It’s three in the morning, the light of a state-of-the-art baby monitor flickers in the darkness and an exhausted mother tries by all means to get her son to fall asleep again to finally achieve those long-awaited eight hours of sleep in one go. The room is full of amenities, but she feels a knot in her stomach. She is surrounded by technology, but feels more alone than ever.
If you ask in your group of friends or on any internet forum how exhausting parenting is today, the answer is unanimous: “It is extremely exhausting and constant.” However, science and history tell us that our ancestors probably did not suffer from this level of sleep deprivation, much less this suffocating loneliness.
And here comes the great paradox of our era. We might think that the problem is a lack of male involvement, but the data show a different picture. As we recently explained in Xatakaparents millennials Today they spend approximately four times more time caring for their children than parents of the generation of the baby boom. In countries like Spain, policies have taken a historic leap by equating paternity and maternity leave to 19 weeks. The father, culturally and legally, is at home.
So why are parents still on the brink of collapse? The answer lies not in a lack of will, but in our biology: we are fighting a losing battle against millions of years of evolution. Human beings evolved to breed in tribes and sleep in sections. Our modern society demands exactly the opposite from us, and it is costing us our health.
The end of the tribe and the ancestral dream
To understand what has happened to us, we must look to the past. As he explains to the BBC evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the human species would never have survived if mothers had not had “alloparents”—grandmothers, uncles, older brothers, and other members of the community—to care for babies who were born extremely immature. Studies in traditional populations they confirm it: In hunter-gatherer groups such as those in the Congo Basin, babies spend much of the day in arms, with alternative caregivers to the mother providing up to 43% of the baby’s direct care.
But not only the tribe has vanished; We have also altered our natural way of resting. In fact, the idea that we should have an uninterrupted eight hours of sleep It is a “modern invention”since before the Industrial Revolution and the arrival of artificial light, the biological pattern of humanity was the biphasic sleep or segmented: people slept for the first part at dusk, woke up in the early morning for a couple of hours (which they took advantage of to chat, pray or take care of the fire), and went back to sleep until dawn.
In today’s industrial societies, waking up at three in the morning is diagnosed as insomnia and generates deep anxiety. However, when researchers examine current hunter-gatherer tribes — whose sleep patterns last between 5.7 and 7.1 hours and are full of microawakenings — discover something fascinating: They don’t consider it a problem.
The loneliness epidemic and mental burden
This break with our evolutionary past is having devastating consequences. In different investigations they talk that we are facing a true epidemic of isolation: today, 65% of parents feel lonelys, a figure that shoots up to 77% in the case of single-parent families.
This “clinical loneliness” is not just a passing sadness. It is triggering Perinatal Mood and Anxiety Disorders (known in English as PMADs), which according to medical research affect up to 17.7% of mothers worldwide. Lack of support and isolation increase the risk of depression and cardiovascular problems. In its most extreme cases, psychiatric causes (including suicides and overdoses) have become one of the main causes of maternal mortality. A slab that disproportionately crushes single-parent families, racialized people or those at risk of exclusion and with financial stress, who lack the economic resources to outsource this care.
And behind closed doors, the mirage of equality in the couple continues to take its toll. Although the modern father “helps” more than ever, the “mental load”—the planning, conception, and anticipation of family needs— continues to fall overwhelmingly on women. Researcher Eve Rodsky defines it perfectly: today’s mothers act as “project managers” where their partners are often “kind subordinates” waiting for instructions. The result is a burnout (professional burnout syndrome) applied to parenting.
Curiously, this parental hyperpresence, born of anxiety, is also harming the little ones. The so-called “helicopter parents”, who fly over their children’s every movement to avoid frustration, are impeding the neurological development of their prefrontal cortex (in charge of solving problems). As studies warnthis has caused psychiatric admissions of adolescents for anxiety and depression disorders to skyrocket at an alarming rate.
The verdict of science
If we look for culprits for this epidemic of fatigue, science gives us a key clue. In modern societies, between 10% and 30% of people live with chronic insomnia. But if we look at current hunter-gatherer communities (such as the Hadza, the San or the Tsimane), this problem is practically a myth: it barely touches 2%. University of California (UCLA) researcher Jerome Siegel summed it up very well in the pages of Scientific American: The problem is that we have erased the natural regulators of sleep from the map. By living locked up, we no longer let our body feel the nighttime drop in temperature, an essential biological brake for rest.
For his part, David Samson, evolutionary anthropologist interviewed by the BBCargues that it is our rigid expectation of perfect sleep that fatigues us. Samson lived with the Hadza tribe in Tanzania and found that its members consider their sleep “good” despite waking up frequently. Instead of getting up, turning on lights, and looking at the clock, they simply accept waking up as natural.
This vision links with the proposal of James McKenna and Lee Gettler, anthropologists at the University of Notre Dame. As they explain in their own studyhave coined the term breastsleeping (a fusion of breastfeeding and sleep). They argue that, biologically, mother and nursing baby are an “integrated system,” and that safe bed-sharing, combined with breastfeeding, is the evolutionary norm that could greatly alleviate maternal exhaustion by preventing the mother from having to remain completely awake during each feeding.
The search for the new tribe
Faced with unattainable standards driven by the showcase of social networks – where use of more than two hours a day doubles the probability of social isolation – a silent rebellion has begun.
Thousands of women are rejecting the tyranny of perfection embodied in the “Tiger Mother.” Thus emerges the profile that some media and sociologists have baptized as the “Beta Mother” or “Type C”: parents who tolerate domestic disorder, make children’s menus more flexible and relax control over their children’s agendas. More than a fad, psychologists interpret this strategic renunciation as a survival mechanism and a direct response to the suffocation of hyperintensive parenting.
And since modern demography has liquidated villages and alienated extended families, specialists emphasize the urgency of building alternative support networks. Organizations like The Good Project They point to schools, peer support groups, and neighborhood associations as the only viable substitutes for forging communities with shared values that assume, in part, that lost “alloparental” role.
As the magazine illustrates International School Parent When analyzing hyperparenting, current parenting resembles a tightrope walker. If the parents cross the tightrope continuously holding the child’s hand, the child will never develop his or her own balance. Parenting, educators warn, should not be the hand that suffocates, but rather the safety net that waits below. In terms of neurological development, children have to be let down.
In light of the overwhelming rates of burnoutloneliness and clinical anxiety that the statistics collect, experts conclude that the isolated family nuclear model is biologically unsustainable. Lowering the levels of self-demand and abandoning the fiction that we can parent alone—and sleeping through sleep—has ceased to be a debate about parenting styles and has become a public health issue. The science is clear: requiring a brain designed for the tribe to survive in the solitude of a modern apartment is not an advance, it is evolutionary negligence.
Image | Photo by Jessica Rockowitz on Unsplash
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