned at thirty-six months, which means that, even if the mother becomes pregnant almost immediately after lactation stops, each child gets its mother’s (and family’s) undivided attention for about four years. Women who feed their children from a bottle rather than a breast often resume menstruation and become available for impregnation just eight weeks after the previous childbirth. One meta-study found that hunter-gatherer mothers spaced out pregnancies by an average of 4.1 years, while sedentary agricultural communities only wait an average of 19 months. Some have argued that the four-year birthing interval (which is also found, incidentally, among chimpanzees) is “natural,” and that the shortened interval of settled societies is a deviation. It’s not that simple, but it is clear that the difference shows up in each child’s developing personality.

Researcher Annette Hamilton lived among an Australian aboriginal tribe, and took voluminous notes on their child rearing practices. Children less than two months old were typically breastfed every thirty-five minutes throughout the day. Between two and six months, they are fed about every ninety minutes. Infants under six months are rarely out of physical contact with an adult (usually the mother). Similarly, an American anthropologist found that !Kung children maintained physical contact with the mother 70 to 80 percent of the time, and with another adult for nearly all the remainder, for the entire first year of life. The worldwide norm for hunter-gatherers (probably including those living in the Paleolithic) is for the infant to be on or near its mother virtually all the time, day and night. Modern Western mothers have much less physical contact with their babies, instead opting for more visual and verbal interaction.

Western child rearing is geared toward encouraging, even forcing, the infant’s separation from the mother at a very early stage. Children who are pushed toward autonomy before they’re psychologically prepared for it often attach themselves to what psychologists call “transitional objects” (stuffed animals and the like, or, sometimes, imaginary friends). Transitional objects are a kind of bridge between dependency on the mother and individual independence. Interestingly, while they are nearly ubiquitous in modern societies, especially in the West, transitional objects are rarely found among primitive children. The Great Mother motif is widespread among the earliest settled civilizations, even those separated by great gulfs of time and distance, and may have been a kind of collective transitional object for people suddenly pushing their children to earlier separation from the mother.