Centuries of Childhood - by Benjamin Breen - Res Obscura
One of my favorite documentaries is the 2010 French film Babies. Told without narration, it follows four babies in four cultures: Mongolia, Namibia, California, and Japan.
I first watched it in 2021 with my wife Roya, when she was in her third trimester of pregnancy. Those months leading up to the birth of our daughter Yara almost felt like we were studying for an exam. Watching Babies was just a small part of a regimen that included close-reads of Emily Oster, endless scrolling of the various parenting subreddits, and debates about attachment parenting, sleep training, screen time, and everything in between. We researched sleep sacks and Snoos, white noise machines and bottle warmers.
And, along the way, we both encountered an assumption that seemed to structure almost everything else. This is the idea that there are two kinds of parenting, “modern” and “traditional”… and that there is something distinctly isolating, atomized, and even damaging about modern parenting methods.
During this same period, I was in the thick of writing my book Tripping on Utopia, a history of the origin of psychedelic science that centers on the anthropologist Margaret Mead and her world. And Margaret Mead was utterly obsessed with babies. So it was partly as a first time parent and partly as a historian of anthropology that I read articles which said things like this: “Historically, premature infants would be consistently attached to their mothers” or trumpeted the “millennia-old methods of raising good kids that made American parenting seem bizarre and ineffective.”
