Are grandparents supposed to be raising their grandchildren?

[A4E]

I've had this thought for a while now. The outline is this: In a stoneage scenario or pre agriculture, it could be the role of adults to go hunt for food or gather food of which old people would have a harder time doing. And in order to utilize the wisdom of old people, and from what I understand, also the joy old people get from spending time with children (perhaps a big clue), the old people would do most if not all the parenting, apart from giving milk.

 

For this I am assuming a peaceful society without child abuse, and who knows maybe it was in that time.

 

How does this convey to you? I dont know if it would work or not, just wondering if it has any merit because I have seen nothing about this topic. It would mean less government needed so maybe that is why.

 

 

Edit: Also presuming that children have atleast 1 grandparent, or would be parented by other old people. And that all the parents are very busy gathering food or building shelters or whatever.

[WasatchMan]

I don't know if I can speak on what is "suposed" to be. 

 

However, I think there is something of potential value in the "extended" family structure, and how having live in grandparents helping with the raising and the practical day-to-day could be beneficial to childhood development.

[Pepin]

From an evolutionary point of view, grandparents who could not reproduce would give some advantage if they helped in the raising of grandchildren. The advantage would of course be the replication of their own genes, which the grandchildren would share 1/16th. Though this number is small, I think I remember Dawkins talking about it being large enough to influence behavior. If they could reproduce, then there would be a larger advantage given to their genes through producing more offspring than taking care of grandchildren.

 

I don't think the potential costs of grandparenting are very high because recent studies seem to show that high levels physical fitness are very attainable in your 60's.

 

With humans, it seems somewhat plausible to me that grandparenting would have a positive evolutionary effect. Humans are very knowledge driven, making elders a great source of value. Many early human technologies likely provided a benefit which was an economy of scale, which would greatly reduce the cost of keeping around larger social groups.

 

It makes me think that the role of a grandparent might be to ensure that memes are successfully replicated. What I mean is that if there is a meme such as how to weave a basket, or hunt for deer, or how to start a fire, a grandparent can ensure successful replication of the meme through at least two generations.

 

Imagine the game telephone and how easy it is for a simple saying to lose its meaning. We can see this with respect to knowledge over just a couple of generations. But if there was an elder who has had success with the meme, and if this person is verifying the replication of the meme through correction, then its replication is likely to be much more accurate.

 

I do not think that parent to offspring meme replication would be terrible, but rather that the addition of the grandparent would provide a tremendous boost to accuracy, leading to a large boost in survivability. This is of course based on the assumption that knowledge was very important in human survival, which seems to be validated by historical evidence.

 

I don't think I've heard that idea before, I just came up with it, but I think it might provide some insight on a few questions. Provided that there is some validity to it, I wonder if more successful meme replication would be more advantageous for an individual's genes than the capability to reproduce later in life. If so, elders might have lost their ability to reproduce to stop them from reproducing and to instead focus on the 1/16th of their genes that can reproduce. Essentially, the frequency of an older individual's gene replication would need to be higher if they focused on the 1/16th within the grandchildren, than if they were to have an offspring with 1/2.

 

I hope that wasn't too confusing. I had a decent thought and had to expand upon it.

[A4E]

@Pepin: Very interesting and I do see how that would work. I wanted to include in the first post that given elders have alot more respect in non western countries, that their role as an overseer or supervisor would be more prevalent atleast in the history of those cultures.

 

But you did derail the question somewhat, in that my suggestion was that in ancient times, perhaps it was customary for old people to handle most of the raising of children, so that adults could focus entirely on working for the immediate survival of the tribe or village. Would that seem likely? Or am I just wrong?

[tasmlab]

@pepin, I think it's a quarter, not 1/16.  Folks have four grandparents.

[MMX2010]

 

But you did derail the question somewhat, in that my suggestion was that in ancient times, perhaps it was customary for old people to handle most of the raising of children, so that adults could focus entirely on working for the immediate survival of the tribe or village. Would that seem likely? Or am I just wrong?

 

I think it was customary, but I cannot say for certain.

 

You may not realize it, but you're really asking the most explosive possible question in this modern society, "Is it intelligent or crazy to assert that a young woman knows more about parenting / raising a child correctly than either her elders (who've done it before) or the scientific community (who, ideally, studies parenting both dispassionately and without agenda)?" 

 

If it's crazy, then the default assumption that "Mommy knows best because she is Mommy." is wrong.