Daycare, Not Warfare: What Teen Girls Tell Us About the Evolution of Empathy

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.alternet.org/books/146896/daycare,_not_warfare:_what_teen_girls_tell_us_about_the_evolution_of_empathy?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=alternet_main_tester

How the stereotypical first job of a young girl -- babysitting -- may be the ultimate source of our ability to understand each other.



The following is an adapted excerpt from Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential—and Endangered (Morrow, 2010) by Maia Szalavitz and Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD.

Teenage girls are not especially known for empathy. To adults, they often seem self-involved, moody and inconsiderate. Their obsessions with what seem like trivial social slights and their desperate yearning for status and friendships, however, may reveal important truths about the development of altruism in humans and the conditions under which children's brains evolved. And oddly, that stereotypical first job of a young girl -- babysitting -- may be the ultimate source of our ability to understand each other.

Here's how babysitting, teen cliques and empathy intersect. For centuries, human caring behavior was either ignored or dismissed. It was seen as mere self-interest; only occurring when, in fact, the goals of the self and the other happened to coincide, as in parenting. But recent research in neuroscience has complicated matters, showing that not only is altruism and a desire for fair treatment real, it shows up early in life and even in other species.

For example, chimps will protest when another ape is not rewarded equally for similar behavior, even rejecting their own treat. And children as early as 14 months will try, without prompting, to help adults having difficulty reaching an object that the child knows how to get.


Much more at the link above ----

[BrklynLiberal]

1. Thanks for this link.

[Captain Hilts]

2. Babysitting was paid 50 cents an hour and lawn mowing $5 an hour. It's our first lesson

that male labor is worth more than female labor.

I decided to mow lawns.

Girls not babysitting is leading the world to hell. It's all their fault.

[Speck Tater]

3. As a teenage boy in the 60's...

I was the most popular babysitter in the neighborhood. The neighborhood girls just hated it that I was always the one parents called first.

[Captain Hilts]

4. Good on you!

It's best to do BOTH!

I had only one male friend who babysat.

[Lance_Boyle]

5. No way.

I babysat as a teenager and I'm a right bastard.

Also, being a bastard I have to kind of chuckle at this: "children as early as 14 months will try, without prompting, to help adults having difficulty reaching an object that the child knows how to get." That sentence put a picture in my head of crews walking down the side of the street, picking up trash with toddlers on sticks.

[Jennicut]

6. I babysat until I was 18! Great job, got paid well, had fun with the kids.

Now I went back to school to teach...I never stopped liking working with kids.