So now that I’ve learned all the ways that the mother can hurt herself or the baby during delivery (pushing too soon, for example), and how breatfeeding is often not an instinct that comes naturally to mother or child, and how a new baby really should be rocked for hours and hours a day, I understand even more about the evolution of society coinciding with human evolution.
When I mentioned to a friend some of the baby stuff that doesn’t work straight out of the box, he half-jokingly responded, “how did humans ever survive?” I think he was partly saying that maybe modern medicine has become too cautious, and pretends that it’s harder than it really is. After all, humans have raised kids for a long damn time without lactation consultants.
But on the other hand, no they haven’t. All societies have lactation consultants. It’s just that here in the West, those consultants specialize, and get paid for it. But I bet that anywhere babies are born, there are people who come around to help the mother learn how to nurse. Same goes for how to swaddle the baby, how to calm him or her in the middle of the night. Etc.
In other societies, the whole family, all the neighbors, and anyone else hanging around, probably helps out. They rock the baby when the parents can’t anymore. They show how to calm him when it’s 3 am. They change his clothes and all the rest. It’s collaborative. Humans are social creatures, and it’s not just about survival in hunting together or gathering together. Birthing and raising a child is hard and anti-intuitive, and human society, or social-ness, must have been shaped, in part, by that fact.
Those humans who DIDN’T help raise other people’s kids would have been reneging on a social contract that would come back to bite them when they had their own kids. Or, if they’d already had their own, maybe they’d find others less helpful in raising them.
Today, in my culture, we don’t need to have lots of neighbors and family coming over to teach childbirthing and rearing. We don’t need lots of other people to help rock the baby when we’re too exhausted. We can definitely do it on our own, but that’s because we PAY nurses, midwives, doctors, and other professionals to help us. We buy electric swings to rock and rock, while books and Internet sources, written by strangers, teach us what to do.
This is a collective “we,” by the way. In fact, my wife and I don’t own a swing (yet?) and we do have lots of family around. But I’m still part of this culture. I’d never ask my neighbor to come and rock the kid while I had a nap.
Now, I’m not saying that our culture isn’t as good as the older way. Not at all. I’m saying that they’re more or less equivalent. They both get the job done. The failure in our culture comes when people don’t have the wherewithal to buy the rocker or the information. Or those people who don’t even know that it’s out there. People who think that it’s all natural and should just come to them. They’re screwed.
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