HDE 103 Lecture 3: Valuing Children
11 Jun 2018
School
Department
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Professor
I. Lecture 3: Valuing Children (April 9, 2018)
A. Introduction
1. Much of contemporary literature on children identifies the parent-child relationship as central to the
functioning of society (seen as mostly unidirectional)
2. Over the last century….
a. European, North American, and East Asian children transformed from future farmers or factory
workers that aided in the household economy to…economically costly but emotionally priceless
cherubs
3. “While in the nineteenth century a child’s capacity for labor had determined its exchange value, the market
price of the twentieth-century baby was set by smiles, dimples, and curls” ~Zeiler
a. And childhood, juvenility, and dependency keeps getting extended
B. Expensive Little Cherubs
1. American parents are keen to spend money to express how important their children are to them
a. Sacrifice their lives to essentially give their children everything
2. In Japan, mothers are known to, “cater to their children’s every whim” ~Schwalb
a. Mothers practice T’aekyo to get in sync emotionally and physically, to educate their child before they
are even born
b. Now this includes fancy new technology and classes given while the child is yet to be born
3. Nannycams, and other “spy” equipment, constantly monitor everything your child does
4. Despite all the efforts, giving birth to a flawed child carries tremendous emotional cost and a sense of
injustice to the parents
C. In contrast
1. Greeks and Romans would expose sickly, unattractive or unwanted infants (i.e., elimintate them)
2. Chinese, Hindus of India, since time immemorial, destroyed daughters at birth to open the pathway for a
more “desireable” son
3. Japanese parents likened infanticide with “thinning the rice patties” for future growth
4. Inuit or the Jivaro, Artic foragers, left unwanted babies to nature to claim
5. “Nineteenth-century London, infant corpses were littered parks and roadsides” ~Scrimshaw
D. Calculating the Costs
1. How do parents decide how much to invest in a child?
2. Consider…
a. A sick child increases the cost of investment
b. Decreases the likelihood of the investment paying off
3. Thus…
a. The child wants to signal, in every means necessary, that they are NOT sick
b. Chubby, smiling, happy, sweet noises, not as smelly as they could be…
4. So, a child’s arrival into society is contingent on their parents
a. If a mother dies in birth
b. Or a father dies before they are born
c. In traditional societies, infanticide can follow with any sign of weakness in the child
5. In our society, we have rules and norms to help parents in care of children
E. Foraging Lifestyles Place an enormous burden on parents
1. They cannot afford, by any means, to have a sickly child
a. Many ancestral populations likely lived akin to modern foragers like the Ache of West Africa
2. Monitoring, Foraging, Hunting, Labor
a. All require enormous investment from parents and community members
b. Few can spare the time to devote to a sick child who will bring little payoff immediately
3. The availability of adequate resources is generally the one condition that allows babies to be kept
a. Western culture, market economies, have adequate resources in general
4. Examples of other cultural beliefs around babies:
a. Some cultures limit children to 3
b. Some families are censured at a certain level of children by the community
c. Breast-feeding is more costly than having a child (high caloric and metabolically taxing)
d. Folklores and stories around that breast milk was dirty and tainted to promote children to encourage
them to fend for themselves and find their own food (be more independent)
F. Mothers uncivilized? NONSENSE!!
1. Mothers in all cultures have been observed to gossip, pridefully, about each “developmental” milestone
their child reaches
2. “Nurturing has to be teased out, reinforced, and maintained. Nurturing itself needs to be nurtured” ~Hrdy
3. “the usefulness of ill-defined and culturally, de-contextualized terms…as ‘bonding’, ‘attachment’, ‘critical
period’ and so forth…must be questioned…The terms seem inadequate to describe and to contain the
experiences of mothering and nurturing under conditions of extreme scarcity and high risk of child death”
~Scheper-Hughes
G. Adaptive Indifference or Calculating Mothers
1. The argument can be made that a mother’s detachment, indifference, or failure to bond immediately
actually serves an adaptive purpose
2. In some contexts it permits her to keep her options open
a. Also shields her emotionally from the emotional impact of the child’s (very likely death)
b. Every culture, across all time, miscarriage, stillbirth, child death are common
c. Many are so numerous that mothers cannot recall the number of pregnancies or births they’ve had
3. But, despite these barriers, keep in mind that the ultimate goal is for parents to adjust or adapt their
behaviors to context to maximize their potential to have genes survive into the next generation
H. The History of Childhood is the History of Death
1. Ancient Greece never discussed the merits of infanticide – it was obvious
a. Plato felt strongly that Greek parents should only keep the children they could feed
b. Women who couldn’t prove paternity, those children didn’t survive; children were counted as property
2. Egypt was well advanced in terms of medicine (pre-Greeks) especially in terms of women’s health
a. They discouraged infanticide—so infanticide wasn’t just and “ancient” norm across all cultures
b. The fertile Nile produced bountiful food; Greece was perennially short of food
3. Although, looking in the past, children who were chosen or kept, were loved
I. What’s in a Name
1. Lustratio
a. Rome: 9 days after a child was born, if the father, or his grandfather if the father was missing, deemed
the child worthy to be reared, then the child was given a name
2. Amphidromia
a. Greece: 10 days after birth, the child, if the child was to be kept, was introduced to the family with a
naming ceremony
3. Just because they got a name didn’t always ensure an “attachment-bond”
a. High infant mortality still prevented parents from investing immediately
4. *Even after the child got a name, parents still didn’t emotionally invest because of the possibility of their
death
J. Changes in History…
1. Philo of Alexandria, the Jewish philosopher and writer, wwas the first notable figure in history to condemn
infanticide
a. Because it suggested intercourse was for pleasure rather than reproduction
2. Christianity started to spread with wars and trade
a. St. Peter’s injunction condemning infanticide and abandonment, spread with Christianity, because,
“parents could not escape the wages of sin”
3. Constantine, the first Christian emperor, outlawed infanticide
a. But did nothing, because he could not, about abandonment
4. The surplus children wandering the roads of ancient Rome was a factor in the surplus of monasteries and
abbeys that popped up at that time
a. Still an official sanctioned act called “oblation”
K. Too many children not just an anvient problem
1. Brephotrophia – the first orphanages created in response to the “too many” children problem in abbeys and
monasteries
a. 1000s of babies a year were dropped off in orphanages
b. 2/3s of which died before the age of 1
i. Part of the problem: no safe substitute for mothers milk as wet nurses were pre-occupied by
families that wanted to keep their babies
ii. Constrained by biology yet again, until 1860 when formula was created
Document Summary
Lecture 3: valuing children (april 9, 2018) Sacrifice their lives to essentially give their children everything. In contrast: greeks and romans would expose sickly, unattractive or unwanted infants (i. e. , elimintate them, chinese, hindus of india, since time immemorial, destroyed daughters at birth to open the pathway for a more desireable son. Japanese parents likened infanticide with thinning the rice patties for future growth. Inuit or the jivaro, artic foragers, left unwanted babies to nature to claim. So, a child"s arrival into society is contingent on their parents: or a father dies before they are born. In our society, we have rules and norms to help parents in care of children. Some families are censured at a certain level of children by the community: breast-feeding is more costly than having a child (high caloric and metabolically taxing) Nonsense: mothers in all cultures have been observed to gossip, pridefully, about each developmental milestone their child reaches.
