Mom Genes by Abigail Tucker

Author:Abigail Tucker [Tucker, Abigail]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

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But, as always with complicated matters of sex, it’s sometimes hard to tell what’s innate and what’s just gendered socialization. Far more than our unconscious response to cuteness, the maternal reaction to a son or daughter is conditioned by where in the world we live and the specific circumstances in which we find ourselves.

For much of human history, those circumstances have firmly favored baby boys and their moms. “Women wanted sons,” the anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote of her time in New Guinea, “and babies of the wrong sex were tossed into the river, still alive, wrapped in a bark sheath.”

Cultures that actively practice infanticide mostly target girls, as a son may be a must-have for everything from land transfers to funeral rites. In modern India, mothers pregnant with boys remain more likely to get prenatal care and tetanus shots. After birth, moms in these countries spend more time on average with their boys, fortify them with extra vitamins, and wean them well after their sisters. In one dismal statistic from an Indian abortion clinic, only three of eight thousand terminated fetuses were male, and by some recent reports the problem is getting worse as the country modernizes and families opt for fewer children.

Even in cases where being born a girl isn’t literally the kiss of death, it can come with lifelong baggage. In one tribe from Turkmenistan, girls are given names like “Last Daughter,” or “Boy Needed.” Meanwhile, boys—and their mothers—get all the social glory.

So it was with Emily. Her Lebanese-born husband was raised in a culture where procuring a son can change a mom’s status forever. After the birth of Emily’s first two children, both daughters, the in-laws back in the Middle East still called her Emily, like always.

But when her son arrived, she was suddenly hailed as “Mother of Dean.”

For centuries, American moms likely also nursed some version of this bias. Birth records from the frontier show when our pioneer farming families stopped having kids, and disproportionately, nineteenth-century American farm wives quit procreating after a son, which implies that boys were what they, too, were after. Some version of son preference apparently survived all the way to the early 1980s, right around the time my sister and I were born, when boys were still slightly preferred as firstborns.

But America’s boy bias has disappeared since then, perhaps thanks to some combination of feminists’ hard work and the ongoing economic movement away from agriculture and other physically demanding ways of making a living.

American mothers at present desire a mix of genders, but we’re refreshingly somewhat biased toward girls, with growing numbers of us stating a preference for daughters in first births. And on average today, American moms may lavish more time and money on our girls. In the 1970s, son-only households were investing more in expenditures like day care and accessories such as bicycles, toys, and camping equipment. But by 2007, the trend had reversed and daughter-only households were the big spenders. (There are striking exceptions, of course—despite

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