Exactly Why Motherhood Today is Unsustainable.

I'm proud to say that the convergent understanding that is expressed in the recent PACE's article - The Wellness-Promoting Pathway Starts With Humanity’s Evolved Nest - has been on Mind Body Baby's radar since our inception. In fact, it's absolutely essential to our mission and vision.

To date, however, because it's human sciences insight that assembles findings of the last 10 to 20 years between psychology, neurobiology and anthropology. These sciences are not readily converging to compare notes. It takes time from outside to note the connection and create the conversation.

"We don’t have to guess or conduct extensive studies of what leads to human flourishing. Evolution, in effect, has ‘done the experiments’ over millions of years, providing the baselines for child raising and human flourishing. Evolution has provided a wellness-informed pathway."

The new book due out tomorrow by Jessica Grose called Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood gets into how American culture has been stripping us of that "village" of support for two hundred years, adding unrealistic parenting expectations - motivated by capitalism and the patriarchy.

"We are animals, specifically social mammals, a line that emerged 20-40 million years ago, retaining many brain characteristics and basic needs of social mammals generally. Our animal needs include nourishment and warmth but our social mammalian needs also include affectionate touch, play, extensive bonding, and community support."

Newer neurological studies of how the parent brain develops are crushing the idea that motherhood is instinctual to those who carry a womb. Rather, we learn much like our babies do by observing and experiencing - repeatedly - as we would if we lived in a village setting, experiencing the role through other journeys before our own.

This understanding is at the core of Mind Body Baby's vision - to recreate a community care mentality and the investment of our neighbor, especially in the absolutely pivotal period of early parenting. Without a doubt, changes in legislation and patriarchal thinking have to shift to support this idea. But, we can still start building that community care concept for families from the ground up to shift mindsets by example.

Learn more about this concept at EvolvedNest.org.