I have just finished reading a brilliant book, which I would recommend to all mothers. It is called "Mother Nature" and it is by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (spelt that way!). The authoress is an anthropologist and mother and she debunks lots of myths about motherhood.
She sets out to answer the following questions:
- What do we mean by "maternal instincts" and have we lost them?
- If women instinctively love their babies, why have so many women across cultures and through history directly or indirectly contributed to their deaths? Why do so many mothers around the world discriminate among their own infants (eg: feeding a son, starving a daughter)?
- Humans produce offspring that are helpless and dependent for so long a time that our hunter/gatherer ancestors could not have reared a family alone. Yet paternal assistance than (as now) was far from certain - so why did humans develop with mothers producing babies so far beyond their means to rear alone?
- Given that fathers share the same proportion of their genes with babies as mothers do, why didn't fathers evolve to be more attentive to infant needs?
- Given that fathers range from caring to indifferent why are all men so interested in the reproductive affairs of women?
- What is the bottom line on infant needs?
The book is very thick and makes for fairly grim reading in places. I had no idea infanticide is and has been so widespread. However, it has certainly opened my eyes to alot of different ways of looking at motherhood and has debunked a whole load of myths too.
The book costs £12.50 and was published last year.