Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina) / quote 3 of 91
Big brains, narrow hips and the birth of parenting
But why does it take so much time and effort? Blame our big, fat, gold-plated, nothing-else-like-it brains. We evolved to have larger brains with higher IQs, which allowed us to move from leopard food to Masters of the Universe in 10 million very short years. We gained big brains through the energy savings of walking on two legs instead of four. But attaining the balance necessary to walk upright required the narrowing of the Homo sapiens pelvic canal. For females, that meant one thing: excruciatingly painful, often fatal births. An arms race quickly developed, evolutionary biologists theorized, between the width of the birth canal and the size of the brain. If the baby’s head were too small, the baby would die (without extraordinary and immediate medical intervention, premature infants wouldn’t last five minutes). If the baby’s head were too big, the mother would die. The solution? Give birth to babies before their skulls become too big to kill mom. The consequence? Kids come into the world before their brains are fully developed. The result? Parenthood. Because the bun is forced to come out of the oven before it is done, the child needs instruction from veteran brains for years. The relatives are the ones who get the job, as they brought the child into the world in the first place. You don’t have to dig deep into the Darwinian playbook to find a cogent explanation for parenting behavior. That’s not the entire mystery of parenting, but it underscores its importance. We survived because enough of us became parents good enough to shepherd our pooping, peeing, swearing, breathtakingly vulnerable offspring into adulthood. And we have no real say in the matter. A baby’s brain simply isn’t ready to survive the world. Clearly, childhood is a vulnerable time. More than a decade passes between the birth of a baby and its ability to reproduce—an eternity compared with other species. This gap shows not only the depth of the brain’s developmental immaturity but also the evolutionary need for unflinchingly attentive parenting. As we evolved, adults who formed protective and continuous teaching relationships with the next generation were at a distinct advantage over those who either could not or would not. In fact, some evolutionary theorists believe that language developed in all its richness just so that this instruction between parent and child could occur with greater depth and efficiency. Relationships among adults were crucial to our survival as well—and they still are, despite ourselves.