In "How She Really Does It", by Wendy Sachs (mentioned in my previous post), it talks about the guilt women have whether they need to go to work or choose to go to work and be away from their babies.
"In cultures where babies are always burrowed onto their mother's bosoms, moms are never made to feel guilty about leaving their kids behind to go to work because mother and child are literally connected at the hip...
...for centuries it has not been practical for mother and child to be attached all day long, every day...
In the United State, the combination of a rigid non-family focused workplace, children spaced close together, and a lack of familial support stresses perhaps our most intense primordial affiliation—the mother-child bond."
And here's where it gets really interesting, when Sachs cites anthropologist Helen Fisher who explains:
"Fifteen thousand years ago, you would never have two children under four years old. We were not built to have children so close together. For millions of years, the natural spacing was four years apart; the same thing is true in gorillas and chimpanzees and even greater in orangutans...The reason that the four-year birth spacing was maintained was because if you nurse a baby on demand, several times an hour, and sleep with a baby at night who keeps nursing, and combine that with a great deal of exercise and low body fat, you wouldn't conceive until you've really slowed down on the nursing. So a woman was only dealing with one child at a time, and the mother carried that child on her back while she did the gathering of vegetables; that's what she was expected to do. She left the older kids in camp in multi-age playgroups in an extremely secure, social environment with all of her relatives and friends. So there was no anxiety about daycare, and there was no anxiety about leaving the baby because she never left the baby since she was nursing around the clock. So she could do all of her basic jobs simultaneously and comfortably.
What we're lacking today is about fifteen other people around us to help care for the babies. We don't have the other adults, friends, relatives, other children, we have none of that. And women today often have more than one child under four years old, so no wonder we're suffering!"
So, we are talking Paleolithic-traditional here, not June Cleaver-traditional. I love the cave-mama characteristics I can benefit from. OK, so maybe I don't have extremely low body fat, but I did (and still do, though to a lesser extent) nurse around the clock and co-sleep. Basically, I have my little one around me all day while I am at home on the computer, aside from our daily trip to the gym, errands and outings (where she is mostly still right there with me). I still haven't had a regular period and my daughter is 20 months old, so old-school biology is working for me, for sure. (Interestingly, the prehistoric paradigm is also used in the popular book "Happiest Toddler on the Block", where author Harvey Karp, M.D., takes kids from being chimps to Neanderthals to little cavemen.)
I guess maybe biologically, we humans are still programmed to work a certain way that hasn't caught up with our technological advancement. Still, as evidenced by the way I managed caring for my baby (and now toddler) while working remotely over the Internet, technology can be a huge boon when it comes to staying close to our babies.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment