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

Family Values 451The most pervasive myth is the denial of maternal ambivalence: thatmothers really both love and hate their children. There's a real silenceabout the ambivalent feelings; . . . it's tantamount to being a bad mother.[In my clinical practice], anger and rage are normal. Children are endlesslydemanding, and they'll just suck you dry. Women shouldn't have tofeel that they are supposed to meet all of the child's needs. But the mythis that mother love is natural and operative at all times.Even the advocates of mothers' rights often feel they must frame theirarguments in terms of the interests of the child (an overburdenedmother is a bad mother) rather than in terms of the interests of themother (an overburdened mother is unhappy).More conservative social critics have also begun to notice that parents'and children's interests can diverge. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead hasreviewed data showing that sex education does not succeed in its advertisedfunction of reducing teenage pregnancies. Today's teens know allabout sex and its hazards, but the girls end up pregnant anyway, quite possiblybecause they don't mind the idea of having babies. If the teens' parentsdo mind, they may have to enforce their interests by controlling theteenagers (with chaperones and curfews), not just by educating them.I mention these debates not to take a side but to call attention to thelong reach of parent-offspring conflict. Evolutionary thinking is often putdown as a "reductionistic approach" that aims to redefine all social andpolitical issues as technical problems of biology. The criticism has itbackwards. The evolution-free discourse that has prevailed for decadeshas treated childrearing as a technological problem of determining whichpractices grow the best children. Trivers' insight is that decisions aboutchildrearing are inherently about how to allocate a scarce resource—theparents' time and effort—to which several parties have a legitimateclaim. As such, childrearing will always be partly a question of ethics andpolitics, not just of psychology and biology.BROTHERS AND SISTERS-Ever since Cain slew Abel, siblings have been entangled by many emotions.As people of the same generation who know each other well, theyreact to each other as individuals: they may like or dislike one another,compete if they are of the same sex, or feel sexual attraction if they are