To Train Up a Primate

[ilovetchotchkes]

On another note - does the book talk about baby sleep habits?

It occurred to me (around the time that I was struggling with my oldest baby's refusal to sleep in her crib or be without physical contact) that for most of human history, it was probably far safer for human babies to cry when placed alone somewhere. Sleeping next to a mother meant being near a source of food, heat and protection from predators.

That's what baffles me about cry it out. The baby wants to be near mama. All warm and snug. And they're telling parents YOUR CHILD MUST LEARN TO BE INDEPENDENT. And how do they propose doing that? abandoning them when they're crying?! how does that make sense. I mean yes, some children self soothe, my daughter does. There have been a few times that she starts crying and I can't get to her right away (cleaning up a poopy diaper on the toddler's behalf that sort of thing) and she gets her thumb in her mouth and stops crying. But she's unusual in that, she's slept through the night since we brought her home from the hospital. She's the type of baby that exists that makes fundies think that ALL babies should be like that.

[SquirrelySquirrel]

I'll join the "this book sounds fascinating" chorus. Amazon has several used copies for a penny right now. One of them is going to be in my next order, no doubt.

[emmiedahl]

On another note - does the book talk about baby sleep habits?

It occurred to me (around the time that I was struggling with my oldest baby's refusal to sleep in her crib or be without physical contact) that for most of human history, it was probably far safer for human babies to cry when placed alone somewhere. Sleeping next to a mother meant being near a source of food, heat and protection from predators.

It did not discuss sleep directly, but it did say that a typical primate spends its infancy in constant ventro-ventral contact with a mother or allomother (what they call "other monkeys who help raise the baby"). I don't think it is safe in the wild to leave an infant to sleep away from you. Even when we go camping, the babies and small children are in our tent snuggled between parents.

[emmiedahl]

Oops, can't edit my post anymore.

Eta: I was just reading through a couple of papers and the high infant mortality rate in those times does seem like it would make infanticide mostly irrelevant. A lot of the argument appears to be over whether boys were favoured over girls and girls therefore killed at a higher rate in the few instances when legitimate, healthy babies were killed. But it does look like infanticide was somewhat accepted and practised, particularly if the child was ill or illegitimate.

Yeah, infant death is historically a fact of parenting. Infanticide did not matter so much when the baby was unlikely to make it either way.

I feel so dirty reading and writing about infanticide. It interests me and yet I get this pit in my stomach. Anyone else have a weird physiological reaction to the subject?

[debrand]

A very long time ago, I remember watching a documentary about a tribe(I think that is was a Pacific Island) where mothers left their very young infants in the jungle overnight. The reasoning was that a strong child would be worthy to remain in the tribe. A weak child would get taken by spirits? At least that is what how I believe the documentary explained the mothers' opinions on their children's disappearance. I suppose that their actions make a weird sort of sense. A very loud, crying child would probably attract other people or animals that might hurt the tribe. Having quiet babies is probably safer for their survival. Plus, it probably does keep the population low so that too many people don't compete for resources.

In my modern mind that sounds horrible, but I see why the tribe's actions might actually help their survival

[Rosa]

There's actually quite a bit of evidence about roman infanticide; it was 100% legal by the paterfamilias, and Rome had an area for abandoning babies in - people who wanted a baby would go pick it up and that was a legally recognized form of adoption. There are court cases and stories about it that are very well documented.

In more modern times there is a LOT of historical evidence for parents doing things that were technically not infanticide but that had known very high death rates - everything from the church run orphanages in Italy and France that had 90% mortality rates, to the gin baby farms of Victorian England.

I don't know if it's in the motherhood book but there's another Hrdy book where she talks about cosleeping and babywearing, and the deal is that the less safe the environment (such as dense forest with large predatory cats) mothers keep their babies and toddlers closer, and in safer environments (such as brushy savannas, or the mongolian steppes) with fewer predators and better lines of sight, they let them sleep/crawl/walk farther away. There's not just one human norm, it's dependent on social structure and natural environment. I'm pretty sure Hrdy talks about mother's social status as deciding whether she'll let others hold their babies, but there's a primatologist named Franz de Waal who talks about that in bonobos and chimpanzees - who also practice infanticide, but generally of OTHER mother's babies. So low-status mothers are reluctant to give others access to their infants.

[Arete]

The myth of the founding of the Roman empire was based on infanticide. Well, attempted infanticide.

I think there was a fair bit of it in Greece. The Spartans were pretty big on killing defective babies and I think it was mentioned by Plato several times. Or is that Aristotle? One of the important philosophers.

Yes, Spartans would kill disabled or otherwise defect babies. It was considered merciful since they were a warrior society and the disabled had no place. In other Greek city-states, if you did not want an infant for whatever reason (you couldn't support it, it was deformed, it was born to an unwed mother,etc), you left it out to die of "exposure". In the Roman Empire if the father did not accept the newborn into the family, it was also put out to die of exposure. Not to mention poor people and slaves who could not support a child or another child.

Plato definitely talks about infanticide/exposure. Aristotle might have also, I'm just not as certain.

[Rosa]

Emmie I do okay with text but some of my history textbooks had pictures and that's just too much for me.

Also sometimes primary documents (like court documents that record mothers statements, if they were prosecuted for infanticide - that one web site that does a historic british court record a day has a lot of them) sometimes really get me.

[emmiedahl]

Emmie I do okay with text but some of my history textbooks had pictures and that's just too much for me.

Also sometimes primary documents (like court documents that record mothers statements, if they were prosecuted for infanticide - that one web site that does a historic british court record a day has a lot of them) sometimes really get me.

You mean like medieval woodcuts of priests gleefully burning piles of live infants? *shudder* There are some things that just slay me deep inside.

[snarktastic]

Oliver Sack's autobiography describes how his mother and midwives in Edwardian England routinely drowned newborn babies who were born with disabilities.

My father was taught at uni by a woman who had been born in Edwardian England weighing just one pound. She said that she was left on a cold stone sink to die and only when she was furiously screaming several hours later, someone decided to give her a chance. I kind of wonder who told her that story and how they told it - hopefully by her outraged mother who had been out cold after the birth and was livid about what happened when she found out.

[RachelB]

You mean like medieval woodcuts of priests gleefully burning piles of live infants? *shudder* There are some things that just slay me deep inside.

This is going to sound weird but-- I'm glad to know I'm not the only one to have that sort of reaction to things that are far in the past. I took an intensive Latin course a few summers ago. We were translating an account of one of the crusades and an account of the Norman invasion on back-to-back days. The history itself was all stuff I knew already (Christians were doing appalling things in Turkey, and the Saxons were having their worst day ever), it's just that translating it was an unexpectedly visceral experience, because I wound up feeling like, I don't know, a mouthpiece for things I find horrible. The invasion account was written in the same sort of terms that Amnesty International bulletins are, detailing all the atrocities going on, except right where in an Amnesty bulletin you'd get the address of the official you're supposed to contact asking for clemency, instead was a sentence equivalent to "And we smote them in their lying backs." Somehow up until then I'd missed the fact that the text was written by someone who saw this brutality not as awful but as cause for celebration.

I was working so hard to hold back tears and nausea the rest of the day that I was thoroughly useless, and none of my classmates seemed at all bothered. This is part of the reason I work on 20th century literature now. The 20th century is not short on atrocity, but I have a little more cognitive distance when I'm not translating and don't have to get at least temporarily as close to the chronicler's position as possible.