The changing face of motherhood. Throughout our evolution motherhood has
been positioned within supportive social frameworks — allowing mothers
to develop the essential primary bonds with their infants and children,
but also allowing them to be additionally productive members of the
groups in which they lived. By the late Stone Age, when most of the
evolutionary forces that have shaped our ways of living and even the
manner in which the circuits of our brains are ‘wired’ had occurred, the
role of women, including mothers, as gatherers of food was crucial to
survival. The sharing of at least some of the childcare responsibilities
was what allowed this adaptive arrangement to flourish.So, what, if
anything, has changed over the 30,000 years of so since the Upper
Palaeolithic days of our hunter-gatherer Stone Age communities? Can
mothers in the 21st century, with all the advanced technology and
communication systems and the modern conveniences that we now take for
granted, now dispense with alloparents (or their equivalent) and happily
raise their children single-handedly (or with just one male partner)
within the much diminished ‘nuclear’ family size? Or do mothers have the
same ‘primeval’ needs for support in their role as the primary
guarantors of the future of the human species that they have always
had?It is, of course, impossible to trace the changing face of
motherhood and the complex social networks in which mothers have found
themselves over this vast expanse of time. The evidence from archaeology
and anthropology may give us some clues, but without first-hand
accounts from mothers themselves, and from those in their families and
social networks, we can only make guesses as to what motherhood really
looked like.We can, however, plot the changing face of motherhood in
more recent times and examine more precisely what has changed, on the
surface at least, and predict where motherhood might be going in the
future. From the 1960s we have witnessed an explosion in the collection
of statistical data that have focused on population compositions, family
sizes, working mothers, etc. From the 1970s we have also had the
benefit of more fine-grained surveys that have asked questions
specifically related to the roles of mothers and their relationship with
families and the wider community. On the basis of these forms of
evidence we have sought to answer some specific questions about the
changing face of motherhood and determine the extent to which modern
‘solutions’ to motherhood are more or less beneficial than the solutions
of the past.Click here to download the report in pdf format.The
Changing Face of Motherhood research was commissioned by Procter &
Gamble (P&G)
http://www.sirc.org/publik/changing_face_of_motherhood.shtml
http://www.sirc.org/publik/changing_face_of_motherhood.shtml