Mothers and Others 4: Nuclear Families and Alloparenting

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy makes a strong case that humans needed to develop alloparenting – parenting by others besides mother and father. Therefore, she says, mothers can’t depend on any one family structure, but need to be flexible to get help wherever they need to. I agree with this conclusion. However, Hrdy goes on to say that the nuclear family is not an optimal structure because it can’t provide enough care and resources that demanding and slow-growing human babies need.

I think Hrdy’s criticism misses how nuclear families work. A married mother and father are the core of the unit that cares for children, but they are rarely all of it. Even in our highly mobile society, where couples in the middle class often live far from their extended families, nuclear families get lots of help from grandparents, aunts and uncles, and more distant kin.

A nuclear family is not a self-sufficient unit. Not in theory, and certainly not in practice. Instead, when a mother and father marry they bring together two lines of support for the benefit of their children. This is one of the great advantages that children in two-parent families have over single-parent kids: they have two sets of grandparents and two sets of aunts and uncles.

Mothers do need to be flexible. They do need to be ready to take help from many sources, especially if they are not married. But the nuclear family still remains the best structure for parenting, and for mobilizing the most reliable network of alloparenting. Mothers need to work hard to create some alternative network if they are unable to make a nuclear family.

Mothers and Others 3: Alloparenting Means Faster Babies

Humans beings are very slow to mature. We are the slowest of all primates, and probably the slowest of all animals. In other slow-maturing species, that means a long gap between babies. But not us. We can have new babies long before the earlier ones are mature because mothers get so much help from others.

In other apes, mothers rarely let go of their babies, not even to let their sisters or mothers hold or help, and certainly not the fathers of the babies. Human beings stand out for how much "alloparenting" - care by others - we do and accept. In foraging bands, fathers normally share in child care very extensively. This makes human mothers, especially in societies in which alloparenting is normal, confident that they can trust their babies to have extensive contact with other people.

Sarah Hrdy's main concern is to explain how intersubjectivity developed among humans. Alloparenting, she things, is the key difference. Mothers in many mammals, especially other primates, have reason to learn how to read the faces, noises, movements, and even minds of their babies, and babies need to develop similar skills in reading their mothers. But in humans, who are often in the care of "other mothers," it would be hugely valuable for babies to learn how to read other people, too, people with whom they did not share the whole range of smells and sounds that mothers and their babies do.

Hrdy reports that kids attached to their moms are better fed, but kids also attached to others were more empathetic, dominant, independent, and achievement oriented. This is an immediate fruit of a society, and species, trusting enough for alloparenting.

Mothers and Others 2: Gendered Mind Reading

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, in Mothers and Others, needs to figure out how humans developed intersubjectivity or a "theory of mind" - that is, the ability to understand what other people are thinking and feeling. She says that there are two main theories. One, that mothers needed to develop a capacity to read the minds of their pre-verbal babies. Two, that people needed to develop a "Machiavellian mind" to understand and anticipte the plans of their rivals. To these she adds a third strong motivation: babies need to understand what their caregivers are thinking and feeling. As Hrdy puts it, a baby's first job is to get mom addicted to nurturing, and that requires that babies need to know how to read mom.

I was surprised that Hrdy did not emphasize how gendered these theories are. When she names the chief proponents of the mother's mind-reading theory and the Machiavellian mind theory it is easy to see that the former are women and the latter are men. Hrdy notes regularly that as a mother she is very attentive to how babies interact with mothers.

I think these gender differences in theories of mind reading strengthen the case that they are true. If men, women, and children all have strong and distinct reasons to do something, that makes me more convinced that it is really true. Moreover, the different kinds of mind reading complement one another. My focus is on mate selection and marriage. Women select men who can provide resources; men who can anticipate rivals and cooperate with allies should be better at getting resources. Men select women who will be good nurturers; women who can understand what their families need even when the need has not been said in words would be better at nurturing.

I would add one more reason that humans need intersubjectivity. Women need to read whether men are really committed before they take the great risk of having children with them. And men, to a lesser extent, need to be confident that the women they marry will stay faithful to them. Women rely on mind reading more than men do, and often expect men to do the same. This leads to many miscommunications in courtship and marriage.

Nonetheless, human beings - women, men, children - have a strong need to be able to understand what other people are thinking and feeling, even without words. Whether, as Hrdy thinks, this capacity evolved or if we acquired it some other way, it is still a skill useful enough to keep. Which is reason enough for human beings to do it more, and more effectively, than any other creatures.

Mothers and Others 1

This week I will be blogging on Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Her concern is figuring out how human beings evolved the capacity to share childrearing - what she calls alloparenting - with others who are not mother or father to the baby. The "it takes a village to raise a child" strategy is very helpful for humans, and very different from what is normal to the Great Apes.

Hrdy argues that empathy and giving are hard-wired in us. We can see from brain scans that people find helping others inherently rewarding. One of the most striking findings that she reports is that people are more cooperative than economists assume: in a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma game, 42% cooperate anyway. In multiple iterations of the game, when we can see who is generous and who is not, the cooperative people tend to get even more trusting and cooperative.

A crucial point that I take from these experiments is that we want to be cooperative. We are very sensitive to who else is cooperative, and whether the social environment makes cooperation normal. If the people we most depend on are reliable, and most people we deal with are, too, then we tend to be cooperative and trusting in new situations because that is the kind of person we want to be - even though we might get suckered.

On the other hand, children who are betrayed by adults have a much harder time trusting and cooperating.

Presbyterian Gay Ordination Fails Again

The vote was closer this time, but outcome was the same as it has been the last three times. Will that settle the issue? Of course not. Look for a wave of overtures to the next General Assembly to try exactly the same thing again.

If we adopted the new Form of Government, we would not have to tear up the whole church every two years over this issue.

Monkey Fighting

How do you edit a famous vulgarity to make is safe for work (or TV)?

Probably not this way.

Race Differences in Men's Nurturing Hormones?

Another interesting possibility that comes from juxtaposed reading.

Edin and Kefalas, in Promises I Can Keep, report that black welfare moms are less likely to be beaten by their boyfriends than their white and Hispanic counterparts because the black women are less likely to live with the fathers of their children.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, in Mothers and Others, reports that men become better fathers by sharing the hormones of pregnant women and newborns. The sustained physical contact makes men's prolactin levels rise (a nurturing hormone) and their testosterone levels to fall.

Perhaps one of the reasons that poor black men are so much less likely to be daily providers for their children is that they don't live with mothers and babies enough to get the nurturing hormonal changes that help make other men into providing fathers.

Leaving the White House - for the Kids

Ellen Moran, the White House Communications Director, is leaving to become chief of staff to the Commerce Secretary Gary Locke. The Commerce job is no easy sinecure, but is not the life-eating total institution that the White House is.

Why is she leaving this dream job?

"She met with Locke twice in recent weeks, and said she decided that the role was a better fit for her professionally and personally in the long run. She and her husband have a daughter and a son both under age 4."

I think it speaks well of her priorities that she can make this decision. Not everyone would make the same call, nor should they. But if everyone, even those at the very top, can keep their family's needs in an appropriately high place on their priority list, the world would be a better place.

Ellen Moran is still having it all. Just a little bit less of it right now.

Working Class Family Patterns vs. Middle Class and Poor

This is a thought inspired by putting together Annette Lareau's Unequal Childhoods with Edin and Kefalas' Promises I Can Keep. Lareau found that the middle class tend to raise their kids one way, while the working class and poor raise theirs another way. She thought there might be a child rearing difference between the working class and the poor, but it didn't turn out that way.

Edin and Kefalas found that poor women see children as a stage on the way to marriage, which the authors implicitly contrast with the middle class norm of marriage as a step toward children. They did not study working class families in this ethnography.

So if the working class does not differ from the poor in how they raise their children, how do they differ from the poor in family life? My guess: the working class are more likely to marry before the kids are born, even if not before they are conceived. The working class is like the poor in child rearing, but like the middle class in marriage.

Long-Term Divorce Effects: A Testimony

The blog Confessions of a Community College Dean has an affecting personal appreciation and eulogy for the blogger's divorced father. This is not science, but powerful testimony. Some excerpts:

I remember vividly the day they told us they were divorcing. I can describe where everybody sat. It was the summer before I turned 11.

The years after that were harder. I was the latchkey older kid, so I had to watch my brother until Mom got home. ... We did the 'joint custody' thing, which is tough in the teen years when you'd really rather be with your friends. To this day, I get a little weird sometimes around packing.

Now he's gone, and I'm a father. ... Much of what I try to do as a father is defined, in part, by awareness of what he did. Having seen the 'divorced dad' thing up close, I want no part of it. And while God knows I've got my flaws and my blind spots, defeatism is not one of them. I will not teach my kids to settle. To deal, yes. To settle, no. There's a difference.

College Drinking and Poor Teen Sex: An Analogy

We are talking about teen welfare mothers in the family class, using Edin and Kefalas' Promises I Can Keep. The authors quickly dispose of the first two myths about teen pregnancy - that poor teens would not get pregnant so often if they had more sex education or if they had more access to birth control technology. That is not the problem. The teen moms in this study know perfectly well that sex can lead to babies, and they have birth control technology, which they use when they don't want to get pregnant.

The real difference between the teen welfare moms and my middle class students, or the middle class do-gooders (like me) who want to prevent poor teen pregnancy is that the poor teens don't really care if they get pregnant or not, while the middle class people who plan their lives, do. The Promises I Can Keep moms said that half of their children were "neither planned nor unplanned." Having a baby was not something they were trying to do, but it would not derail any life plan they had.

To students on the elite college track, this attitude is dumbfounding. I was trying to think of an analogy that might make this calculation seems more intelligible. This is what came to me.

On any given weekend, a sizable minority of college students will not drink at all, a small minority will get drunk on purpose, and another group will drink and may end up drunk. This last group might be as many as half. On this campus, nearly all of these students will have received extensive education on the effects of alcohol. Some take this information and choose to be abstinent. Some take this information and choose to be moderate drinkers. A few ignore it utterly and aim to get drunk. All students, likewise, have several kinds of "drunkness prevention technology" available to them. Some use it religiously, some ignore it.

I am most interested here in the middle group. They know drinking can lead to drunkenness. They know several ways that drunkenness can be avoided, some of them foolproof. They go to a weekend party and they don't really care if they get drunk or not. Their drunkness was "neither planned nor unplanned." They did not make a plan one way or the other because getting drunk or not would not derail any life plan they had.

For poor teen moms, having a baby is not in itself a bad thing; that is not the way they measure their character. Being a bad mom would be a bad thing, but they don't plan to be bad moms. For college drinkers, getting drunk is not in itself a bad thing; that is not the way they measure their character. Being an alcoholic would be a bad thing, but they don't plan to be alcoholics.

Bagram is Obama's First Really Bad Decision

Candidate Obama attacked the shameful policy of the Bush administration to hold prisoners at Guatanamo in Cuba with no charges, no lawyers, no due process, no habeas corpus. President Obama's first act on his first day in office was to close down Guatanamo.

Now, though, the Obama administration is planning to hold prisoners in the even more remote Bagram air base in Afghanistan under the same shameful "black hole" rules.

I strongly supported President Obama and still do. Nearly everything that the new administration has done have been a step forward for the nation, and a relief to me personally. Because I support Obama, I think it is my duty to criticize wrong things that my guy does.

The no-rules prison at Bagram is very wrong.

The F Word

Passed on to me about a student's little brother:

After giving Mom her Mother's Day gifts...
Evan: Don't you think you need to say the "f" word?
Mom: ...Um...what?
Evan: "Fank you?"

Sports are McDonaldized Cultivation

Annette Lareau, in Unequal Childhoods, compares the child rearing style of middle class and working class parents. She found that working class parents tend to make sure their kids are fed, clothed, housed, and made to go to school. After that, they can choose what to do. Lareau calls this the "natural growth" method of child rearing. Middle class parents, by contrast, tend to get their kids into all kinds of organized activities to develop each child's talents. Lareau calls this "concerted cultivation."

Centre College students are overwhelmingly the product of concerted cultivation. Indeed, the whole elite college track is driven by kids who try to do very well at a wide range of formal activities, and the parents who pay, drive, comfort, and push them through all those activities.

Of all the types of concerted cultivation, sports were the most common among my students. In part this reflects what the kids are interested in, and what the parents are interested in. Sports are also pursued because they are the easiest to arrange. The standard sports are already understood and organized in most places. The infrastructure is there. Moreover, sports teams are an efficient way to get kids in a structured activity that will develop their talents. Sports produce highly calculable results to tell exactly how well your talent cultivation is going. Sports have predictable seasons, schedules, rules, outcomes, and progressions. And sports allow you to control the risks you face through safety technology, and control the time you spend through a dozen forms of clocking.

These four elements - efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control through technology - are the four marks of what George Ritzer calls "McDonaldization." They are the tools through which a formerly disorganized and organic activity - in this case, physical play - can be rationalized. Rationalization is the master principle of modernity, says Max Weber. It is a core idea of sociology.

Sports are the most McDonaldized form of concerted cultivation.

The Rich and Social Problems

People from all social classes produce social problems.

Still, most of the social problems - crime, addiction, delinquency, family disorder - are caused by the poorer half of the population.

I think it is true that people in the poorer half of the population are more disordered and problem causing. One big reason for this is that leading a disordered and problem-causing life tends to leave you poor, no matter how you started out.

There is another reason that the rich create fewer social problems. The rich can use money to treat their personal problems and to compensate for the consequences of their personal problems. The rich can use money to keep their personal problems from becoming social problems.

Paying Taxes Is Patriotic

Today is Tax Day.

This is the day when all Americans should celebrate the services that we have hired the government to provide. I have already eaten food that was safe and regulated, sit in a house that was built to code, use electric appliances built to standard, and wear clothes made cheaper by trade agreements. Soon I will walk down city sidewalks, cross a state highway, past dormitories built with government-backed bonds, to teach students who can be at Centre College because of their federal loans.

But before I go to work, I will put up the flag and thank all those who served in our armed forces to keep me and my family free to enjoy all of this and much more.

Paying taxes is a patriotic duty that I can do with a grateful heart.

The Smart One and the Other

I have been reading student journals from my family class. We discussed birth order and sibling competition this time. We studied Frank Sulloway's theory that children are in a Darwinian competition for parental attention. They have to differentiate themselves from their siblings. The first-borns get first choice, so they tend to try to monopolize the things that the parents value. My students are overwhelmingly first-borns or only children. Since Centre is a highly academic place, we tend to get first-borns who emphasized academic learning.

I have also been hearing about the niches chosen by the later-born children. I knew many of the options - sports, art, music, religion, service, or sheer rebellion.

Listening to the women, though, I have heard several times that sisters sometimes differentiate into "the smart one" and "the pretty one."

This made me wonder what the male equivalent would be. The closest I can get is "the smart one" and "the funny one." But the parallel is not as common or exact.

So far this is just an educated guess.

The Kentucky 25

Today is my 49th birthday. I had previously asked readers to suggest 50 things that every Kentuckian should do or see by 50. I thank you for the many excellent suggestions I received.

Today I am going to post the top 25 suggestions. In the course of the year I will add another 25, based on what people suggest and what I learn about in my travels. I am going to try to do them all before this day next year.

I picked the top ten based on intrinsic excellence and national or world impact as a symbol of Kentucky. This means there has to be some horses, bourbon, coal, and basketball. There should also be some tobacco, but I do not have an excellent nominee for that category.

Kentucky Derby
Mammoth Cave
UK basketball game at Rupp Arena
Maker’s Mark factory
Lincoln Shrine
Fort Knox - Patton Museum
Louisville Slugger Museum
Red River Gorge & Natural Bridge
Abbey of Gethsemani
Van Lear coal museum (& Loretta Lynn) [or something like this]

The next ten are places are perhaps a step down, but big in Kentucky:

My Old Kentucky Home
Shakertown
Keeneland
Moonbow at Cumberland Falls
Museum of the American Quilters Society
Southeast Christian
Creation Museum
Berea College
Cane Ridge revival site
Ashland - Henry Clay's home

I will round out this first list with five food suggestions.

Hot Brown at the Brown Hotel
Kentucky Fried Chicken at the (reproduced) original store in Corbin
Ale-8-One at the plant in Winchester
Moonlite Bar-B-Q in Owensboro
Miguel’s Pizza at Natural Bridge

I have also had suggestions for five or ten great Kentucky texts to read, a category I am mulling. I will revisit these ideas, and your other suggestions, in future posts.

Happy Easter

The Gruntleds enjoyed the Easter service of First Presbyterian Church, Nashville today. It was solid, well done, and completely traditional -- just what we went there for. Seeing an Easter service full of Southern Presbyterians is the most reliable way that I can think of to find the core of the American bourgeoisie at its best. Go stewardship! Go inner-worldly asceticism!

Godot Day

In college I read and acted in the strange but moving play, "Waiting for Godot." The best analysis I read of it held that it took place on Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter - endlessly.

That day is today. Somewhere, Didi and Gogo are waiting, waiting, for God(ot).