Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Family Values 433are relatively harmonious because the usual bickering between husbandand wife is mitigated by their sympathy for each other as blood relatives.These days it's impolite to talk about parental love having anything todo with biological relatedness because it sounds like a slur on the manyparents with adopted children and stepchildren. Of course couples lovetheir adopted children; if they weren't unusually committed to simulatinga natural family experience they would not have adopted to startwith. But stepfamilies are different. The stepparent has shopped for aspouse, not a child; the child is a cost that comes as part of the deal.Stepparents have a poor reputation; even Webster's unabridged dictionarydefines stepmother, in one of its two definitions, as "one that fails togive proper care or attention." The psychologists Martin Daly and MargoWilson comment:The negative characterization of stepparents is by no means peculiar toour culture. The folklorist who consults Stith Thompson's massive Motif-Index of Folk Literature will encounter such pithy synopses as "Evilstepmother orders stepdaughter to be killed" (Irish myth), and "Evil stepmotherworks stepdaughter to death in absence of merchant husband"(India). For convenience, Thompson divided stepfather tales into twocategories: "cruel stepfathers" and "lustful stepfathers." From Eskimos toIndonesians, through dozens of tales, the stepparent is a villain in everypiece.Daly and Wilson note that many social scientists assume that the difficultiesplaguing step relationships are caused by "the myth of the cruelstepparent." But why, they ask, should stepparents in so many culturesbe targets of the same slander? Their own explanation is more direct.The ubiquity of Cinderella stories ... is surely a reflection of certainbasic, recurring tensions in human society. Women must often have beenforsaken with dependent children throughout human history, and bothfathers and mothers were often prematurely widowed. If the survivorwished to forge a new marital career, then the fate of the childrenbecame problematic. [Among the Tikopia and the Yanomamo, the husband]demands the death of his new wife's prior children. Other solutionshave included leaving the children with postmenopausal matrilinealrelatives, and the levirate, a widespread custom by which a widow andher children are inherited by the dead man's brother or other near relative.In the absence of such arrangements, children were obliged to tagalong as stepchildren under the care of nonrelatives with no particular