Grandparents raising children is in line with human biology
nautil.us
nautil.us
On the other hand women have a difficult and increasingly difficult time getting pregnant from late 30's onward. And yet most women of that age would be very capable parents.
What is the evolutionary explanation that the optimal physical age of reproduction is so skewed compared the optimal emotional age of reproduction?
It just doesn't make sense unless young parents are not the primary caregivers to their children.
Life was not as easy and it was likely much shorter on average. In a more primitive society, if a newborn's mother dies, that newborn probably has very low survival odds. Older women could definitely still have played an important role in raising children in the context of the family/tribe, but I see clear evolutionary advantages to having your children while younger, because you are simply more likely to be alive to raise them.
The average includes a huge number of deaths of children and of mothers though - not counting those risks (childhood, especially the very early one, and giving birth) it's higher than most people think. In a lecture on microbes (http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/return-of-the-m...) the professor mentions as an aside that a late Victorian British citizen after excluding those risks actually had a slightly longer life-expectancy than a modern British citizen! While that is fairly recent it still is long before modern medicine and antibiotics.
Quote:
> And what is interesting, if you take out the childhood mortality, the Victorian person between 1850 and 1880 lived slightly longer, if he was a male, than you do today.
("if he was male": giving birth was very risky)
So it seems that good food (variety plus enough of it) and hygiene did most of the job of extending life-expectancy outside the above two risks - and modern medicine very significantly lowered childhood and birth (mother) deaths. In the light of such evidence modern medicine does not seem to have had a great effect on life expectancy once you made it past childhood. We can't do anything against "aging".
There is plenty anthropological research on the social structures of these hunter-gatherer humans and children were usually collectively raised by the whole group rather than in their biological families.
Now, anatomically modern humans do not differ much from humans over 10,000 years ago. Parenting back then was basically bring food and keep predators away, not studying and getting higher education and getting a job to provide to your family. Modern lifestyle doesn't have to do much with what is good biologically: oocyte quality peaks on early 20s and decreases with age.
Would I take a 15 year old girl in a tribal village as mother? Sure, why not?
What's more strange, having grandparents raise children or importing young women from across the planet and paying them to do it while the parents sit inside offices all day shuffling paper around...
It also assumes that these constructs are the more favorable outcome in increasing mankind's "fitness", than a mutation that gives women more than 400 eggs.
It explains this away by saying evolution perfectly timed menstruation to allow for raising the last child to adulthood coinciding with your average-est old age of 70. It must be further hypothesized and explained how natural selection could have codified this time traveling foresight into the genome, before even beginning to leap to that conclusion, while simultaneously acknowledging other mammals don't have this "feature", while simultaneously acknowledging that kidneys don't just give out at age 45 in a kidney menopause process, or lungs, or other organs. The article inadvertently makes the greatest case that the reproductive system breaking itself is a flaw, and tries to extrapolate why that would it is a feature, and why it is the best possible feature, when a best possible feature according to their time traveling genome theory, would be an adaptive amount of eggs in each woman based on their genetic fitness, instead of 400.
See for example: http://www.nature.com/news/reproductive-biology-fertile-mind...
> in 2009, Ji Wu at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China and her colleagues reported that they had isolated from mice what she called “female germline stem cells” — not from bone marrow, but from ovarian tissue. When her team transplanted the cells into chemotherapy-treated female mice, they developed into mature oocytes, then fertilizable eggs and, the clincher, healthy pups.
>[Tilly] has since published a parade of headline-grabbing papers, culminating this year in a report2 that he had isolated the elusive stem cells from human ovaries and coaxed them to develop into bona fide oocytes. But his work has been dogged by doubt.
It's still really messy and I haven't heard anything new in 3 years, but humans may have the capability in place to create unlimited oocytes like sperm, it's just hard to tell why we don't (the OP's story is one story - there are unlimited possible stories, including simply random loss).
> It's still really messy and I haven't heard anything new in 3 years
There is some very good-but-old research into reproductive physiology. There is quite a gap between modern "medical science" and physiology. The core problem is that it is much more profitable for Wall Street to suppress women's difficult menstrual cycles with drugs, than to implement what was figured out long ago.
> but humans may have the capability in place to create unlimited oocytes like sperm, it's just hard to tell why we don't
Women's reproductive organs get worn out by Estrogen, which should be known as "The Cancer Hormone" or "The Heart Attack Hormone". Fundamentally, estrogen tells tissues to "swell and divide". Estrogen is balanced by Progesterone, which is Nature's anti-estrogen.
Before she met me, my girlfriend self-medicated her depression with the street pharmacy, and shut down her menstrual cycle. Some very stupid endocrinologists told her she "went through menopause", at around 28 years old. Now she thinks she can't get pregnant, because MENOPAUSE. But if her pituitary starts working right, and a proper diet and the right supplements refresh her uterus, she could release an egg at any time. She's not going to get knocked up, because I've just verified that my reversible sperm-elimination strategy has been successful, but I've met plenty of women with an infant on their hip whose doctors told them they were infertile.
what? and how did you verify?
I verified with a microscope - the amscope 150 (iirc) was not quite $100 with some slides. I should have bought the microscope first.
Evolution would.
I can't think of another species where grandparents take a special interest in their grandchildren (as opposed to, say, a generic interest in the young of the herd as a whole). Are there any?
He suggests an alternate theory: "An older, “retired” segment of the population, we argued, serves to keep the population stable over cycles of feast and famine."
Bizarre.
I think there's a valuable lesson to be learned here: among the Hadza studied by ... every nursing mother is supported by a post-menopausal helper, nearly always her mother or mother-in-law.
妈妈生，外婆养，外公天天菜市场，
爸爸回家就上网，爷爷奶奶来欣赏。Also similar to what my early childhood was like before we moved to the states. Except my maternal grandfather passed away shortly after I was born and there was no internet back them.
I think the funniest thing is that it suggests that the modern Chinese family is uxorilocal when it's traditionally been virilocal.
The same woman said that often the grandparents will move in with the parents to care for a child, rather than the other way around.
Regardless of whether everyone has their parents act as their children's caregiver or whether they act as their own children's caregiver as long as every generation does the same you are only primarily responsible for raising one round of children. Its just a matter of whether you do it when you are younger or older.
That's one level of PC beyond the site's addition of the subtitle: 'The growing role of grandparents in raising children is right in line with human biology" for an article that, again, is solely about female biology.
When will the reality of sex-based differences be presented unapologetically?
It was probably not carefully constructed to eradicate the notion of sex differences.
Furthermore, the current trend the article refers is a trend where more and more grandparents are raising children, not solely grandmothers, which explains the wording.
It's funny how paranoid people get when it comes to political correctness. But you don't need to worry Golemotron, I promise you there's no feminist under your bed.
Actually, there is one. He's very noisy.
> Today’s grandparents are doing exactly what their biology has prepared them for.
Prepares for them to take care of their children's child due to their inability to care and protect their own child? This paper/article doesn't talk about the biology/evolution influence of how so many people don't care for their own off spring. I have had children who's grandmother took a knife to her (Her mom was off in the world of drugs), while I had my future son (He had terminal cancer) the father beat the biological mother to death with a baseball bat, and I have had a biological uncle one block from my house and he never once came to even see his nephew (The father (his brother) was less then 200 miles away and never saw his son past year 4).
I get the argument but there is plenty of reasons of equal importance in asking why so many parents are giving way to grandparents in child rearing.
We have a Foster System due to the inability of Grandparents to take care of the children. If they could the system would be 10% of what it currently is today.
We're impatient. We have much "explosive" energy, the kind not really suitable for watching a newborn for hours.
We can now have beautiful and very healthy babies easily, but Grandma is way better sitter than us for most of the day - more experienced, more calm, comfortably retired by now :) And I do belive it is the natural way. Better than kindergarten.
Traditionally you'd put the baby in some sort of sling/papoose/carrier and do pretty much what you'd normally do but with extra breaks for feeding etc.. Children learn by seeing and imitating, in a few years they can be productive parts of the family/tribe.
IME children need lots of energy put in to their upbringing. My kids ages span a decade - I'm far less able to give the youngest the active upbringing I feel he needs than I was for his older siblings.
Mind you in this sort of scenario there would be much shared responsibility and lots of people to carry/teach/feed/entertain/etc..
What's not better than kindergarten?