In April of 2014 I took this picture of my son eating
popcorn off our kitchen floor. In this
picture the food is actually coming out of the bowl, but that wasn’t
necessarily the case the entire time. I suppose one may also recognize that he
isn’t wearing any clothes. For some
internal reason that I can’t fully justify, I feel like young children are
happier without clothes. Perhaps I am
just projecting my own childhood on others, as my mother let us run without
clothes, but I just think little kids shouldn’t have to wear clothes all the
time.
When taking the picture I joked with my wife that we were re-inventing
Caveman Parenting. After a bit it struck me that there might be something to
that. As a biological anthropologist I
am trained to look at problems from an evolutionary perspective, and a trend
adhering to that philosophy has been trickling into the parenting canon for
some time.
So here I am to add my little piece. Despite the name, this blog will not actually
attempt to be a parenting guide, but rather musings on parenting two young boys
in postmodern suburbia by someone who views the world from an evolutionary
perspective. This is not the Paleo Diet, which any Anthropologist or dietician can
tell you, has no origins in science and that it is just a new name slapped on the
Atkins diet, while also pretending to be based on an evolutionary perspective.
Of course I am playing on the same romantic notion that we
can reach back into our past to find solutions for today. I am just not going to claim that truth where
there is only conjecture. Conversely, I
hope to, in the course of my musings, do something which the creators of the
Paleo Diet have not, and that is to occasionally add some actual substance that
is based in our evolutionary biology.
Mostly, I just want to write about my kids, my adventures
raising them, and have a place to say silly things. So here is my cave-baby, Declan, eating his
popcorn off the floor with no clothes on.
