Is it all small families' fault?
Did we sabotage ourselves?
My parents both came from large-ish families. My paternal grandparents had 4 children, while my maternal grandparents had 5.
Despite their best efforts, I was an only child.
Not only that, but I lived in a fairly rural area, with no one my own age for miles around. I grew up with more trees and beasts for friends than other humans. This seemed to cause abundant frustration with my parents (and me) with my social skills in public.
Now that I’m older and many of my friends are having kids of their own, observing the process of child rearing has put a lot life’s experiences into perspective.
Stating the Obvious
The debate over how “blank slate” humans are is a frustrating one mostly because people define their terms so poorly it becomes an exercise of yelling past each other. So let’s define it using walking: Humans are not born knowing how to walk. In fact, an infant’s muscles are too weak and the body too lopsided to even be able to do it. No amount of effort will get a day old baby to walk upright. But we DO have an innate drive to learn how to walk. Yet even when we start to learn it, we do it very badly. So a child takes a few halting steps, then fails and falls down. Then a few more, and fails again.
People seem to forget that learning is all about failing repeatedly until you get it right. That’s what practice is all about - fail and fail and fail and fail again until you learn the right way by doing it all the wrong ways.
Wouldn’t the same apply to social interaction?
The problem is, if you fail at walking you’ve just hurt yourself for a bit - failing at socialization hurts a lot longer. Do it badly enough, and people go away from you, further reducing your ability to fail and practice and “git good.”
Unless of course they’re family. Then they can’t leave you. They have to let you practice more - and those siblings can give you honest feedback. After all, it has been so long since I learned to walk, the effort is so ingrained now, if a child was struggling at it and asked for help I would be stumped on what aid I could provide. It’s been so far back, I’ve forgotten what difficulties a learner has. But another child? One who may be just a bit older? The memories would still be fresh and they could probably help the kid far more than an adult. Likewise with socialization. By now if a kid asked “why do we say this?” or “how did you know what they really meant?” there’s a chance I’ve forgotten the answer as long as I’ve been alive. Yet an older sibling would better be able to address those questions given their own recent efforts.
Add in that phones and social media now allow for every social failure to be preserved until the end of time and go viral through the whole world means the price of failure and learning is astronomical. Is it any wonder then that kids are socially shy, awkward, and afraid nowadays? They no longer have any safe spaces to practice and learn and the world has reached the stage of “do it right the first time or die!”
I think this also explains a lot of the conflict between the sexes. Even if you have a sibling, a one-off data point is easy to ignore. “Not all women are like that, that’s just sis being sis.” Or “That’s just how my brother is, surely most guys are different.” But imagine you had say… 6 of both sexes in your family. Then, growing up, your brain would just have to notice the ways your siblings are distinct and the commonalities they share. Grow up with six sisters, and you’ll probably get a decent idea of what women want. Survive a house with six brothers, and there’s a good chance you’ll know how men are.
At least it makes me wonder that when you hear complaining about the way things are nowadays, is it because we took for granted all the benefits large families gave to society? Did we get rid of them without coming up with suitable replacements for the functions they served? How much more did they do for all of us?