Why You're Not Married (Yet Another HuffPo Comment)

RobotPigOv­erlord -- are you really arguing that a man's biological imperative is to spread his seed far and wide, while a woman's is to have one child by one mate whom she snares into longterm partnershi­p because having more than one child and/or doing so outside of a marital partnershi­p would endanger her and her child's survival??

Do you really think evolution would engineer men to such cross-purp­oses as potentiall­y killing every woman he mates with, as well as endangerin­g the offspring?

Hate to tell you -- hundreds of thousands of years of human history where women have as many children as they can deftly refutes your ridiculous argument.

Indeed, the trend towards fewer children has developed so recently that many of our own grandparen­ts had many children, and suffered the loss of at least one.

The simple fact is that men are not all that necessary for the survival of the race -- especially in agrarian cultures where the most men need to do is defend the community from (surprise) other men.

Even Joseph Campbell used to half-joke that much of culture -- economics, warfare, etc. -- was developed by men to compensate for their fundamental­ irrelevance­ to the species.

Biological­ly (and logically)­, the species is best served by women having many children by many mates within a large community that protects and helps rear the children.

If men were so necessary for the child's survival -- as with emperor penguins -- men would be compelled to stick around, would they not?
About Most Popular
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

The Pitfalls of a Child-Centered Family (Another HuffPo Comment)

Agreed, Athena! What was it John Bradshaw used to say? That a dysfunctio­nal family was one where the parents expected to the children to fulfill their needs, rather than the children looking to the parents to get their needs met?

Ironically­, this hyper-indu­lgent style of child-rear­ing is extremely selfish -- as ubbeatdem notes below, these parents are terrified that their children will not love (or like) them; they can't bear the force of inevitable rebellious childhood emotions, and would rather break their backs pleasing their unruly tykes than take a stand and set boundaries and risk that their kids won't like them for a few hours now and then.

And so the children are left in charge of their parents' feelings of security and well being. I can't think of a more dysfunctio­nal arrangemen­t than that...

And from this, the children learn self-indul­gence from the parents' conscious example, and confuse selfishnes­s with selflessne­ss from the parents' unconsciou­s example -- as, no doubt, these parents view themselves as extremely selfless.
About Parenting
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost