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With a slight departure from the usual editorial policy of printing almost exclusively original articles and stories on the website, I reprint this article which appeared in the Tacoma News-Tribune November 5, 2002, taken from the New York Times. I agree with the most basic premises of the research. However, I see a major departure from the findings when they are compared with our Grandmother, Nellie Bryant Burdett. Perhaps, "A son is a son until he takes a wife. A Daughter is a daughter all her life," is folklore stemming from an agreement with the findings of this research and explains why paternal grandmothers identified here are bad for their grandchildren's health...Nellie seems to have soared above such traditions and to have done very well with her sons' wives and their children. Ruth Terry Bryant and Isabell Kemp Bryant are suspected of adding evidence in support of the research discussed below. I have bolded some of the text which I find of particular interest to our great big family. Virginia To grandmother's house may be the best
place for children to go Grandma, what a big
and fickle metaphor you can be! For children, the name translates as "the
magnificent one with presents in her suitcase who thinks I'm a genius
if I put my shoes on the right feet, and who stuffs me with cookies the
moment my parents' backs are turned." In news reports,
to call a woman "grandmotherly" is shorthand for "kindly,
frail, harmless, keeper of the family antimacassars, and operationally
past tense." For anthropologists
and ethnographers of yore, grandmothers were crones, an impediment to
"real" research. The renowned ethnographer Charles William Merton
Hart, who in the 1920s studied the Tiwi hunter-gatherers of Australia,
described the elder females there as "a terrible nuisance" and
"physically quite revolting" and in whose company he was distressed
to find himself on occasion, yet whose activities did not merit recording
or analyzing with anything like the attention he paid the men, the young
women, even the children. But for a growing
number of evolutionary biologists and cultural anthropologists, grandmothers
represent a key to understanding human prehistory, and why we are
as we are - slow to grow up and start breeding but remarkably fruitful
once we get there, empathetic and generous as animals go, and family-focused
to a degree hardly seen elsewhere in the primate order. As a result, biologists,
evolutionary anthropologists, sociologists and demographers are starting
to pay more attention to grandmothers: What they did in the past, whether
and how they made a difference to their families' welfare, and what they
are up to now in a sampling of cultures around the world. At a recent international
conference - the first devoted to grandmothers - researchers concluded
with something approaching a consensus that grandmothers in particular,
and elder female kin in general, have been an underrated source of power
and sway in our evolutionary heritage. Grandmothers, they said, are
in a distinctive evolutionary category. They are no longer reproductively
active themselves, as older males may struggle to be, but they often have
many hale years ahead of them; and as the existence of substantial proportions
of older adults among even the most "primitive" cultures indicates,
such durability is not new. If, over the span
of human evolution, postmenopausal women have not been using their stalwart
bodies for bearing babies, they very likely have been directing their
considerable energies elsewhere. Say, over the river
and through the woods. It turns out that there is a reason why children
are perpetually yearning for the flour-dusted, mythical figure called
grandma or granny or oma or abuelita. As a number of participants at the
conference demonstrated, the presence or absence of a grandmother often
spelled the difference in traditional subsistence cultures between life
or death for the grandchildren. In fact, having a grandmother around
sometimes improved a child's prospects to a far greater extent than did
the presence of a father. Dr. Ruth Mace and
Dr. Rebecca Sear of the department of anthropology at University College
in London, for example, analyzed demographic information from rural Gambia
that was collected from 1950 to 1974, when child mortality rates in the
area were so high that even minor discrepancies in care could be all too
readily tallied. The anthropologists found that for Gambian toddlers,
weaned from the protective balm of breast milk but not yet possessing
strength and immune vigor of their own, the presence of a grandmother
cut their chances of dying in half. "The surprising
result to us was that if the father was alive or dead didn't matter,"
Mace said in a telephone interview. "If the grandmother dies,
you notice it; if the father does, you don't." Importantly, this
beneficent granny effect derived only from maternal grandmothers -
the mother of one's mother. The paternal grandmothers made no difference
to a child's outcome. Indeed, a number
of researchers at the conference admitted to being flummoxed by the nature
of grandma's goodness. "This was a
constant refrain: What is the mechanism?" said Dr. Patricia Draper,
a professor of anthropology at the University of Nebraska. "We
can see that grandmothers are doing something, but what? What buttons
are they pushing that end up making the difference to their families?" Perhaps, she suggested,
they exerted as much of a psychological as a practical effect - for example,
by encouraging family cohesion or stifling extreme sibling rivalry. In two studies, the
divergent effects of the two grandmother species is so pronounced that
the son's mother appears not merely a neutral influence on her grandchildren,
but a negative one. Dr. Cheryl Jamison,
an anthropologist at Indiana University in Bloomington, and her colleagues
combed through an exceptionally complete population register from a village
in central Japan. The records covered a period from 1671 to 1871, when
officials sought to battle the encroachment of Christianity and thus kept
track of everybody's birth, death and whereabouts, the better to interrogate
citizens each year on their religious allegiance. As in the Gambian study,
the overall mortality rate for children was substantial, with 27.5 children
dying by age 16. Jamison and her co-workers
determined that when a maternal grandmother lived in the household,
boys were 52 percent less likely to die in childhood than if there was
no grandmother present. Conversely, when the father's mother lived
in the house, boys were 62 percent more likely to die than were those
without a resident grandma. For girls, no statistically significant benefit
or decrement could be seen from grandmothers of either bloodline. Jamison cautioned
that not too much could be made of the results, for, in a patrilineal
culture like that of premodern Japan, where sons were the ones who took
in their aging parents, the sample size for maternal grandmothers living
with their grandchildren was extremely small. Nevertheless, she said,
she was startled by her results. "One would think
that boys would be preferred by everybody, but apparently that isn't what
happened here," she said. Why boys should be
helped or harmed to a comparatively greater extent than are female children
in this sample could not be gleaned from the population registry data,
Jamison said. Researchers with
a Darwinian bent propose that the discrepant effects of maternal versus
paternal grandparents is a result of the old evolutionary bugaboo, paternity
uncertainty. Maternal grandmothers, they reason, are confident that the
grandchildren in question are their blood relations, and hence worth working
for, whereas the mother of a son, ever unsure of her daughter-in-law's
fidelity, may withhold her love and care, albeit unconsciously, from the
young bairns before her. Kohli said a new
French study of contemporary grandparenthood had found, among other things,
that paternal grandparents often wanted to do more for their grandchildren,
but felt they were not as welcome to visit as were the maternal grandparents. |
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