Dr Paul Turke is a pediatrician, evolutionary anthropologist, and an author. How did humans raise kids 1,000 years ago? Today’s parenting is all routines, data-driven insights and what the latest research says. But what can ancient wisdom teach us about parenting, and where might it call our modern methods into question? Expect to learn how child rearing might look different if parents were educated in evolutionary theory, what the evolutionary role of grandparents are, and why it matters for raising kids today, Where babies would have slept ancestrally, why toddlers wake up at night, throw food, or act out and why might those be smart behaviors, what parents should know about “normal” child development from an evolutionary view, what we can we learn from cultures that co-sleep, breastfeed longer, and parent together and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://gym.sh/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM10) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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How might child rearing look different if parents were educated in evolutionary theory? Well, I think quite a few ways.
Probably the biggest one is in one of the big themes in my book is that we used to live embedded in kinship networks. Um, so we had lots of different, uh, helpers contributors, uh, helping us to raise our children that, you know, there are situations now where one parent, usually a mother gets stuck with three kids in a, in a home. And, um,
It's very different from how things used to work back in the day. And it puts a lot of stress on everybody, children, but parents, parents also. So that's a big thing. Kids, when they would go out to play and run around, they would... be in sort of mixed age groups.
So they would have, if you were a three-year-old, you'd have a seven-year-old there to learn from, and you might be helping a two-year-old. And so the sort of the independent child stuff would be different. So those are two of the big ways that we've lived in. We live now sort of in a mismatched environment.
What does that say about broken homes or un-intact homes increasing, single parents, step-parents? What are the implications of that when it comes to child development?
Yeah, I think it puts a lot of stress on children. It also... You know, the human brain, the child's brain, is very malleable, very undeveloped when baby first appears on the scene. And when we change the environment, the early environment— that children are reared under, we sort of miss, I think some of the cues that lead to, uh, uh, normal development.
Now humans, if anything, we're, you know, we're, we're flexible. We, we can adapt to a lot of different things. So it's not, uh, uh, the end of the world, but if we're, but if we're trying to optimize, you know, we're, we're sort of off the optimum if we're, um, uh, Under those sorts of stressful situations.
And I think that has implications for happiness and healthiness and, you know, just emotional well-being, that sort of thing. And even things like ADHD, potentially depression. the more spectrum-y things on the altruism spectrum, all of that can be affected, I think, by, uh, this mismatch, uh, environment, stressful, broken homes, the step-parents, like you say. Um, so, um, I, I,
I don't know if you want to go into it, but there was a group of evolutionary psychologists, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, who did early work on step-parenting, and they found that... step-parents tend to be, I mean, most step-parents are great.
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