Baby Hominid
There’s nothing like caring for a newborn infant to get one thinking about the early human ancestors. Babies are just so primitive seeming. They come programmed with that grasping reflex, and you can just see the little monkey inside, with the innate urge to grasp onto mother’s chest hair. But then, I suppose it’s been a long time since homo species mothers actually had any chest hair (save perhaps a few anomalies), and it leaves me wondering… how did our hunter-gatherer ancestors go about caring for their offspring? How did they transport their floppy, helpless newborns as they wandered in search of nuts, berries, mammoth, and whatnot? How has our species evolved to carry its babies?
Now, I’m no particular fan of evolutionary explanations for human behavior. From what I understand, the whole field of evolutionary psychology is being largely discredited for lacking evidence, and a rather unfortunate tendency to justify chauvinistic behavior by tying it to the “cave man” genes. Still, I can imagine that something like caring for a child might somehow be more directly rooted in our biology than, say, cheating on one’s wife.
I’ve noticed, with Johanna, that she seems to enjoy being carried in the crook of my arm; that indeed, this seems to be the only thing that will calm her sometimes, late in the evening. And it occurred to me, after a few days of this – the sling’s the thing. She would do well being carried in one of those cloth baby slings. Perhaps nomadic granny fashioned cloth baby slings in the same way she fashioned crude overcoats out of mammoth skin. Perhaps Johanna’s genetic memory was demanding to be carried in a baby sling…
Strings of logic like this make a lot of sense when you’re running on no sleep. Trust me. (Then again, even voodoo priests and witch doctors start to seem plausible when you’re looking for ways to get your baby to sleep).
So on Saturday, while were visiting the new office space, I decided to stop into a chic little children’s clothing store on the street level, just to see if they had any baby slings. Of course they did have one fancy little number, called the Rockin’ Baby Pouch, priced at $85. And of course the lady was more than eager to help me try one on with Johanna; I acquiesced because I find it oddly pleasing when someone works really hard to sell me something. However, when I put Johanna in the pouch, she scrunched down into an impossible position, and I thought, there’s no way I could carry her in this…
….but before I could even finish the thought, she was asleep. Oh yes, I’ll take six please.
And that’s where baby sleeps now, as I finish typing. She’s curved across my chest, looking as peaceful as she must have in the womb. As for genetic memory? I don’t know; but it feels pretty natural.
I don’t know of any mainstream researcher that would claim that you have a genetic memory relating to maternal behaviors. What I’d expect (though I am not an expert) would be something along the lines of: through your inheritance, you have a constitution that both provides both the hormones necessary to be differentially influenced by the presence of a child and cognitive mechanisms that allow you, as a woman on average, to be better suited for raising a child. You don’t have a memory of any behaviors that are required to raise a child; those likely come from gender-specific learning/conditioning that you experienced. But you’d have cognitive mechanisms like a greater ability to notice small changes in behavior, a mother’s intuition if you will, that help you respond more positively to your child’s needs.
Standard evopsyc disclaimers:
-the differences (like the majority of cognitive sex differences) are likely to be small, but nonetheless, they are worthy of study. For example, if you have a 3 point difference on a scale like IQ (M=100, SD=15), then you will have a 61/39 difference between groups if you select for abilities over 2SD.
-any individual can fall on any end of the scale, though the small differences will mean that the likelihood of each sex falling at a certain point will be different.
Thank you for taking the time to leave a thoughtful comment. I wrote this post as a lark, but I can see I might have to put some effort in fact checking!
I know someone who refers to these sorts of musings as “25 cent theories” – because that’s all they’re worth, of course.