By Claude Mills, Staff Reporter
AS SMEARS go, this is a nasty one.
Males often enjoy MFC (Most Favoured Child) status in the family domicile. This is so especially in a decidedly patriarchal world where mothers dote on them, and fathers revere them out of an evolutionary necessity programmed to ensure the survival of lineage and the family name.
So imagine the consternation of young men all over the world when a study published recently tacked on a never-before-heard Doomsday Scenario on the prospect of women raising boys.
Led by evolutionary biologist Samuli Helle, researchers at the University of Turku in Finland published findings in the journal Science that showed that women who gave birth to sons had a shorter life span approximately 34 weeks (8-and-a-half months) per son than women who gave birth to girls. Conversely, those women who had a girl and who raised a daughter to adulthood slightly increased their life span.
Researchers studied church family records of a nomadic people called the Sami from 1640 to 1870 focusing on women who gave birth and lived to the age of 50.
But the clincher, according to the evo-biologist Helle, is that one could 'cancel the negative effect (on life span) of one boy by producing about three girls'.
Sounds like a cooked-up 'see-males-are-toxic' feminist conspiracy, doesn't it? But it begs the serious questions: do rough-and-tumble boys make mothers crazy? Are girls hard-wired to be more helpful and caring, and less problematic than boys are?
Lead study author Helle says the explanation could be as simple as the fact that "boys get on their mothers' nerves more than girls because they are running around, (while) girls are more willing to help their mothers."
But foreign experts believe that baby boys are bigger, and heavier and that the male foetus introduces additional amounts of testosterone, which may inhibit the mom's immune system.
Dr. Errol Daley, obstetrician/gynaecologist, however debunked the Finnish finding.
"Generally, girl babies tend to be bigger than boy babies, and very little testosterone would make its way from a male baby to his mother, certainly not enough to make much of a difference," he said.
Dr. Daley, who is also president of the Medical Association of Jamaica, however conceded that the 'study was an interesting finding'.
"A male boy is certainly more demanding and they are not as durable as the females are. It is sometimes hard for young mothers to cope with the demands of raising a boy in these challenging modern times, especially in a case where she has more than one boy child to contend with," Dr. Daley said.
Still, there is no concrete theory that links male children with shortened female life spans.
Mrs. Iris James, who is the mother of four sons and one daughter, strongly denies the authenticity of the study.
"I am in great health, and I have raised all of four sons, and a daughter. I don't think that sons are a bad thing and that they will cut my life span in any way. My four sons are a joy to me," Mrs. James said.
"It is all dependent on how you grow your child, if a boy or girls mean to give you problems, they will. But it helps when
there is a strong father figure in the picture who will be a good role model for your sons," she said.
MALES ARE MORE FRAGILE
Psychologist Dr. Leahcim Semaj welcomed the theory saying that 'data going back 30 to 40 years would back up the theory'.
"In a couple, the partner who is under the lesser amount of stress tends to decide the gender of the child conceived. This is sort of a survival mechanism where the parent who is coping the better sets the gender of the child. If the child is male, it means that the male is the stronger parent, and is more likely to survive," he said.
Dr. Semaj also pointed to the fact that despite their swagger, males are the more fragile sex of the human species.
"There are more male spontaneous abortions, more boys die in pre-natal care, and 80 per cent of babies delivered still-born are male," Dr. Semaj said.
According to statistics, male foetuses are less likely than females to come to term: although 125 males are conceived for every 100 females, only about 105 boys are born for every 100 girls.
In the first half of this century, improvements in prenatal care reduced the number of miscarriages and stillbirths and hence increased the proportion of baby boys in most industrial countries. But since 1970 the trend has reversed: in the U.S., Canada and several European countries, the percentage of male births has slowly and mysteriously declined.
And if the boys make it through all that, you have to worry about their teenage hormones kicking in and exposing them to greater danger in those wild adolescence years.
"A young teenage boy might shorten the life span of his mother more by keeping her awake at night worrying about him getting into accidents or becoming victims to violence. So I can see where mothers of boys are more likely to get chronic stress-related
illnesses," Dr. Daley said.
Interestingly, in China, most of the unwanted children and abortions are girls, victims of a one-child policy instituted in 1979 to curb population growth. Yet many parents argue that it takes more time and patience to raise a male child than a female.
"It is harder to raise a boy than a girl. I understand the girls more, but it takes more energy to raise my son," Dr. Glenda Simms of the Women's Bureau, said. She is a mother of two girls and one boy.
Often, mothering creates contradictions between the goals of feminism and the demands of patriarchal motherhood. Mothers, for example, may reject patriarchy, but realise that their sons must be schooled in its ways, or risk alienation from their own culture.
"With a son, the mother takes on more responsibility to make sure that the son doesn't get in trouble, and that he is a man, by society's standards, even if it means pulling away from his natural inclinations like arts," she added.
"Women just take on a greater mission to raise sons to be better men than their fathers were or better men than the lovers they had!" Dr. Simms asserted.
Ironically, the common assertion made by generations of fed-up mothers complaining to their wily, wilful sons has always been: "you wear me out!" and "you'll be the death of me!"
That assertion may finally be coming home to roost, and women may be paying for the privilege of having sons with that most precious sacrifice of all - their lives.
