Opinion: Expecting mothers to care for children with little support, while expecting fathers to provide for their families with little support, is likely to lead to adverse health consequences for mothers, fathers & children

Opinion: The male breadwinner nuclear family is not the ‘traditional’ human family, and promotion of this myth may have adverse health consequences. Rebecca Sear. Royal Society Philosophical Transactions B, June 21 2021, Volume 376, Issue 1827. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0020

Abstract: The importance of social support for parental and child health and wellbeing is not yet sufficiently widely recognized. The widespread myth in Western contexts that the male breadwinner–female homemaker nuclear family is the ‘traditional’ family structure leads to a focus on mothers alone as the individuals with responsibility for child wellbeing. Inaccurate perceptions about the family have the potential to distort academic research and public perceptions, and hamper attempts to improve parental and child health. These perceptions may have arisen partly from academic research in disciplines that focus on the Western middle classes, where this particular family form was idealized in the mid-twentieth century, when many of these disciplines were developing their foundational research. By contrast, evidence from disciplines that take a cross-cultural or historical perspective shows that in most human societies, multiple individuals beyond the mother are typically involved in raising children: in evolutionary anthropology, it is now widely accepted that we have evolved a strategy of cooperative reproduction. Expecting mothers to care for children with little support, while expecting fathers to provide for their families with little support, is, therefore, likely to lead to adverse health consequences for mothers, fathers and children. Incorporating evidence-based evolutionary, and anthropological, perspectives into research on health is vital if we are to ensure the wellbeing of individuals across a wide range of contexts.

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What are the implications of a male breadwinner isolated nuclear family norm for health and wellbeing?

So there is considerable evidence that the idea that the ‘traditional’ human family is an isolated nuclear family, in which mothers are solely responsible for childcare and fathers solely responsible for providing for their families, is a myth. Isolated nuclear families, who raise children without help beyond the parental unit, barely seem to exist at all, even in 20th or 21st century Western societies, and male breadwinning is both rare and novel in our history. Myths about the ‘traditional’ family, and what ‘traditional’ maternal and paternal roles should look like, are likely to have real world implications. The assumption that mothers are primarily responsible for childrearing, that they should sacrifice themselves to invest intensively and over a long period in their children, may put considerable 12 pressure on women to behave in ways compatible with this difficult-to-attain, and novel, ideal of motherhood (Budds, this issue). Particularly damaging may be the idea that mothers should be able to cope with relatively little support. Research has shown that new mothers in the UK spend a significant proportion of their time alone with their infants (one study found 38% of mothers spent >8 hours a day alone, and 34% between 4-8 hours [80]). This is a situation which appears to be less than desirable in a social species which relies on cooperation to raise children, and on social learning for developing skills in a wide range of behaviours including parenting. Such isolation and the expectation that mothers should cope with little support is not likely to provide ideal childrearing conditions for either mother or child; for example, prompting maternal guilt where mothers feel they are not living up to this ideal [81,82], increased rates of postnatal depression [83] and decreased breastfeeding [84] in the absence of support, and other negative effects on mother’s wellbeing [85]. Assumptions about the adverse effect of the ‘breakdown’ of marriages, which idealise the nuclear family as the best way to raise children, and blame adverse child outcomes on the absence of such a family structure, have also led to government interventions aimed at persuading couples to marry rather than cohabit in the US [86]. These interventions tend to focus on socioeconomically disadvantaged groups because such groups have lower rates of marriage than more advantaged groups. A belief underlying these interventions appears to be that if disadvantaged groups can be made to form marital relationships which mirror the family structure of advantaged groups, then their disadvantage will melt away. Such interventions have attracted criticism, because a more effective way of reducing “bad family outcomes” is likely to be to tackle economic disadvantage itself, rather than a marker of disadvantage such as cohabitation [87]. These marriage interventions also don’t work. Public health initiatives around maternal and child health in lower and middle income countries typically also assume a default nuclear family structure in which mothers are largely responsible for the health of their children – this excludes vital support structures such as grandmothers (see Daniele, this issue). There are even some perceptions in global health that grandmothers are the ‘guardians of tradition’ [88] and that, if they have a role at all, it is a role which has the potential for negative maternal and health outcomes given that the advice of older women may contradict that of public health professionals. This echoes some of the findings from the literature on grandparental investment which suggests that input from grandparents may not always result in child outcomes which would be approved of by a public health professional. But even if older women’s advice does contradict that of public health professionals, they are typically very influential in decisions around 13 maternal and child health, which suggests it is even more important to incorporate older women into public health interventions [30]. The positive results in the handful of studies which have incorporated grandmothers and older women in public health initiatives suggest this would be a fruitful avenue for improving maternal and child health [88–91], and mental health (Dixon Chibanda’s ‘Friendship Bench’ is perhaps the best known example of a successful intervention employing ‘grandmothers’ [92,93]). Ideologies around the family and ‘traditional’ gender roles feed into political ideologies which promote hierarchies of male dominance over women. Online fora have facilitated the spread of misogynistic movements, including Mens’ Rights Activist groups and Incels (“involuntary celibates”), which are collectively referred to as the ‘manosphere’. These movements use and misuse evolutionary psychology as their theoretical justification, and draw on supposedly biological arguments that women are ‘designed’ to bear and raise children while men are ‘designed’ to do pretty much everything else in society [94,95]. These movements have led to fatal terrorist attacks [96,97]. These ideologies not only present a terrorist threat, but also do not seem to benefit the men who adopt them, given such ideologies sometimes promote ‘men going their own way’ and removing themselves from (female) society [98]. The cooperative nature of our species suggests that such isolationism may not suit our evolved preferences [99]. At a less extreme level, the male breadwinner norm promotes ideals of male independence and isolation from others, since it assumes that men should have the ability to entirely provision a wife and children without support, which may feed into gender norms and socialisation which have been popularly referred to as ‘toxic masculinity’. These include emphasis on male dominance and self-reliance, and are considered to be detrimental to men, women and children [100]. Finally, despite the belief in some circles that intensive mothering, and lengthy, dependent childhoods, is optimal for children, the little research on the impact of intensive mothering does not find clear and conclusive evidence that such parenting has substantial positive effects on children [101]. Such childhoods may even fail to allow children to develop some of the skills they need to succeed in adult life [102]. Children and adolescents typically lack opportunities to develop parenting skills in Western societies, for example, as they are no longer involved in caring for younger children. Hrdy [1] also cautions us that, if we are a species adapted to a strategy of cooperative reproduction, then mothers raising children with little support from others, and keeping children dependent on mothers for lengthy periods, may hamper children’s abilities to develop the social, cognitive and emotional skills they need to succeed in adult society:14 “If empathy and understanding develop only under particular rearing conditions, and if an everincreasing proportion of the species fails to encounter those conditions but nevertheless survives to reproduce, it won’t matter how valuable the underpinnings for collaboration were in the past. Compassion and the quest for emotional connection will fade away as surely as sight in cave-dwelling fish”