How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong - Dr Paul Turke - #938

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
How might child rearing look different if parents were educated in evolutionary theory?

**Paul Turke** (0:08)
Well, I think quite a few ways. Probably the biggest one, in one of the big themes in my book is that we used to live embedded in kinship networks. So we had lots of different helpers, contributors helping us to raise our children. There are situations now where one parent, usually a mother, gets stuck with three kids in a home, and 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.

**Chris Williamson** (1:29)
What about, what does that say about broken homes or un-intact homes increasing single-parent, step-parent? What are the implications of that when it comes to child development?

**Paul Turke** (1:43)
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, very undeveloped when baby first appears on the scene. And when we change the environment, the early environment, the children are reared under, we sort of miss, I think, some of the cues that lead to normal development. Now, humans, if anything, we're flexible. We can adapt to a lot of different things. So it's not the end of the world. But if we're trying to optimize, you know, we're sort of off the optimum if we're 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 the more spectrumy things on the autrism spectrum, all of that can be affected, I think, by this mismatch of environment, stressful, broken homes, that step parents, like you say.
So, 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, you know, they found that step parents tend to be, I mean, most step parents are great, you know, of course they step in, they help, they're wonderful. But statistically, there's more likelihood of abuse or neglect coming from the step parent. You know, it's the old Cinderella thing. And so, you know, the more our environment is altered from what we used to have, where there were always three or four people. So if grandma was a bad apple, you know, there were other people to step in. But if it's just a broken home and just one mom or one dad, you know, that can increase the amount of abuse and things like that that go on. So that was very influential early work in evolutionary psychology. And some people got upset about it, where they're saying, oh my God, because it's natural, does that mean it's okay for step parents to abuse kids? And, you know, of course, that doesn't make sense. That's the naturalistic fallacy. And, yeah, no, it's almost the opposite. It's the idea that, you know, hey, if you're going to be a step parent, just be forewarned that there's some going to be emotional challenges for you. And it could be a little bit harder than, you know, on that sort of thing. So we would hope that would remedy the situation, not excuse it.

**Chris Williamson** (4:55)
Yeah, it's be extra vigilant if you're a step parent, you know, this is going to be tough. Raising kids is tough. And one of the ways that the toughness of raising kids gets ameliorated is by them being your genetic progeny. So you're like, they're crying again for the seventh night in a row, but it's my cry. So, but if it's just the person that you're in love with's progenies cry, there's a lot less motivation to be there and you might get more frustrated, so on and so forth. And yeah, I think it's a 100x increase in child mortality when there's one non-biological parent in the household. So some of the outcomes, I mean, the base rate for that's quite, that's not saying that it's making a massive difference, but it's a sufficiently significant difference that it's something everyone should be aware of. You mentioned there about grandparents.