Letters to the Editor
-
Biological roots
Paternity and maternity as identified by contribution of gametes evolved because, under certain environmental conditions, juveniles whose care was more assured by certain designated adults driven to identify with and care for them had higher survival rates to reproductive age than juveniles whose care was not as assured by such biologically-driven identification and commitment of caretakers. Likewise, under certain evolutionary contexts, survival and selective advantage of progeny has been conferred on individuals who are driven toward other behaviors, like use of aggression and violence to gain resources, siblicide, infanticide, and rape. The fact that natural selection formed traits, or tendencies, over past millennia and ancient environmental contexts carries no normative or adaptive mandates for autonomous humans in contemporary conditions.
Except, of course, by virtue of the stories and fears we carry in our minds. Those stories and fears – about “mothers” and “fathers”, fears of change and of authenticity, fears carried by adults of displeasing mommy and daddy – are what keep us from facing barriers to real parenthood, which is impaired by kinship identification. To the extent that individuals are normatively constructed as caretakers of biologically related children, those children’s development will be impaired precisely because a “parent” thus constructed and granted ownership of offspring is invested (as we consistently observe) less in the growth, self-actualization and autonomy (i.e. well being) of the child as individual than in some idealized and normative model of how “my son” or “my daughter” contributes to the parent’s own attempt to validate self, family name, and social standing as prescribed by pathological social expectations for “success”.
This pathology of kinship, enforced and celebrated by patriarchy as “family”, “motherhood” and “fatherhood”, is the single greatest barrier to the loving and competent care of children and is represented by a culture of “adults” functioning as frightened, dependent children afraid of the disapproval of fictionally constructed “mothers” and “fathers” and afraid of shaming their “families”, rather than as autonomous beings free to choose relationships and to construct themselves.
“Biological roots” and longing for a “biological relationship” (whatever that could conceivably mean) matter to children and create anxiety only because of the maladaptive fictions we perpetuate and ingrain in them, fictions which would not be needed apart from maladaptive drives toward monogamy and identification of a male and female “parent” who somehow have rights to them.