Parent shaming is natural
Only societies that manage to dampen natural resentment against parents can survive
In Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands, a group of chimpanzees live together in a big enclosure. In the late 1970 and early 1980s they were studied by primatologist Frans de Waal for his book Chimpanzee Politics (1982). A female called Gorilla couldn't make her children survive past a few weeks, probably because she had too little milk for them. The primatologists got an idea: To teach Gorilla to bottle-feed a baby so she could become the adoptive mother of a baby chimpanzee.
Initially, the scientists had a problem to overcome: It was very difficult to show the adoptive mother how to feed the baby, because she wouldn't look at the humans when they were feeding the baby. Among chimpanzees, young females have a tendency to look away when close to a mother with a baby, out of some kind of chimpanzee politeness. So the elected adoptive mother just turned away her gaze. Eventually, she was taught the feeding procedure step by step and learned to bottle-feed the baby.1
Why do chimpanzees have norms against looking at other people's babies? Most probably because they have a tendency to threaten other people's babies. In the wild, Jane Goodall observed a female and her daughter killing three different babies from two different females2. Males also kill babies: Chimpanzee females are known to go on “maternity leave” from their groups in order to give birth. One first-time mother failed to do so, and her newborn was snatched and partially eaten by a male3. And among several different species of Old World monkeys, higher ranking females kill babies of lower ranking females through adopting them. They kidnap the baby, who dies of thirst and starvation.4
For a chimpanzee, other people's babies on the one hand are competitors. On the other hand, they are future allies and protectors against attacks from other groups of chimpanzees. Probably for millions of years, chimpanzee evolution has been about balancing selfishness with the need to build coalitions. Which led to a tense situation around other people's babies: Mostly they were allowed to live. Sometimes they were not.
Not only our closest relatives are ambivalent to other people's babies. All animals are concerned with who can breed. In addition, group living animals are concerned with who should be allowed to breed. Arrangements differ. Among chimpanzees, all females are allowed to breed, but some under safer and richer conditions than others. In smaller packs of wolves, only the alpha couple, who are typically the parents of other pack members, breeds. Meerkats also suppress breeding in females other than the alpha female.
How about us?
And how about humans? Do humans allow all female group members to breed?
As with everything with humans, it's complicated (and depends a lot on the availability of resources, as described in my post The price of a woman). Human females do not commonly steal each other's babies and fail to feed them the way monkeys do. But human females do steal each other's babies and raise them badly.
Yes. In previous years Anders and I have read a lot about child protection services. The operations of child protection services are based on assumptions, not science. As far as I know, no one with scientific ambitions, in no Western country, has dared to assert that the foster care system actually makes life better for most of the children it cares for. The only intervention study I know indicated that in marginal cases, cases that some social workers consider grounds for removals while others don't, the children who are allowed to stay with their parents are doing significantly better.5
In other words: Higher-status females take the children from lower-status females, probably to the detriment of the children, among humans too.
The obvious counter-argument here is that social workers don't mean to move children from better conditions to worse conditions. It is just that they have difficult jobs. But in that case, child protection systems would err a bit in both directions. Sometimes taking too many children, sometimes too few. And saying that removing children from parents is the “safe option” is incorrect, since there is a high all-cause mortality rate of children in social care. In an American study, foster children were 42 percent more likely to die than children in the general population.6
The most likely reason why Western social workers err predominantly in one direction, is that the public can't stand that children fare badly in the homes of their birth parents, while the public can stand that children fare badly in foster homes. At least it can stand it much better.
Why is that? Because, I think, parenting enrages people. Like any other group-living animal, humans have a sense of who should be allowed to be a parent. “Some people don't deserve to have children” is an ordinary phrase among less cultured people where I live.
Throughout history, humans have created hierarchies where the right to breed was a hard-won privilege. Only married people were supposed to have children and only people with a certain amount of resources could get married. Today the demands are much less clearly stated: Officially, everyone has the right to have children. But there are a number of norms and rules for how children must and should be brought up and everyone can't meet those demands.
Up to a point, those demands exist for good reason: Children are the people of the future. The people of the future must be brought up to be good people. But just because such good reasons exist, that doesn't mean that everyone who is upset is upset for a good reason.
For example, in his book Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be, Timothy P Carney describes absurd demands placed on American parents to keep their children safe from kidnapping. The reason why parents comply is, in many cases, not that they are actually afraid of kidnappers. It is that they are afraid of the judgement of others. He writes:
“Free-range parenting guru Lenore Skenazy runs a website, LetGrow, which published a letter in 2022 from a dad who had pizza with his four-year-old daughter at a Costco. Dad got up a couple of times—once to fill the sodas, a second time to get napkins, never walking more than a few feet away from their table. After sitting down to eat, “someone sitting behind me tapped me on the shoulder. He said something like, ‘You know that’s a no-no, right?’ Then he let me know he works for Child Protective Services.”7
The weird thing is that if a Swedish parent had been so afraid of kidnappers that they always need to keep within arms length of their child in public spaces, that child would be at risk of being taken by the social services. The Swedish child protection services likes to observe parents and children in public spaces in order to see if they act properly. A social worker once revealed to me that on such occasions, they observe the child's degree of independence from their parent. Too dependent and too clingy is no good. Too indifferent is also no good. The ideal Swedish child moves back and forth to their parent when in a child-friendly public setting. Sometimes exploring, sometimes seeking safety and assurance. That is considered a sign of a “secure attachment style”.
That is not a reason to conclude that Swedish child protection services are liberal and permissive. Swedes are at least as obsessed with other people's parenting as Americans. They just focus on different aspects. While Americans go crazy over security, Swedes go crazy over kindness. There is an enormous taboo around every kind of physical violence. Not just outright physical punishment, but every use of force (like dragging a screaming toddler out of a playground). Discipline in general is viewed with very suspicious eyes. The CNN ran a story about an American mother who was arrested for not knowing that her 10 year old son had walked to the store. CNN made the case that the mother was indeed a good mother, among other things describing her reaction when she found out that her son had walked down the road without permission:
“She gave him a talking-to for walking to town without asking permission first. She said he would have to lose some privileges and do some extra chores.”8
In Sweden, saying “you will lose privileges” or using chores as punishment wouldn't count as good parenting. In fact, I can't think of a Swedish translation of that concept. I mean, the word “privileges” exists in Swedish too, but it is not used between parents and children. Instead, parenting is supposed to be based on reasoning. Swedish people tend to believe that if children misbehave, that must be because the parents didn't reason with them over how to behave (that is, unless the parents manage to get their child a psychiatric diagnosis that partially or completely absolves them from blame).
It looks like parenting has become difficult in America partially because people from California to New York got the idea that kidnapping of children is something really, really bad that must be avoided at almost every cost. And on the other side of the Atlantic, during the same time frame, people got convinced that only a very kind, understanding and equal parenting style is acceptable, and every kind of fault in a child probably stems from lack of that ideal parenting style.
Ideals differ. But the level of certainty seems rather similar everywhere. I believe that is a sign that people everywhere are feeling slightly hostile to parents and make up arguments to explain why they are feeling like that. Some people don't deserve to have children. Wolves or meerkats couldn't have said it better.
Or the Chinese, for that matter. The support for the one child policy in China is a clear sign that parent shaming is not an exclusively Western phenomenon. Also in other parts of East Asia, the fertility rate sank from five or six children per woman to two in only a generation. Policy makers lament that getting the fertility rate down seems doable in most places, but once it has sunk below replacement, it will stay there. I think that one important reason behind this is that shame is a very efficient tool in one direction, but not in the other direction. People naturally feel hostile to individuals who have too many children. They don't naturally feel hostile to individuals who have too few children. So people are much more afraid of having too many children than of having too few children. The latter might be a bit empty and sad. But it risks provoking people much less.
Timothy Carney stresses the cultural aspect of how many children people have, saying that pregnancy is contagious.
“Most people that I know in our age group have three or four,” Ava told me during Purim festivities in Kemp Mill. “And then there’s another group, and they all have five, and they’re all friends with each other, and five is a great number. Five is just what they do.”9
Yes, that is very probable. Because if a number of acquaintances have three, four or five children, that sends the message to couple x that couple x can probably care for three, four or five children in a socially acceptable way. If the others can get away with that number, couple x probably can too. So couple x feels emboldened to drop contraception once more.
Stupid rules are needed
If parent shaming is natural, why did then most societies in history value children highly? How can there be a great number of cultures all over the world where people breed as much as they can and don't show any open hostility against each other for that?
Because of cultural evolution. In a book called Spirit of the Rainforest, Mark Andrew Ritchie tells the story of Jungleman, a Yanomamö shaman. Jungleman's most important job was to send his spirits to kill the children of his enemies. That was considered a perfectly honorable occupation. But such small and fragmented societies could only persist in the deepest rainforests. Only societies where people found ways to tolerate each other and each other's children could form armies.
Societies where parent shaming (and worse, child murdering) instincts were allowed to rage freely disappeared from history. And, for that matter, are disappearing from history in this now, right before our eyes. Societies that instituted functioning norms against parent shaming took their place.
One such society was Catholic Europe. Catholics say that using contraception is a sin. At first sight that is a bafflingly stupid idea, satirized by Monty Python in the song Every Sperm is Sacred. And still, the idea that contraception is immoral was almost universal until the 20th century. Not only among Catholics, but among other Christians as well.
Why was that stupid idea so ubiquitous? Maybe because it was a very effective tool against parent shaming. It placed one hundred percent of the shame in the sexual act and zero percent of the shame in having children. When poor married couples had more children than they could afford, people couldn't blame them for it aloud. Because those poor people only followed the rules. Many people suffered, but the population increased and the contraception-negative societies became big and successful.
When such rules are removed with no other anti-parent-shaming rules to replace them, parent shaming instincts are let loose. For every generation, more and more people think it is a good idea to urge people to use contraception if they don't like this-or-that normative parenting duty. The people who advocated for contraception in the early 20th century most of all wanted to alleviate human suffering: Mothers completely worn out from childbearing, unwanted children with no one to care for them. Little could these activists suspect that a hundred years later, their acts would lead to high levels of hostility to everyone who dared to have children outside of very narrowly defined circumstances.
The cause with big C
I dare to suggest that instinctual parent shaming is the cause with a big C for the demographic crisis. No society has completely eliminated parent shaming and no society should do so. But creating a culture that handles parent shaming properly is essential. It is the measure that needs to be taken. The rest is commentary.
Hitherto the bulk of suggestions for how to make people have more children has been in the vein of how to help people attain the social position where it is possible to have children without feeling shame. And nothing seems to work more than on the margin. Because the genie of parent shaming is out of the bottle. People are naturally critical of other people's parenting. People are naturally anxious that other people will be critical of them. As long as this issue is not addressed, it doesn't matter how much help people get to reach one particular standard. Once the help comes, people will only adjust their level of shaming, and their level of shame felt, to a level that includes the new help (don't we hear it coming? Now that we have a year of paid parental leave, parents should really manage to x, y and z…) .
Finding the appropriate amount of shame
Technically speaking, it is easier to raise children until adult age than it has ever been. That doesn't help as long as almost every technically possible way of raising a child is considered shameful and even illegal. Making fewer possible ways of bringing up children shameful is a good place to start. Which is easier said than done, because almost everyone, myself included, actually supports parent shaming.
The social control of parents is a bit like eating. It is instinctual, it is necessary (no social control, no society, and people start killing each other). And it easily gets too much. Overeating makes us physically unhealthy, overshaming results in an invigorous and dying society.
As things are, rather few people seem consciously aware that holding parents to high standards is not only a good thing, if we want to survive on a cultural level. Putting demands on parents is the same thing as raising the cost of parenting. For good, but also for bad. It is as simple as that.
Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics, 1982, 27 percent of e-book
See for example Martin Muller, Chimpanzee Violence: Femmes Fatales, 2007, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982207011414
Hitonaru Nishie, Michio Nakamura, A newborn infant chimpanzee snatched and cannibalized immediately after birth: Implications for "maternity leave" in wild chimpanzee, 2018, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28983906/
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature, 1999, page 161
Joseph Doyle, Child Protection and Child Outcomes: Measuring the Effects of Foster Care, 2007, PDF source. Doyle concludes that there might be a rational excuse for removing the current number of children, because the American foster care system might trade more bad outcomes for children against fewer catastrophic outcomes: If more children are taken from their parents, fewer children might be seriously abused. But. as Joseph Doyle himself suggests, that is a highly dubious assumption. For example, Sweden removes more children from parents than most developed countries. Still, Sweden doesn't stand out positively when it comes to child maltreatment deaths. For example, we found out that Sweden has about twice as many foster children than Spain per thousand children. Still, twice as many children were killed by their caregivers in Sweden than in Spain, according to a comparison from 2003 ( A league table of child maltreatment deaths in rich nations). Such cases are on the news here a few times every year and social workers who failed to prevent that outcome tend to say the same thing: That such rare tragic outcomes are very difficult to predict and prevent.
If zero children are removed from their parents, more children will be seriously abused, because some parents provenly seriously abuse their children and if not removed, those children will continue being abused. But there also is a threshold where removal of children doesn't decrease abuse of children, but rather increases it, because foster children are at comparatively high risk of serious abuse.
Barbara H Chaiyachati, Joanne N Wood, Nandita Mitra, Krisda H Chaiyachati, All-Cause Mortality Among Children in the US Foster Care System, 2003-2016, 2020. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7171576/}
Timothy P Carney, Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be, 2024, 15 percent of e-book
Thomas Lake, A boy in north Georgia went for a walk down the road. It landed his mother in jail, December 23, 2024, https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/22/us/mother-arrested-missing-son-georgia-cec/index.html
Timothy P Carney, Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be, 2024, 46 percent of e-book
Really interesting explanation. It seems to bridge the gap between the economic vs. cultural explanation for fertility decline.
If parental shaming is a large cause of low fertility rates, what aspects of being a parent that make childrearing so expensive, that are mostly culturally motivated, should be suppressed? Obviously some parental shaming is beneficial overall to the lives of outcome of children, but I can imagine quite a few expenses that go into childrearing, that have become social expectations, that can probably be done away with;
- Every child having their own room (Housing is very expensive)
- Extracurricular sports (Very expensive/time consuming, few children continue when schooling ends)
- Expensive clothing (They quickly grow out of it)
- Yearly birthday parties (Relatively recent social innovation)
- Expensive toys (iPhones, gaming consoles, more than one Christmas gift etc.)
- Exotic Vacations (2 Kids essentially doubles the cost of most vacations)
- Not working (Kids should start at least a summer job when they turn 13)
Of course there's the taboos, expectations, and shaming that goes along with all these things, so I have absolutely no idea how they could be changed without changing the entire culture, which is basically impossible. It's hard to limit the consumption of your kid if they're in a school where their peers are constantly given all these things, and exposed to social media where people are constantly flexing, setting their expectations high, and breeding resentment if they don't get what they want.
Back when corporal punishment was more accepted, there was a certain expectation among parents that there be a certain amount of spectacle associated with it.
One could argue that it the spectacle served as a warning to other kids (especially siblings) of what could happen to them if they misbehaved.
But it seemed like the biggest spectacles often happened in public, or in front of other parents, and most importantly out of the presence of any siblings or other affiliated kids, as a demonstration that one was a fit parent that was in control of their kids.
The fact that this runs contrary to the tried and true rule of "praise in public, reprimand in private" just reinforces the point.
Maybe this is the reason why corporal punishment has been so difficult to eradicate--at least in cultures where there's an expectation of highly performative punishment.