The decline of collective child-rearing has had disproportionate effects on mothers. This hastened a shift away from distributing child-caretaking tasks across a community of neighbors, relatives, and friends, a long-standing practice anthropologists call “ cooperative breeding.” marriage ages dipped to new lows and the fertility rate surged, and briefly, the average (white) man could support his family without relying on at least some income-generating labor from his wife or children. The marriage historian Stephanie Coontz has called the economically self-contained-and socially isolated-male-breadwinner family a “historical fluke” that crystallized in the public imagination within a short window after World War II. In America, nuclear-family units are far more isolated than in the past many of us grow up without seeing much child-rearing beyond what we’re subjected to ourselves.Īs Faith indicates, things weren’t always this way. And the constraints of the nuclear family make this birthright all the more challenging to break free from.Įlisabeth Stitt, a parenting coach and the author of Parenting as a Second Language, told me that people are especially likely to default to their parents’ behaviors-including negative ones-if they don’t have any other models to look to. Whether that’s a once-in-a-while type of thing or a perpetual-reenactment loop, the “intergenerational transmission of parenting” is an established phenomenon of child-rearing-for better and for worse. To put it less obliquely: Parents commonly repeat their own parents’ mistakes. Before long, her parents’ childhood baggage can also come home to roost, emerging like a GIF-ified Kim Kardashian from their existential foliage. Certain biological inheritances will shape who a person is and the sort of life she’ll lead, as will her parents’ material circumstances, social support, and values. As my colleague Faith Hill wisely pointed out in a recent Atlantic article, a child is the unwitting embodiment of parental legacy before she even draws her first breath.
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