A bit late to the party, but here are a few book recommendations on child rearing:
Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods
by Barry S. Hewlwt and Michael E. Lamb
This is a collection of articles by anthropologists and researches describing topics around childhoods in various hunter-gatherer culture. Gives a good overview of multiple cultures.
The Continuum Concept
by Jean Liedloff
The author spent two and a half years living with natives in the South American jungle. Not really a rigorous anthropological study, more a recollection of her personal experience, but her main interest was what she observed of their way of child rearing, so very interesting from that perspective.
Child Rearing
by Daniel Greenberg
This one is a bit of an outlier. Daniel Greenberg was the founder of the Sudbury Valley School and he has a very different take on child rearing that while not argued from an evolutionary perspective seem to have a lot of similarities. It is a quirky book, and I definitely do not agree with all he puts up, but it is very thought provoking. (can be hard to find, probably have to get it from the school site: https://bookstore.sudburyvalley.org/product/child-rearing)
Good article. I have thought about this trend as well. the connection seems clear to those of us paying attention. A big difference from the medical community at least in the United State is how anorexia is treated vs. gender dysphoria. One of them being treated to reverse the disease with therapies, counseling, nutrition consults, and feeding tubes in severe cases, while the other is treated with affirming care. Imagine taking that approach with anorexia, i.e. a gastric bypass to treated an anorexic's desire for weight loss.
>>Imagine taking that approach with anorexia, i.e. a gastric bypass to treated an anorexic's desire for weight loss.
In the time of Ozempic that question is more relevant than ever. The better the weight-loss medication, the higher the pressure will be to useit to treat fat-based body dysphoria.
I was wondering if "ambivalence toward the female condition" may be due to modernity. In most or all of the pre-modern past, children were explicitly valued (often as laborers on subsistence farms), and women were explicitly valued as producers of children. There weren't a lot of paths in life for anyone, and particularly for women who didn't want to take up childbearing. (Somewhat like it being understood that there was nothing for nobles to do in life except wage wars to take land from other nobles.)
And now that I think about it, standing in my culture, there is a sense that there were historical paths for women as vessels of wisdom, especially medical lore and negotiating interpersonal relationships, but the stereotype is that those roles were for crones, women after menopause, dispensing what they had learned over a long lifetime.
> I was wondering if "ambivalence toward the female condition" may be due to modernity.
I think so, yes. Being female - versus being male - means trading emotional ruggedness, a bit of spatial ability, and some paltry physical functioning for the miraculous ability to create conscious, intelligent life in your own body. If you don't care about little miracles, being female would probably seem like a real let-down.
Boys, too. Sadly, nobody really knows what to do with children anymore. Back when people shrugged and thought that "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree" they mostly let kids run around. Now if their children have trouble, it's probably their own fault as parents. The belief that environment shapes children is a weight around parents' necks.
My theory is that the emaciated look sprang from the outsized influence of the tastes of gay fashion designers, who took over women's fashion in the late 60's. They preferred their models more boyish - skinny, hipless, and chestless. Women (and other media - film, art, etc.) then learned this from fashion magazines, and adopted it. Later, it metastasized into anorexia. I remember as a teenage boy being nonplussed by many of the women pedestalized in the media as paragons of beauty. Then I discovered some magazines and movies from before that era featuring more feminine women. I felt like Indiana Jones exploring a chamber of forgotten treasures.
The phenomenon of gay men reaching prominent positions in the fashion industry puzzles me. I mean, can't women even excel in their core business? Do they need to hire a very special type of man in order to refine the art of femininity to perfection? Apparently, yes. Otherwise they wouldn't have paid for the products and images created by gay men.
And this is the important point: Women actually pay for the taste of gay men. Then there must be something in it for them.
One argument is that women had only limited opportunity to influence fashion in the past. Combine this with heterosexual men’s disinterest in careers in fashion, and the result is that gay men had an outsized influence that lingers to the present.
The fashion industry does include many highly successful women. They seem to have the same skinny chic look (social x-rays, as Tom Wolfe would say). It seems both the male and female leading lights in the industry prize the same morphology. So maybe some other factor is at play?
Maybe not a business, but I think women excel in education. Where ever I see examples of successful social engineering on the local plan, there are females behind it. And the gay men are nowhere to be seen.
>>Sex and the City was reputedly created by gay men and was for a while very popular with women.
Wasn't Sex and the City about women who behaved like gay men? The it would make sense if gay men created it, I guess.
I am short of time but feel compelled to comment before reading. All I have read is: "I came to articulate a reason for my wish to be thin: I wanted to escape the curse of femininity."
Several women have said similar things to me, while I was a teenager ie anorexia was a 'thing' in the mid '70s, in my 20's, and my wife, similarly tells me she cursed her wayward body when her breasts ballooned as an 11 yo.
Talking breasts, breast feeding overwhelmingly reduces the chances of later getting breast cancer. (based on vanishingly low 3rd world rates of breast cancer before infant formula became available).
I don't know if this theory has held up, but one proposal I have seen is that breast cancer risk is from some particular phase of a woman's cycle. In the state of nature, women don't cycle that many times during their life, most of the time they're either pregnant, breastfeeding ... or too thin ovulate.
Neither do I. It would be interesting to see how breast cancer rates changed after infant formula became common in '3rd world' societies. Pick a country like Malaysia that had a reasonably formalised health system in the 60's and 70's and look at recorded rates through to the 90's (Maybe restrict to premonapausal women). Of course it could be confounded by increased meat consumption, though that would encourage bowl cancer rather than breast cancer, surely?
There are theories about meat consumption and rich diets in general that could explain the increase in breast cancer and cancer in general in developed countries. But a quick look doesn't give me a better impression of the read meat theory than of the breastfeeding theory.
Hi Tove, thanks your first link is interesting. It's most notable conclusion: "Breast cancer incidence was found to increase in a substantial number of countries in the younger population." (page 5757), (trends were derived from data starting in 1996 with most pos 2000).
For NZ, it would be interesting to compare pre 1970's rates of breast cancer for those under 40 with current rates. Pre '70s meat and fat consumption (including preserved meat) was likely higher than now, while family size was larger (and age at first birth about a decade younger), obesity less common, and hormonal contraception rare (except for older married mothers)
I'll check the link to the review of breastfeeding.
*... disorders should be designed with what we want people to get in mind. Somehow, it seems like Western society is already doing that with its concept of depression: Depression is, essentially, bad feeling in itself, expressed in a calm and comparatively non-dangerous way both for the people around and for the victim themselves.*
This is true, but 'you have depression' still reifies the concept in comparison to 'you are sad.' Depression is expected to be an ongoing state, not only in need of treatment but in danger of relapsing (and quite usable in constructing an identity as 'disabled' or 'mentally ill').
If you're sad, it's probably for some reason, which maybe you can change or maybe you can't, and in the case where it's for no reason at all you can simply hope it will go away. Whereas the model which says that you're sad *because* you're depressed allows you to avoid the frustration of feeling that you are sad because of things about your life that you can't hope to change, and don't expect will change - but it also allows you to avoid dealing with things that are making you sad that you maybe *could* change, but you're afraid to or can't bear to for whatever reason.
Yes. But many people also recognize depression as prolonged, persistent sadness. I remember a post at Astral Codex Ten where Scott Alexander wrote that a large percentage of his patients think they know perfectly well why they are feeling bad: Unhappy marriage, unpleasant job etc, but for one or another reason they are unable to or unwilling to escape those conditions.
For many I think the problem is they don’t conceptualize their problem in that way. Having depression or an imbalance of brain chemicals gives them an easy excuse that lets them avoid responsibility for making changes and telling the truth in their personal lives.
I was there myself for a few years, so I’m sympathetic. But it’s not a healthy way to help people in tough circumstances.
Derrick Freeman: "Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unkmaking of an Anthropological Myth", although not specifically about raising infants, covers the Samoan way of doing so, (which, as you might expect, is quite different from Western ways), as well as other fascinating stuff. Having been told by one of Mead's interlocutors when I lived in Samoa, that indeed, they told her, as sort of a huge practical joke on the palagi, what she wanted to hear, Freeman is all the more persuasive.
Nice post! This is probably the reason why the rationalist community has been so interested in mindfulness and the Buddhist lens in general as a replacement for Western psychology, but I have never seen this argued in detail.
Wait can you unpack this a bit more? I have other thoughts about the connections between rationalism and Buddhism but don’t understand your point very well.
I should qualify that my "rationalist community" is Scott-Alexander-related forums, which obviously are more influenced by Scott Alexander than by rationalists as a whole. If you ask Scott why he is taking mindfulness this seriously (often in comparison to academic psychology), he will probably bring up the replication crisis and many other equally valid points, but ultimately it is a very reasonable idea that the best therapeutic tools are probably the tools that also help the healthy improve themselves as opposed to ones tailored for therapy.
>>This is probably the reason why the rationalist community has been so interested in mindfulness and the Buddhist lens in general as a replacement for Western psychology
I never thought of that. But now that you say it, why not?
If you happen to have a copy of Pinker's "Language Instinct" handy (and the odds that you do are good!), I copied down the following quote: "In contemporary middle-class American culture, parenting is seen as an awesome responsibility, an unforgiving vigil to keep the helpless infant from falling behind in the great race of life. [... This is] part of the same mentality that sends yuppies to "learning centers" to buy little mittens with bull's-eyes to help their babies find their hands sooner."
This isn't useful per se, but my memory is that near this passage is a statement about a particular non-industrial (foraging, IIRC) culture where mothers carefully sit young babies upright on the ground and build mounds of dirt behind them to keep them propped upright, on the principle that if they do not deliberately teach the child to sit upright, it will never learn to do so. (As an issue of fact, that's not true.) But that passage likely has a footnote to a detailed study of that culture's child-raising practices, which meets your search criteria.
Thank you! I will make a search in that book. Hitherto I have mostly used Steven Pinker as a means to convince my son to have his hair cut, but it would be nice to read something he has written too.
re: I would like to read more about how people have been taking care of infants in time and space. Especially in pre-industrial societies, but every non-Western population is of interest.
The Evolution of Childhood by Melvin Konner is packed with cross-cultural anthropological information.
Fascinating and cogent, as usual. I'm left wondering about male gender dysphoria, because there seem to lots of boys who want to be girls these days. Is this also a newly acceptable way to express unhappiness with their gender condition - in this case maleness? And if so, what were the disorders that preceded it, as anorexia preceded female gender dysphoria?
This is indeed body modification, but in the other direction. It's trying to become cartoonishly hypermasculine, not escaping some perceived burden of masculinity by erasing signals of masculinity.
I have always found this thing a bit confusing: Somehow there is a high prevalence of man-boobs among the most masculine men of them all (workers, doers). It is like masculinity in its fullness, both physical and psychological, doesn't have a place in modern society. Only in environments where there is work to do most men can look typically masculine without resorting to effeminate vanity.
But among workers and doers? I don't see that, myself. The workmen we have repairing our houses, my father-in-law who's of a similar background, anybody around like that... I count 2 in 9 workmen overweight, as opposed to around 3 in 9 Americans in general.
Thank you! I will look at Baumeister, I have never read anything by him as far as I can remember.
That medieval nun thing is truly fascinating. I think one very interesting case bordering between the medieval and the modern is that of Simone Weil (1909-1943): A modern mystic justifying her anorexia in religious terms.
A bit late to the party, but here are a few book recommendations on child rearing:
Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods
by Barry S. Hewlwt and Michael E. Lamb
This is a collection of articles by anthropologists and researches describing topics around childhoods in various hunter-gatherer culture. Gives a good overview of multiple cultures.
The Continuum Concept
by Jean Liedloff
The author spent two and a half years living with natives in the South American jungle. Not really a rigorous anthropological study, more a recollection of her personal experience, but her main interest was what she observed of their way of child rearing, so very interesting from that perspective.
Child Rearing
by Daniel Greenberg
This one is a bit of an outlier. Daniel Greenberg was the founder of the Sudbury Valley School and he has a very different take on child rearing that while not argued from an evolutionary perspective seem to have a lot of similarities. It is a quirky book, and I definitely do not agree with all he puts up, but it is very thought provoking. (can be hard to find, probably have to get it from the school site: https://bookstore.sudburyvalley.org/product/child-rearing)
I can't read all books at once anyway. Thank you!
Good article. I have thought about this trend as well. the connection seems clear to those of us paying attention. A big difference from the medical community at least in the United State is how anorexia is treated vs. gender dysphoria. One of them being treated to reverse the disease with therapies, counseling, nutrition consults, and feeding tubes in severe cases, while the other is treated with affirming care. Imagine taking that approach with anorexia, i.e. a gastric bypass to treated an anorexic's desire for weight loss.
>>Imagine taking that approach with anorexia, i.e. a gastric bypass to treated an anorexic's desire for weight loss.
In the time of Ozempic that question is more relevant than ever. The better the weight-loss medication, the higher the pressure will be to useit to treat fat-based body dysphoria.
I was wondering if "ambivalence toward the female condition" may be due to modernity. In most or all of the pre-modern past, children were explicitly valued (often as laborers on subsistence farms), and women were explicitly valued as producers of children. There weren't a lot of paths in life for anyone, and particularly for women who didn't want to take up childbearing. (Somewhat like it being understood that there was nothing for nobles to do in life except wage wars to take land from other nobles.)
And now that I think about it, standing in my culture, there is a sense that there were historical paths for women as vessels of wisdom, especially medical lore and negotiating interpersonal relationships, but the stereotype is that those roles were for crones, women after menopause, dispensing what they had learned over a long lifetime.
> I was wondering if "ambivalence toward the female condition" may be due to modernity.
I think so, yes. Being female - versus being male - means trading emotional ruggedness, a bit of spatial ability, and some paltry physical functioning for the miraculous ability to create conscious, intelligent life in your own body. If you don't care about little miracles, being female would probably seem like a real let-down.
>>If you don't care about little miracles, being female would probably seem like a real let-down.
And 14 year old girls are actively discouraged from caring too much about little miracles.
Boys, too. Sadly, nobody really knows what to do with children anymore. Back when people shrugged and thought that "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree" they mostly let kids run around. Now if their children have trouble, it's probably their own fault as parents. The belief that environment shapes children is a weight around parents' necks.
My theory is that the emaciated look sprang from the outsized influence of the tastes of gay fashion designers, who took over women's fashion in the late 60's. They preferred their models more boyish - skinny, hipless, and chestless. Women (and other media - film, art, etc.) then learned this from fashion magazines, and adopted it. Later, it metastasized into anorexia. I remember as a teenage boy being nonplussed by many of the women pedestalized in the media as paragons of beauty. Then I discovered some magazines and movies from before that era featuring more feminine women. I felt like Indiana Jones exploring a chamber of forgotten treasures.
The phenomenon of gay men reaching prominent positions in the fashion industry puzzles me. I mean, can't women even excel in their core business? Do they need to hire a very special type of man in order to refine the art of femininity to perfection? Apparently, yes. Otherwise they wouldn't have paid for the products and images created by gay men.
And this is the important point: Women actually pay for the taste of gay men. Then there must be something in it for them.
One argument is that women had only limited opportunity to influence fashion in the past. Combine this with heterosexual men’s disinterest in careers in fashion, and the result is that gay men had an outsized influence that lingers to the present.
The fashion industry does include many highly successful women. They seem to have the same skinny chic look (social x-rays, as Tom Wolfe would say). It seems both the male and female leading lights in the industry prize the same morphology. So maybe some other factor is at play?
Is there a business in which women excel?
Sex and the City was reputedly created by gay men and was for a while very popular with women.
>>Is there a business in which women excel?
Maybe not a business, but I think women excel in education. Where ever I see examples of successful social engineering on the local plan, there are females behind it. And the gay men are nowhere to be seen.
>>Sex and the City was reputedly created by gay men and was for a while very popular with women.
Wasn't Sex and the City about women who behaved like gay men? The it would make sense if gay men created it, I guess.
I am short of time but feel compelled to comment before reading. All I have read is: "I came to articulate a reason for my wish to be thin: I wanted to escape the curse of femininity."
Several women have said similar things to me, while I was a teenager ie anorexia was a 'thing' in the mid '70s, in my 20's, and my wife, similarly tells me she cursed her wayward body when her breasts ballooned as an 11 yo.
Talking breasts, breast feeding overwhelmingly reduces the chances of later getting breast cancer. (based on vanishingly low 3rd world rates of breast cancer before infant formula became available).
I don't know if this theory has held up, but one proposal I have seen is that breast cancer risk is from some particular phase of a woman's cycle. In the state of nature, women don't cycle that many times during their life, most of the time they're either pregnant, breastfeeding ... or too thin ovulate.
"I don't know if this theory has held up"
Neither do I. It would be interesting to see how breast cancer rates changed after infant formula became common in '3rd world' societies. Pick a country like Malaysia that had a reasonably formalised health system in the 60's and 70's and look at recorded rates through to the 90's (Maybe restrict to premonapausal women). Of course it could be confounded by increased meat consumption, though that would encourage bowl cancer rather than breast cancer, surely?
Breast cancer seems to be much more common in rich countries than in poor countries (except some say it is not https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-estimated-incidence-of-breast-cancer-in-2018-females-all-ages_fig1_349217393 )
But the link to breastfeeding seems rather weak within industrialized countries. https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/jwh.2008.0917
There are theories about meat consumption and rich diets in general that could explain the increase in breast cancer and cancer in general in developed countries. But a quick look doesn't give me a better impression of the read meat theory than of the breastfeeding theory.
Hi Tove, thanks your first link is interesting. It's most notable conclusion: "Breast cancer incidence was found to increase in a substantial number of countries in the younger population." (page 5757), (trends were derived from data starting in 1996 with most pos 2000).
For NZ, it would be interesting to compare pre 1970's rates of breast cancer for those under 40 with current rates. Pre '70s meat and fat consumption (including preserved meat) was likely higher than now, while family size was larger (and age at first birth about a decade younger), obesity less common, and hormonal contraception rare (except for older married mothers)
I'll check the link to the review of breastfeeding.
*... disorders should be designed with what we want people to get in mind. Somehow, it seems like Western society is already doing that with its concept of depression: Depression is, essentially, bad feeling in itself, expressed in a calm and comparatively non-dangerous way both for the people around and for the victim themselves.*
This is true, but 'you have depression' still reifies the concept in comparison to 'you are sad.' Depression is expected to be an ongoing state, not only in need of treatment but in danger of relapsing (and quite usable in constructing an identity as 'disabled' or 'mentally ill').
If you're sad, it's probably for some reason, which maybe you can change or maybe you can't, and in the case where it's for no reason at all you can simply hope it will go away. Whereas the model which says that you're sad *because* you're depressed allows you to avoid the frustration of feeling that you are sad because of things about your life that you can't hope to change, and don't expect will change - but it also allows you to avoid dealing with things that are making you sad that you maybe *could* change, but you're afraid to or can't bear to for whatever reason.
Yes. But many people also recognize depression as prolonged, persistent sadness. I remember a post at Astral Codex Ten where Scott Alexander wrote that a large percentage of his patients think they know perfectly well why they are feeling bad: Unhappy marriage, unpleasant job etc, but for one or another reason they are unable to or unwilling to escape those conditions.
For many I think the problem is they don’t conceptualize their problem in that way. Having depression or an imbalance of brain chemicals gives them an easy excuse that lets them avoid responsibility for making changes and telling the truth in their personal lives.
I was there myself for a few years, so I’m sympathetic. But it’s not a healthy way to help people in tough circumstances.
Derrick Freeman: "Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unkmaking of an Anthropological Myth", although not specifically about raising infants, covers the Samoan way of doing so, (which, as you might expect, is quite different from Western ways), as well as other fascinating stuff. Having been told by one of Mead's interlocutors when I lived in Samoa, that indeed, they told her, as sort of a huge practical joke on the palagi, what she wanted to hear, Freeman is all the more persuasive.
Thank you! I never heard of Derrick Freeman. I have been too discouraged by the controversies to read Margaret Mead. Freeman could be a good start.
His book got some media exposure here (a decade or so ago?) because of our relatively large Samoan population. My memory is that it was well received.
Nice post! This is probably the reason why the rationalist community has been so interested in mindfulness and the Buddhist lens in general as a replacement for Western psychology, but I have never seen this argued in detail.
Wait can you unpack this a bit more? I have other thoughts about the connections between rationalism and Buddhism but don’t understand your point very well.
I should qualify that my "rationalist community" is Scott-Alexander-related forums, which obviously are more influenced by Scott Alexander than by rationalists as a whole. If you ask Scott why he is taking mindfulness this seriously (often in comparison to academic psychology), he will probably bring up the replication crisis and many other equally valid points, but ultimately it is a very reasonable idea that the best therapeutic tools are probably the tools that also help the healthy improve themselves as opposed to ones tailored for therapy.
Ahh I see. Interesting.
>>This is probably the reason why the rationalist community has been so interested in mindfulness and the Buddhist lens in general as a replacement for Western psychology
I never thought of that. But now that you say it, why not?
If you happen to have a copy of Pinker's "Language Instinct" handy (and the odds that you do are good!), I copied down the following quote: "In contemporary middle-class American culture, parenting is seen as an awesome responsibility, an unforgiving vigil to keep the helpless infant from falling behind in the great race of life. [... This is] part of the same mentality that sends yuppies to "learning centers" to buy little mittens with bull's-eyes to help their babies find their hands sooner."
This isn't useful per se, but my memory is that near this passage is a statement about a particular non-industrial (foraging, IIRC) culture where mothers carefully sit young babies upright on the ground and build mounds of dirt behind them to keep them propped upright, on the principle that if they do not deliberately teach the child to sit upright, it will never learn to do so. (As an issue of fact, that's not true.) But that passage likely has a footnote to a detailed study of that culture's child-raising practices, which meets your search criteria.
Thank you! I will make a search in that book. Hitherto I have mostly used Steven Pinker as a means to convince my son to have his hair cut, but it would be nice to read something he has written too.
"Hitherto I have mostly used Steven Pinker as a means to convince my son to have his hair cut"
Yowza! How do you make that work???
Me: Do you want to look like Steven Pinker on your head?
Son: How does Steven Pinker look?
Me: Picture-Google him!
Son, after having seen some pictures: OK, you can cut my hair.
Nice article!
re: I would like to read more about how people have been taking care of infants in time and space. Especially in pre-industrial societies, but every non-Western population is of interest.
The Evolution of Childhood by Melvin Konner is packed with cross-cultural anthropological information.
Thank you! Yes, it is. I will read it!
Fascinating and cogent, as usual. I'm left wondering about male gender dysphoria, because there seem to lots of boys who want to be girls these days. Is this also a newly acceptable way to express unhappiness with their gender condition - in this case maleness? And if so, what were the disorders that preceded it, as anorexia preceded female gender dysphoria?
In the early 70's I recall having a pair of 'unisex' jeans (ie tailored fit both sexes?). Also'bisexuality' was a thing eg David Bowie
I think it also applies to males taking steroids because they don't feel masculine enough.
This is indeed body modification, but in the other direction. It's trying to become cartoonishly hypermasculine, not escaping some perceived burden of masculinity by erasing signals of masculinity.
I have always found this thing a bit confusing: Somehow there is a high prevalence of man-boobs among the most masculine men of them all (workers, doers). It is like masculinity in its fullness, both physical and psychological, doesn't have a place in modern society. Only in environments where there is work to do most men can look typically masculine without resorting to effeminate vanity.
Wait, what? You notice breast-tissue on men who work and do things?
No, I just notice that men who don't care to stay slim tend to get fat. Chest-fat included.
But among workers and doers? I don't see that, myself. The workmen we have repairing our houses, my father-in-law who's of a similar background, anybody around like that... I count 2 in 9 workmen overweight, as opposed to around 3 in 9 Americans in general.
Thank you! I will look at Baumeister, I have never read anything by him as far as I can remember.
That medieval nun thing is truly fascinating. I think one very interesting case bordering between the medieval and the modern is that of Simone Weil (1909-1943): A modern mystic justifying her anorexia in religious terms.