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STONE-AGE BABIES (AND PARENTS) IN A SPACE-AGE
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Western infants, parents, and families live in extraordinarily different social, cultural, and biological circumstances than the ones within which human life was designed and sculpted. Indeed, to understand contemporary human development and human developmental problemsÑincluding health and illness, both psychological and physicalÑanthropological data show clearly that we must begin our analysis by looking at how human behavior evolved within a hunting, gathering, and collecting ecology and economy. However convenient and sometimes luxurious, it is strange to think of contemporary Western values and lifestyles putting us at odds with our own biology and mental health. This seminar looks at the ways in which recent Western values and experiences associated with industrialization, which often guide child-rearing practices, conflict with what our bodies and minds 'expect' to experience. We will use traditional models of human development alongside evolutionary perspectives to best understand why our babies have problems feeding and sleeping, why adolescence is so awkward, and why reproductive cancers confront Western women at tenfold percentages greater than they do Third World women. We will also consider why humans appear to be more aggressive and sometimes more anguished than might otherwise seem probable.
Click here to see images of the seminar.
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Jim McKenna, chair of the Anthropology Department, specializes in biological anthropology with a focus on the social behavior of primates. His research concerns the relationship between infant and childhood sleeping arrangements, breastfeeding, and the sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). He has pioneered studies on mother-infant co-sleeping, is the primary public spokesperson in the U.S. on issues pertaining to sleeping arrangements and SIDS prevention, and has won awards for excellence in teaching. At Notre Dame he directs the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory, has written extensively on Evolutionary Medicine, and is currently writing a book on parenting.
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