8 ms·

That evolutionary instinct came from a time when humans lived in communal support networks and new parents had help from extended family, and does not translate

That evolutionary instinct came from a time when humans lived in communal support networks and new parents had help from extended family, and does not translate well to a world where Mom has to work 9-5 in an office a few months after birth. You might as well express shock that suburbanites don't supplement their diets by foraging for fruit and mushrooms. Besides, it's not like parents 10K years ago had the option to let their babies cry it out in a separate room with a noise machine, and evolution selected against it because co-sleeping babies reproduced more. "Babies cry because they need to co-sleep or they will suffer some serious problem" sounds reasonable to me, but so does "Babies cry because it gets them more nutrition by keeping Mom so sleep-deprived that she delays her next pregnancy." Making just-so stories about behavioral evolution is dubious, the bar needs to be higher than just sounding plausible.

omnibrain 4y ago
> a world where Mom has to work 9-5 in an office a few months after birth That's a cultural problem itself.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  Unfortunately, solving a cultural problem is the second most difficult thing to do, after changing laws of physics. Or, as some web article I read the other day put it: society is fixed, biology is mutable. And it's not just about two-income households. From my personal experience I can say that, even with one parent working, a poorly sleeping child can bring the parents to the brink of divorce, or depression, or both. Given the importance of loving, caring, supporting family for a child's overall health, happiness, and future prospects, it's fair to consider some interventions as trade-offs for the sake of the household. The article mentions this near the end, but then mostly dismisses the concern.
  - komali2 4y ago
    You can solve cultural problems on a micro level. I know many couples that have merged into larger multi-partner families, sometimes as individual couples, sometimes as polycules, regardless, the commune is back lol, and just my own observation it seems an ideal way to raise kids. There's always someone around, couples can take their own time to go on dates quite regularly, the kids grow up with lots of people around and lots of friends, the close community support is just phenomenal looking. If I have kids, I will go this route.
    - crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
      I have one kid and we are going thus route. The nuclear family is dysfunctional by design. Partner and I both have been with them fulltime throughout their life, living off savings instead of working. This opened my eyes to how very little men are taught about caring for people and how much nonsense I was taught. Nurturing a little person from a perspective informed by anarchism reveals a whole lot of backwards thinking. We've just spent 5 days with 3 people who can actually handle facing the childhood trauma that gets stimulated through allowing a little person to actually make choices for themselves and the difference is astounding. We can spend time together without interruption and without it being after they're asleep. There are people to help cook and clean, do so joyfully, and play and dance and sing and cuddle. Why you're getting down voted, I have no idea. Community- oriented approaches to families, no matter what society says or does or thinks, are what humans have done for millenia.
  - dinkumthinkum 4y ago
    I don’t know, it doesn’t seem like society is that fixed. It seems pretty malleable over the scale of decades.
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      It changes, but it's not exactly easy for anyone to predict or control the direction of those changes. Also, this malleability is not what matters in this context - "over the scale of decades" isn't very helpful to the people alive today.
    - ElevenLathe 4y ago
      On the scale of decades, your baby isn't a baby anymore and they can sleep however is convenient for them.
- jpambrun 4y ago
  In my culture women want to work and have a carrers as well.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    Reading it generously, I think the cultural problem is supposed to be that parents are expected to go back to work too quickly, not specifically that women are. “Mom” has just come through the sequence of quotes, making it unnecessary gendered. It could also be seen as a cultural problem that both parents are generally expected to work nowadays, and it would be nice to be able to expect that families had some adult at home (but we’d hope that in a more egalitarian society nowadays the gender balance would be more equal — although men can lift larger laundry baskets on average so maybe we should end being the at-home ones more than 50% of the time, I dunno).
  - komali2 4y ago
    Nice, same, I think the "cultural problem" comment is not saying that the problem is that "women are going to work" but rather that "the parents have to be away from the child for the majority of the time, or they will all be homeless and hungry." I'm not sure which country the OP is discussing, likely one without good maternity/paternity laws and whatnot, which is really sad to hear about, I hope more citizens demand this of their governments and more employees demand this of their companies, it seems crazy to me that you should have to sacrifice formative time with your newborn so you can go do a capitalism every day.
    - lazide 4y ago
      Plenty of women need and want something to do besides 24/7 baby and house care stuff. And they won't starve to death if they don't do it.
      - komali2 4y ago
        Right, I'm countering the accusations of misogyny with "no, we're talking about the flaws of capitalism." Consider that many families in the USA have two parents, both working multiple jobs, to make ends meet. To me, one of the most important things in my hopefully 80 years is family, and so I get sad when I see people forced to trade that little time we get already, for work.
- lazide 4y ago
  Says who? And saying it doesn't make it less of a thing.
- profstasiak 4y ago
  is this true in USA? Wow
awillen 4y ago
It's astounding to me that so many people on HN, a place where folks generally profess to be driven by science and data, are in this thread just casually throwing around anecdotes and comments about evolutionary instinct while completely ignoring the actual science and data. Doubly so when so many of the comments are pretty vicious towards people who sleep train their babies.
- metabagel 4y ago
  https://www.attachmentparenting.org/ensure-safe-sleep-physically-and-emotionally https://www.attachmentparenting.org/ensure-safe-sleep-physic... >>Parents who are frustrated with frequent waking or who are sleep deprived may be tempted to try sleep training techniques that recommend letting a baby cry in an effort to "teach" him to "self-soothe". >>Research shows us that an infant is not neurologically or developmentally capable of calming or soothing himself to sleep in a way that is healthy. The part of the brain that helps with self-soothing isn't well developed until the child is two and a half to three years of age. Until that time, a child depends on his parents to help him calm down and learn to regulate his intense feelings.
  - sanderjd 4y ago
    It's so weird to me that you're throwing around attachmentparenting.org links like they are the final objective word on the subject. It would be like linking to the American Enterprise Institute in a discussion on economics. They are smart and well read on the subject, but they are pushing their own point of view, which is far from being the only one.
  - remote_phone 4y ago
    Not even a single study was cited in that page. It’s garbage.
  - julienfr112 4y ago
    "his intense feeling" measured in what unit ?
- metabagel 4y ago
Gordonjcp 4y ago
[flagged]
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  Name a non-shithole place on the planet where that isn't the case. This is not a US phenomenon, it's pretty much a global phenomenon by now. It's the flip side of breaking down the traditional family/society model - as more and more households had two incomes, the market quickly compensated for the surplus, and now most households struggle without two incomes.
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    In the UK you get six month's paid maternity leave, and that is in a country being run into the ground by right-wing idiots. In most European countries it's 12 months.
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      Six months is "few months" in my book. My country (Poland) has 12 months of maternity leave, and it's nowhere near enough either. In fact, 12 months is about when your child might start exhibiting sleeping issues (as opposed to just being an infant). In other words, this isn't a problem because of sub-year maternity/paternity leaves. It's a problem because both parents need to work.
    - dinkumthinkum 4y ago
      Why not 5 years or 16? I think “shithole” country is pretty inflammatory and condescending.
      - chadlavi 4y ago
        It's also not as though we can just decide to pack up and leave even if it is a shithole.
- dang 4y ago
  Nationalistic flamewar will get you banned here, regardless of which country you have a problem with. Please don't post like this to HN again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: we've had to warn you about this kind of thing before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33501516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33501516. Would you please review the rules and fix this? I don't want to ban you, but eventually we don't have a choice if an account keeps breaking the rules.
thaumasiotes 4y ago
> so does "Babies cry because it gets them more nutrition by keeping Mom so sleep-deprived that she delays her next pregnancy." Babies do delay their mothers' next pregnancy. But sleep has nothing to do with it. And really, neither do the babies. Nursing mothers inhibit their own pregnancy; that is why the normal interval between births is two years instead of one year.
- mrjh 4y ago
  “Nursing mothers inhibit their own pregnancy” It’s an interesting theory, but having my second kid appear 12 months after the first — in spite of the breastfeeding — makes me very sceptical of its reliability.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    It is very reliable indeed, but there's still variation. Compare https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3726904/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3726904/ : > Data that were collected prospectively from a child health study conducted in Gaza show a strong relationship between breastfeeding and two major components of birth intervals, the postpartum anovulatory period and the waiting time [from resumption of menstruation] to conception. > The finding of a strong positive association between breastfeeding and the length of postpartum amenorrhea is as expected from numerous other studies.
    - fwip 4y ago
      The effect appears reliably when looking at groups of people. It is not a reliable method of birth control.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    My wife and I were warned about this by nurses. The effect is real, but it's absolutely not reliable as a contraception method, as it can easily break down for various reasons, including the mother not following a strict and consistent regimen of frequent breastfeeding. And, as it turns out, consistent and frequent breastfeeding is much harder to achieve than popular media would had you believe.
anothernewdude 4y ago
> You might as well express shock that suburbanites don't supplement their diets by foraging for fruit and mushrooms. What person in the suburbs doesn't have a veggie garden?
dinkumthinkum 4y ago
I wonder if many people realize mortality rates were much, much higher in antiquity and prehistoric times.
- rpcorb 4y ago
  For what reasons, though. Mostly disease. Irrelevant.
burnished 4y ago
My favorite is “babies cry because the quiet ones got forgotten”
- IshKebab 4y ago
  I mean that's literally true. Also why babies are so cute. The ones that weren't got put in the bin.
  - burnished 4y ago
    Quibble: I'm not sure its true, though it is entertaining, reasonable, and appears to fit the facts. The cuteness one is good too. I wonder if this sort of thing emerged slowly or quickly? Like, is cooperation just generally selected for and animal cuteness has been developing for a long time, or did it appear swiftly somewhere and provide some huge benefit? Or something else entirely?
    - IshKebab 4y ago
      I reckon both must have evolved along with the increase in head size. Most animals have babies that have developed enough so that they are reasonably independent. They can at least walk! But humans have really big heads so they have to give birth really early before the baby is capable of walking, so screaming for help and being super cute is their only option.
Aeolun 4y ago
> You might as well express shock that suburbanites don't supplement their diets by foraging for fruit and mushrooms. We do forage for fruits and mushrooms. We just forage inside different locations :)

omnibrain 4y ago

> a world where Mom has to work 9-5 in an office a few months after birth That's a cultural problem itself.

TeMPOraL 4y ago
Unfortunately, solving a cultural problem is the second most difficult thing to do, after changing laws of physics. Or, as some web article I read the other day put it: society is fixed, biology is mutable. And it's not just about two-income households. From my personal experience I can say that, even with one parent working, a poorly sleeping child can bring the parents to the brink of divorce, or depression, or both. Given the importance of loving, caring, supporting family for a child's overall health, happiness, and future prospects, it's fair to consider some interventions as trade-offs for the sake of the household. The article mentions this near the end, but then mostly dismisses the concern.
- komali2 4y ago
  You can solve cultural problems on a micro level. I know many couples that have merged into larger multi-partner families, sometimes as individual couples, sometimes as polycules, regardless, the commune is back lol, and just my own observation it seems an ideal way to raise kids. There's always someone around, couples can take their own time to go on dates quite regularly, the kids grow up with lots of people around and lots of friends, the close community support is just phenomenal looking. If I have kids, I will go this route.
  - crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
    I have one kid and we are going thus route. The nuclear family is dysfunctional by design. Partner and I both have been with them fulltime throughout their life, living off savings instead of working. This opened my eyes to how very little men are taught about caring for people and how much nonsense I was taught. Nurturing a little person from a perspective informed by anarchism reveals a whole lot of backwards thinking. We've just spent 5 days with 3 people who can actually handle facing the childhood trauma that gets stimulated through allowing a little person to actually make choices for themselves and the difference is astounding. We can spend time together without interruption and without it being after they're asleep. There are people to help cook and clean, do so joyfully, and play and dance and sing and cuddle. Why you're getting down voted, I have no idea. Community- oriented approaches to families, no matter what society says or does or thinks, are what humans have done for millenia.
- dinkumthinkum 4y ago
  I don’t know, it doesn’t seem like society is that fixed. It seems pretty malleable over the scale of decades.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    It changes, but it's not exactly easy for anyone to predict or control the direction of those changes. Also, this malleability is not what matters in this context - "over the scale of decades" isn't very helpful to the people alive today.
  - ElevenLathe 4y ago
    On the scale of decades, your baby isn't a baby anymore and they can sleep however is convenient for them.
jpambrun 4y ago
In my culture women want to work and have a carrers as well.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Reading it generously, I think the cultural problem is supposed to be that parents are expected to go back to work too quickly, not specifically that women are. “Mom” has just come through the sequence of quotes, making it unnecessary gendered. It could also be seen as a cultural problem that both parents are generally expected to work nowadays, and it would be nice to be able to expect that families had some adult at home (but we’d hope that in a more egalitarian society nowadays the gender balance would be more equal — although men can lift larger laundry baskets on average so maybe we should end being the at-home ones more than 50% of the time, I dunno).
- komali2 4y ago
  Nice, same, I think the "cultural problem" comment is not saying that the problem is that "women are going to work" but rather that "the parents have to be away from the child for the majority of the time, or they will all be homeless and hungry." I'm not sure which country the OP is discussing, likely one without good maternity/paternity laws and whatnot, which is really sad to hear about, I hope more citizens demand this of their governments and more employees demand this of their companies, it seems crazy to me that you should have to sacrifice formative time with your newborn so you can go do a capitalism every day.
  - lazide 4y ago
    Plenty of women need and want something to do besides 24/7 baby and house care stuff. And they won't starve to death if they don't do it.
    - komali2 4y ago
      Right, I'm countering the accusations of misogyny with "no, we're talking about the flaws of capitalism." Consider that many families in the USA have two parents, both working multiple jobs, to make ends meet. To me, one of the most important things in my hopefully 80 years is family, and so I get sad when I see people forced to trade that little time we get already, for work.
lazide 4y ago
Says who? And saying it doesn't make it less of a thing.
profstasiak 4y ago
is this true in USA? Wow

awillen 4y ago

It's astounding to me that so many people on HN, a place where folks generally profess to be driven by science and data, are in this thread just casually throwing around anecdotes and comments about evolutionary instinct while completely ignoring the actual science and data. Doubly so when so many of the comments are pretty vicious towards people who sleep train their babies.

metabagel 4y ago
https://www.attachmentparenting.org/ensure-safe-sleep-physically-and-emotionally https://www.attachmentparenting.org/ensure-safe-sleep-physic... >>Parents who are frustrated with frequent waking or who are sleep deprived may be tempted to try sleep training techniques that recommend letting a baby cry in an effort to "teach" him to "self-soothe". >>Research shows us that an infant is not neurologically or developmentally capable of calming or soothing himself to sleep in a way that is healthy. The part of the brain that helps with self-soothing isn't well developed until the child is two and a half to three years of age. Until that time, a child depends on his parents to help him calm down and learn to regulate his intense feelings.
- sanderjd 4y ago
  It's so weird to me that you're throwing around attachmentparenting.org links like they are the final objective word on the subject. It would be like linking to the American Enterprise Institute in a discussion on economics. They are smart and well read on the subject, but they are pushing their own point of view, which is far from being the only one.
- remote_phone 4y ago
  Not even a single study was cited in that page. It’s garbage.
- julienfr112 4y ago
  "his intense feeling" measured in what unit ?
metabagel 4y ago

Gordonjcp 4y ago

[flagged]

TeMPOraL 4y ago
Name a non-shithole place on the planet where that isn't the case. This is not a US phenomenon, it's pretty much a global phenomenon by now. It's the flip side of breaking down the traditional family/society model - as more and more households had two incomes, the market quickly compensated for the surplus, and now most households struggle without two incomes.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  In the UK you get six month's paid maternity leave, and that is in a country being run into the ground by right-wing idiots. In most European countries it's 12 months.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    Six months is "few months" in my book. My country (Poland) has 12 months of maternity leave, and it's nowhere near enough either. In fact, 12 months is about when your child might start exhibiting sleeping issues (as opposed to just being an infant). In other words, this isn't a problem because of sub-year maternity/paternity leaves. It's a problem because both parents need to work.
  - dinkumthinkum 4y ago
    Why not 5 years or 16? I think “shithole” country is pretty inflammatory and condescending.
    - chadlavi 4y ago
      It's also not as though we can just decide to pack up and leave even if it is a shithole.
dang 4y ago
Nationalistic flamewar will get you banned here, regardless of which country you have a problem with. Please don't post like this to HN again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: we've had to warn you about this kind of thing before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33501516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33501516. Would you please review the rules and fix this? I don't want to ban you, but eventually we don't have a choice if an account keeps breaking the rules.

thaumasiotes 4y ago

> so does "Babies cry because it gets them more nutrition by keeping Mom so sleep-deprived that she delays her next pregnancy." Babies do delay their mothers' next pregnancy. But sleep has nothing to do with it. And really, neither do the babies. Nursing mothers inhibit their own pregnancy; that is why the normal interval between births is two years instead of one year.

mrjh 4y ago
“Nursing mothers inhibit their own pregnancy” It’s an interesting theory, but having my second kid appear 12 months after the first — in spite of the breastfeeding — makes me very sceptical of its reliability.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  It is very reliable indeed, but there's still variation. Compare https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3726904/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3726904/ : > Data that were collected prospectively from a child health study conducted in Gaza show a strong relationship between breastfeeding and two major components of birth intervals, the postpartum anovulatory period and the waiting time [from resumption of menstruation] to conception. > The finding of a strong positive association between breastfeeding and the length of postpartum amenorrhea is as expected from numerous other studies.
  - fwip 4y ago
    The effect appears reliably when looking at groups of people. It is not a reliable method of birth control.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  My wife and I were warned about this by nurses. The effect is real, but it's absolutely not reliable as a contraception method, as it can easily break down for various reasons, including the mother not following a strict and consistent regimen of frequent breastfeeding. And, as it turns out, consistent and frequent breastfeeding is much harder to achieve than popular media would had you believe.

anothernewdude 4y ago

> You might as well express shock that suburbanites don't supplement their diets by foraging for fruit and mushrooms. What person in the suburbs doesn't have a veggie garden?

dinkumthinkum 4y ago

I wonder if many people realize mortality rates were much, much higher in antiquity and prehistoric times.

rpcorb 4y ago
For what reasons, though. Mostly disease. Irrelevant.

burnished 4y ago

My favorite is “babies cry because the quiet ones got forgotten”

IshKebab 4y ago
I mean that's literally true. Also why babies are so cute. The ones that weren't got put in the bin.
- burnished 4y ago
  Quibble: I'm not sure its true, though it is entertaining, reasonable, and appears to fit the facts. The cuteness one is good too. I wonder if this sort of thing emerged slowly or quickly? Like, is cooperation just generally selected for and animal cuteness has been developing for a long time, or did it appear swiftly somewhere and provide some huge benefit? Or something else entirely?
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    I reckon both must have evolved along with the increase in head size. Most animals have babies that have developed enough so that they are reasonably independent. They can at least walk! But humans have really big heads so they have to give birth really early before the baby is capable of walking, so screaming for help and being super cute is their only option.

Aeolun 4y ago

> You might as well express shock that suburbanites don't supplement their diets by foraging for fruit and mushrooms. We do forage for fruits and mushrooms. We just forage inside different locations :)