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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I minored in biological anthropology in college. Reality is, human children are not meant to be raised solely by two people. We did not evolve with isolated nuclear families.

Human children are so time-intensive that we evolved to be raised by an entire village of people (alloparents). From what I remember, among hunter gatherers, the ratio of adults to children is around 4:1 and infants are held by up to 18 different people per hour.

Animals with extremely time-intensive parenting, such as birds, usually have a very short period of rearing. A baby bird is off on its own within 6-8 weeks.

Of course, there are trade-offs. Among animals, babies usually just follow their parents around while the parents go do normal life activities. However, this leads to extremely high death rates of 50-90%. Even among hunter-gatherers, childhood mortality is around 50%.

And having a village raise your child means they will alloparent in different ways from you, and you have very little say in it. There are reports of hunter-gatherers where the parents do virtually zero discipline and leave it up to other members of the group. This wouldn't fly among many parents today.

Unfortunately I don't think there's really a solution for families in the United States. We want to be independent and not live with multiple other people. Things like free daycare, free healthcare, a living wage, etc do help, though. But the reality is that life with kids is just intense. Add a capitalistic system where we're supposed to buy more things and bigger things, and nobody is happy.[/quote]

This is very fascinating. thank you for this! [/quote]

NP.  If you are interested in biological anthropology, you might like the book "Our Babies, Ourselves" by Meredith Small.

It's about some of the odd features of our culture regarding babies.  It is weird to keep them in nursery bedrooms separate from parents.   That's why they cry.  They aren't evolved to feel safe so far from parents.  They have to get used to it/learn they are safe.  Americans also bathe their babies far more than a lot of cultures.

Time savers for me included buying a condo townhouse to avoid yard work, finding a reliable decent daycare center, and keeping the baby in my room until about 12 months.  I never found a village.[/quote]

Yes, as a South Asian immigrant, 40 years ago - I also did not have a village here.  But, thankfully, DH and I, belonging to the same culture and being first gen, also followed our own cultural practices as much as we could.

40 days of traditional postpartum care for mom and baby, complete seclusion for us so that I could heal without visitors, having my mom and sister be in the room with me and the baby for 40 days  so that I did not have to do anything except feed the baby and did not sink into PPD,  hiring someone to do chores so that the household functioned well etc.  Co-sleeping in the same room as our kids, nursing on demand, following our traditional time table for when solid foods were introduced, no CIO, keeping baby warm and dry, eating and drinking special food for nursing mom, heated oil massage and herbal baths for mom and baby, my infant being held most of  the time during the day, no sleep training/ferberizing, no leaving the kid alone with a baby monitor. The kid was either where we were, or we were where the kid was.

I basically never shared with my pediatrician what I was doing.  The disconnect between what I culturally grew up with  VS  what the cultural norms here was so much that it left me uncomfortable at best and horrified at worst. [/quote]

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