Reading Blog 5

Inca parenting would get cancelled nowadays

Hi friends!

When Garcilaso discusses child rearing I was surprised that it was usually such an individual and nonchalant activity where women would “resume their household duties as if nothing happened (p. 213)” after birthing a child in the river or at home. Although not mentioned directly in this chapter, there were some herbal remedies that could be given to help with childbirth like coca tea. Given how easygoing childbirth is described by Garcilaso makes me wonder if mortality rates were somewhat low for there to not be a lot of emotional commotion around the event. However, I’m skeptical to believe mortality rates were low given just the general lack of control for infection and blood loss at the time. Garcilaso is also a man who didn’t birth a child. His aloofness to the experience of literally having a human rip your vagina makes me question him. As much as he wants to report on Inca culture, it seems he was probably not invited into the sacred spaces of childbirth. There’s a mention of a witch being the only potential help, but I wonder what that help entailed. Especially since the witch’s presence is described as different from a midwife the Spanish would’ve been familiar with.

Life for the babies was also tough. Kids were bathed in cold water to toughen them up and made to lie on cradles that were pretty hard (p. 212).The mothers also wouldn’t hold their babies under the belief that they would cry more and dislike their cradle (p. 212). Current studies show that there’s actually no such thing as holding and cuddling your baby too much, and it’s actually very much needed. So much so, that there’s specific volunteer positions at hospitals to hold babies in the NICU or that don’t have sufficient family members to hold them throughout their hospital stay (ex. single mom who had complications with birth). The Inca were able to grow into functioning adults so I’m not worried about them directly, but I wonder if parental attachment needs have evolved throughout time depending on the social roles one is eventually expected to fulfill. 

The degree of tough love the Inca’s supposedly gave themselves and their kids seems baffling to me and probably to most people nowadays. However, it did have me thinking alot about neurological expressions of pain. Given children were exposed to harsher sensory conditions (uncomfortable temperatures and pressures) during a period of greater behavioural sensitization, I wonder if the nociceptors (pain receptors that react to external sensory stimuli, usually in the skin, muscles, tendons) adapted to baseline stimulus differently and allowed people to be more tolerant of harsh conditions in their later years. Of course, I also wonder if there’s a potential slight genetic modification in DNA that has occurred in the past couple centuries that has slightly modified the opening speed of ion-gated channels along synapses, allowing more synaptic pulses indicating pain. There’s also a socially mediated attitude towards pain that probably affects higher pain tolerances and just having to make do with objectively worse conditions. It’s interesting to examine how the behavioural, genetic, and social components of pain can interact to create human experience. This is obviously a massive topic that I hope to someday study much more thoroughly, but for now, I’m glad to be living in the 21st century with my plush bed, hot showers, and epidurals.