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Title: | The male breadwinner nuclear family is not the 'traditional' human family, and promotion of this myth may have adverse health consequences |
Authors: | Sear, R |
Keywords: | grandmothers;cooperative reproduction;cooperative breeding;nuclear family |
Issue Date: | 3-May-2021 |
Publisher: | Royal Society Publishing |
Citation: | Sear, R. (2021) 'The male breadwinner nuclear family is not the 'traditional' human family, and promotion of this myth may have adverse health consequences', Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 376 (1827), 20200020, pp. 1 - 9. doi: 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. |
Description: | Data accessibility: This article has no additional data. |
URI: | https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/28967 |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0020 |
ISSN: | 0962-8436 |
Other Identifiers: | ORCiD: Rebecca Sear https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4315-0223 20200020 |
Appears in Collections: | Dept of Life Sciences Research Papers |
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FullText.pdf | Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved. This is an accepted manuscript made available on this institutional repository under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), see: https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/id/publication/11601. The published version may differ from it. Please cite as: Sear, R. (2021) 'The male breadwinner nuclear family is not the 'traditional' human family, and promotion of this myth may have adverse health consequences', Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 376 (1827): 20200020, pp. 1-9. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0020. | 1.07 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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