Parenting So Easy, Even A Caveman Could Do It

Sort of. Actually, Friedman points out that several of Narvaez’s key tenets will be familiar to practitioners of attachment parenting. At least a couple — home birth and breast-feeding (Narvaez recommends women continue the latter for two to five years) — aren’t necessarily possible for everyone, and advocating them as the way to raise a moral child leaves out a lot of people. Others, however, might have interesting implications for how we structure our society. Narvaez recommends that kids receive care from a number of adults, not just their parents — and that they be allowed to play with kids of a variety of ages. Explains Friedman, “hunter-gatherers weren’t separated into age-specific play circles, exposing them to kids at different stages of development.”

Obviously, school provides modern kids with both varied caregivers and playmates, to a certain extent. But Narvaez’s recommendations also seem like an argument for shared-care arrangements — and against the idea that a biological mother is the only person who can adequately care for a child. Perhaps “traditional family” advocates should look a bit farther back for their traditions. And perhaps we should all be embracing policies that help families pool their resources and child-care duties, rather than encouraging the kind of nuclear family isolation that sometimes seems to prevail today. I’m not generally a fan of the theory that everything was better in the past — but in this case, teaching kids to get along with a lot of different people may just be smart.

Parent Like A Caveman [Daily Beast]

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