Parental Love

Anthropologists fuss about terms like "human nature," because a lot of behavior isn't innately "human," it's cultural. In some societies fathers rule the roost, and in others, it's the mother. Both probably believe that their family structures reflect "human nature," but they're really expressions of normative behavior, passed along from generation to generation.

But there are some things that seem to be universal, or at least come close, and one of them is an innate desire on the part of adults, especially mothers, to nurture and protect their young children. This is normative behavior throughout most of the animal kingdom, in fact, because the production of viable offspring is the name of the game in the world of natural selection. Whether we're CEOs, starting pitchers for the Red Sox or pump jockeys at the local Mobil station, we all share the same biological imperative: to produce a new generation and to help them survive long enough to produce another new generation.

But for humans like us, feeding, training, and protecting our offspring is expensive, demanding, and sometimes unrewarding work. So somewhere in our evolutionary history, we developed an emotional component to stimulate, and then sustain this important behavior: parental love.

In this context, it's heart-breaking to hear the latest news from Haiti. If you've been following developments there, you know that ten Americans are currently being detained on suspicion of "child trafficking" and are due to appear today in a Haitian court to answer the charges. At first, news sources reported that the Americans were attempting to transport 33 Haitian orphans across the border to the Dominican Republic, where they would be safely housed until adoptions could be arranged in the US.

As the story evolved, we learned that many of the children were not orphans at all, but had been given up for adoption by parents who simply couldn't afford to take care of them. The reporters who tracked down these parents might have expected them to say, "We were tricked -- we didn't mean to give up our children." But instead, they found mothers and fathers who said, "We signed the papers because we felt our children could have a better life anywhere but here."

This is a case of abject poverty so severe that parents feel the best thing they can do for their children is give them away -- a level of desperation that few of us, in more comfortable circumstances, can even imagine. It violates every assumption we might have about parental love.

Some people hearing these stories might say, "Well, if these parents love their children so much, why don't they give them their own food?" And some parents probably do exactly that. But in biological terms, this might not be the best solution to the problem. Just as parents on airplanes are advised to put on their own oxygen masks first in the event of an emergency ("You can't help your child if you're unconscious"), so desperately poor parents might conclude that starving themselves is not, in the end, the best thing they can do for their children.

In Haiti, sadly, it appears that the best thing some of these poor parents can do is give their children to others who can better care for their needs. Parental love, that powerful, deeply-rooted human emotion, may be a luxury these desperate parents simply can't afford.