Friday, July 25, 2014

Clan Kids

For me, articles like these ("Why So Many People Care So Much About Others' Sex Lives") highlight a social bias that children have always been seen as the sole responsibility of their biological parents in every human society, past and present.

I'm only tapping in to a general memory of history and sociology books I've read over my lifetime, but I know many of them outlined societies where children were seen as everyone's responsibility. I think it would be an insane proposal to them that biological parents be the only ones responsible for their children. They did pay attention to family relationships, of course, but these connections were used to identify membership in a large and complicated clan structure, not to isolate a "nuclear" family from everyone else in the larger group. Given that social structure, their attitudes about sex would have to be different than the conclusions in this article. 

No comments: