>An adolescence such as Western children experience is certainly not a part
>of all cultures nor does it go back very far historicaly here either.
>(Kathy D would know much more about this, I am certain. )

Indeed, in most world culture's, girls begin from an early age (2-3-4-5
years) to learn the skills they need to have to be fully functioning adults.
  Most have learned all those skills by age 10, and then it's just a matter
of going through physiological puberty in order to be able to reproduce.
They may be married before menarche, or after.  They usually start having
children soon after menarche happens, even if they have not finished their
own physical growth in size, and they are fully competent and able mothers,
both in terms of breastfeeding and other arenas of child care -- because
they've been doing it since early childhood with their own younger siblings.

In the US and some other Western countries, we often 'infantilize' our
children by NOT teaching them to contribute to the family economy from an
early age (ideals of carefree childhood, opposition to child labor in other
cultures, and just not demanding that our children be responsible members of
the family in terms of chores and doing their share of household work).
Under the guise of letting them be "children" we don't teach them the skills
they need to be adults.  We let them grow up physically and hormonally
without letting them DO anything.  But those hormones, the drive to
reproduce, is often stronger than cultural rules.

People used to expect that teens would graduate from high school and then
immediately get married and have a family.  So TEENS having children was a
perfectly acceptable thing -- they were MARRIED teens.  In those days (I'm
talking 1920s through 1950s in the US), being an UNWED mother was the shame,
no matter your age.  There was nothing wrong with being a TEEN mother as
long as you were married.  My mother-in-law had her first two kids when she
was married, the first at 18, the second at 19.  Perfectly respectable and
above-board, and no one thought she was having kids early, or wasn't capable
of breastfeeding and mothering them competently.

But then, gradually through the late 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, the focus shifted.
  Women married later and later, fewer women got married and had kids right
out high school.  More and more women of all ages chose to become mothers
without getting married first.  Being UNWED and a mother came to be seen as
OK, acceptable, fine.  So people shifted their target for accusations of
immorality to TEEN mothers, with the assumption that none of these women
were married, as well as the assumption that "girls" in their teens are
incapable of being good mothers.

End of today's anthropology/history lesson.

Kathy Dettwyler
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com

             ***********************************************
The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM)
mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html