They seem weirdly pathological, those parents who desperately sit by the mailbox waiting for a letter from their child at camp, or those who frantically search the camp's website looking for a candid picture of their child. But maybe they're not: maybe they're just the wave of the future.
The news articles about parents and camps continue: this week it was The New York Times weighing in on the front page. This Times article featured parents buzzing around camps like angry bees, trying to arrange special privileges for their progeny: extra-comfy bunk arrangements, contraband cell phones- you name it, and these parents will try to get it to their kids so their kids won't have to experience being ordinary people. And these parents are not like the ones in the AP article I described in my last post: these parents are not weeping by the mailbox. They're storming the gates of Camp No-Ko-Me-Ko-No, refusing to be bossed around by camp directors who want everyone to follow the same rules. It's just as weird, but much less passive than the "kid-sick" parents whose life has lost all meaning when their kids are away.
But let's think about that. The question that arises again and again is why do these people have nothing else to do? Why have so many families become so "kid-centered" that they have no other abiding interests? It is clear these people don't have any civic or community commitments: they're not spending their extra time pitching in to clean up the local parks or stocking shelves at the free food pantry. Nothing matters to them except their kids, and if they can't work at trying to get them some extra advantage, they apparently lie around like dishrags waiting for the moment when the kids come home and life will resume.
They may seem grossly pathological, but think again. After all, evolutionary psychologists are always telling us that the primary purpose in our lives is to get as many of our genes as possible into succeeding generations, and to spare no effort in the relentless quest to promote the welfare of our offspring. According to many evolutionary psychologists, all other motivations- creativity, altruism, religious faith, etc.- are beside the point. They are either strategies used to get over on other families (altruism as a useful pose that allows you eventually to collect an unfair share of the resources of other people) or epiphenomenal (religion as a useless corollary of the evolutionarily useful propensity for finding remote causes for mysterious effects).
So parents who seem to have no interests beside promoting the advantages of their offspring may seem like particularly nasty baboons, fighting for their own progeny and savaging everyone else's, or lying about in a stupor when they're prevented from providing for their offspring. But they may just be the post-illusionary families predicted, and celebrated in a weird way, by evolutionary psychologists. These people don't mess around helping non-family members, and they don't seem to have a purpose in life other than kin-promotion. Isn't that what families are for? So what if they violate the rules and mores of everybody else: it's nature red in tooth and claw, after all. Perhaps in the future, when competition for resources becomes even more fierce, we can expect more and more of this, as all other motivations and thus social institutions fall before the onslaught of our unbridled aggression in making the world safe for our own, and only our own, kids.
Next: Kid-sickness and unconscious hate
