There have been a number of studies noting the parallels
between courting couples and mother and baby.
They both touch much more frequently than necessary, they look at each
other to the exclusion of the world around them, etc. There’s a self-absorption between the two of
them, ignoring everything else.
I’m drawing together ideas from a lot of different sources
so if this gets disjointed, I apologize.
A lot of new fathers complain about feeling supplanted by
the new baby in the family. I can see
that. It’s like watching your wife fall
in love with someone else. A short,
somewhat irritating someone else who moved into your house and took over your
wife. If Maestripieri is right, then
they might have a reason to complain.
Maternal affection has likely been around for a long time since the
majority of primates are cared for exclusively by their mother until
independence. Involved fathers only appear
in species with highly dependent young, where a mother can’t care for them
independently. And no babies on the
planet are more dependent than humans.
Now to bring in the next thread: Natalie Angier’s theory
that intelligence and sentience evolved as an adaptive trait to allow a child
to convince a wide variety of individuals to take care of it, increasing it’s
chance of survival. She noted that in
hunter-gatherer societies, older women help to provide food for their
daughter’s, niece’s and cousin’s older children, particularly after the birth
of a new baby. She believes human
evolution went like this: we started to survive beyond our reproductive years
and the older women of the group started bringing in a significant number of
calories; the children started having to compete for this extra food,
encouraging social awareness and early intelligence. This set the stage for true sentient
intelligence to develop. It was okay for
children to go through an extended development because they had the food from
the extended kin group and smarter, more social children got more food.
So where did this leave fathers? As children took longer and longer to be
independent, they would have become increasingly vulnerable to irritated males
looking to mate with the mother. It
would be evolutionarily adaptive to start drawing men into the extended
family. They can protect the children
from other men and would provide access to a whole other kinship group. Those families who had an attentive, caring
male parent as well as the female kingroup would have done the best, allowing
their genetic legacy to be dominant.
But this model doesn’t explain why couples break up (which
they do with surprising regularity). If
two caring parents give the best shot to a child, why wouldn’t humans be better
suited to being in a relationship? Maybe
it’s still a work in progress.
Maestripieri suggests that human pairbonds are designed to
last around seven years, enough time to have a child (or two) and see them past
the most vulnerable first few years.
After that, the needs of the individual change and being in a couple
might no longer suit both of them.
Or maybe it’s long enough for the father to give up hope of
regaining being number one in his wife’s affections. It’s a long held truth. In crisis situations, men save their wives
and mothers save their children. Perhaps
its why men are so vulnerable to affairs, because the mistress puts them at
number one.
Babies tend to be cared for by the mother and the extended
female kin group in most societies.
Fathers get bumped out of significant roles. Interestingly, in cultures where fathers are
directly encouraged to bond with their child, the rates of divorce tend to stay
the same but lack of child support becomes a much less common phenomenon. If the only tie to the family is through the
mother, it’s easy for a father to walk away from the entire family. But if he gets tied to his children, he’ll be
there for them even if he and the mother split apart.
It’s all interesting fodder to explore. I like looking at different cultures and
seeing what could be. I think it’s neat
to figure out how we became what we are, since it gives opportunities to guess
how we might have been different.
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