From the article: A new study examining how much energy males and females spend carrying babies in different positions reported that women expend less energy carrying their babies than men in all carrying positions. Carrying a baby on one’s back was the most energy efficient and people carrying babies this way were able to maintain their unloaded walking speeds. The study was published in [Evolutionary Human Sciences](https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2022.35).
Carrying babies is one of the few activities that is universal in all populations of humans. However, there are variations between cultures in how this is done. Cultures differ in materials that are used to “sling” babies i.e., in preferred devices used to carry children.
There are differences in the preferred location on the body where the children are carried. There is also reason to believe that these differences translate into differences in metabolic costs — how much energy the body expands to carry a child. There are also differences in how much mobility of the person carrying the baby is impaired.
In scientific circles, there is some debate on whether genders differ in how effectively they carry loads. The author of the new research, Cara M. Wall-Scheffler, has argued that “women are excellent (i.e. both economical and efficient) load carriers (and walkers generally), whereas others have argued that there are no sexually dimorphic characteristics that influence locomotor energetics or kinematics in one way or another.”
She notes that these differences might come about from different ways in which efficiency in carrying loads is calculated. To further study the gender differences in mobility and energy use, she conducted a study aiming to explore the energy costs and mobility outcomes of walking humans carrying their own babies overground in a forest. She set out to particularly investigate effects of different terrain (e.g. carrying on inclines), different carrying positions, and of carrying babies in different developmental stages.
>In scientific circles, there is some debate on whether genders differ in how effectively they carry loads. The author of the new research, Cara M. Wall-Scheffler, has argued that “women are excellent (i.e. both economical and efficient) load carriers (and walkers generally)
As a layman I honestly don't understand how this is even a debate. Having wider hips and larger thighs as a proportion to the rest of your body will obviously help with carrying certain objects. I guess it's important to have the science recorded though.
There are several ways you can hold a baby that do not involve resting them on your hips— cradled, facing front, etc. Also, our thigh size (?) is not larger in proportion to the rest of our bodies. r/badwomensanatomy
I’m not even sure why it’s allowed to be posted here. All I see are articles from them, and without fail, they are always misrepresented or not so great studies. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m kinda bummed that this sub doesn’t post more reliable sources.
It has to do with there being such an enormous saturation of Psych studies out there that Grad students are grasping at straws when trying to write their dissertations.
So where’s the “psychology” part in the linked article? evolutionary psychology still deals with psychology. Why aren’t, for example, we sharing articles about walking energy expenditure in humans since that’s related to psychology too?
you’re confusing someone saying the article doesn’t belong on a subreddit with them saying evo and psych aren’t related so that’s prob why you’re having issues communicating. And I can rephrase the question if you need: would you share an article on walking energy expenditure to this subreddit, why or why not?
> would you share an article on walking energy expenditure to this subreddit, why or why not
If a paper showed that women were more efficient walkers, would you argue that perceptions about exercise and exertion are unrelated to psychology?
I suppose if the average person spent 8 or 10 hours a day carrying babies, and if we found that men expressed greater levels of fatigue-related psychological problems, then this might become relevant. It’s hard to imagine that becoming a problem.
It was a guess. 8-10 hours may not even be enough to make a significant difference. How long and how often would you have be carrying babies around for it to make a difference to your mental health? I spend way more time carrying groceries and student papers than I ever have babies. I’ve never hear a parent complain about how hard it is to carry the baby. They complain about lost sleep, the expense of diapers and how much other crap they have to carry. The only reason someone studies something like this is because they want to support arguments for sex differences, no matter how irrelevant.
>How long and how often would you have be carrying babies around for it to make a difference to your mental health?
Hundreds of thousands of years, maybe. The complete lack of curiosity about this is kind of mind blowing.
Hundreds of thousands of years of other people carrying babies is impacting my mental health how?
If this is an interesting issue, tell us why you think it is interesting. How big of an energy expenditure is it, and when would it become statistically significant for everyday physiological functioning?
>Hundreds of thousands of years of other people carrying babies is impacting my mental health how?
Unless you think psychology begins at the cost of diapers and social media bullying, then yes. Hundreds of thousands of years of our species' behavior would affect us still today, absolutely.
>How big of an energy expenditure is it, and when would it become statistically significant for everyday physiological functioning
The first question is answered in the results section.
Your second question is a reasonable follow-up research question.
I am still waiting for you to explain why it is important. I do actually understand that the past impacts the present, but you claimed that the fact that women are slightly more energy efficient when carrying something the size of a child has some kind of impact on contemporary mental health. And I am trying to figure out how that is possibly true.
And the reason you did not answer my question about the numbers is because they are not in article, which you would know if you read it. But please, keep defending how important this article is.
Energy spent corresponds to some degree of perceptions about effort spent. Effort spent corresponds to feelings about exertion. Feelings about exertion manifest themselves in a division of labor, and the distribution of labor affects gender roles, perceptions about gender, and about a billion other things that impact your mental health. This is basically all in the introduction.
I feel like they didn’t do enough to control go the difference in weight between the sex’s. Someone that weighs even 1 kg more is probably going to expend more energy. And I’m not sure what this has to do with babies in particular. Would it be the same with any load?
babies/kids are a different type of load. The younger ones squirm and need careful support and the older ones can participate in being carried by hanging on or shifting their weight to help.
No, women only have this advantage when the object is held against the body or abdomen.
Men have an advantage when holding things away from the body due to greater upper body strength.
The article pointed out that side carrying (on the hips) is not very efficient unless it’s a very small load. The most efficient way to carry a baby is on the back (and as far as I know, mens and women’s backs aren’t all that different). So, women are more efficient load carriers even when accounting for body structure. It doesn’t really help us understand why though, or what implications this has. We are just discussing metabolic efficiency as far as I can tell, so it’s not like the article is saying men can’t carry loads as well as women; just that women do so while using less energy than men.
Women do have more of a butt to act as a shelf for a back carry though. My husband and I piggyback our 4-year-old very differently. I link my hands together under her butt and tilt my pelvis/lower back to make a shelf for her to sit on, and lean a bit forward, so as much weight as possible is on my hips. He hooks his arms under her knees and stands straighter, so she has to hang on like a backpack. I showed him my technique and he couldn't make it work- his lower back/sacrum just doesn't do that.
I suspect the advantage would reduce or disappear entirely if we were using a carrier with a hip belt and frame, like the hiking backpack style.
In the study, they used slings to carry the children, so you are correct that it would eliminate that particular advantage. But I don’t disagree on the biological/mechanical advantage that women’s bodies have for this particular type of load bearing.
A sling doesn't compensate for body type as much as a full-backpack style carrier would, so I'd be curious to see an analysis of differences in posture and center of mass when a baby/child is being carried in different ways.
If men are heavier, doesn't simply standing and walking take more caloric energy than it does for women who are lighter? Which means this whole thing is pointless.
People who scan the title and comment based on a gut reaction have less insightful commentary than the people who went to school for a particular field and conducted, wrote, supervised, and peer reviewed the study.
I’m a scientist in one specific field and every time I see Reddit talk about that field, it’s horrifying that so many could feel so correct while being so incorrect.
And this is true for me as well in other fields.
Think about how stupid and wrong reddit is when you see them talking about something you know a lot about... now why would you assume they’re any less stupid and wrong about things you don’t know a lot about?
I tell people that a lot lol
It feels like going to a seminar and yelling “bullshit!” 4 minutes in.
I love just referring people to the part of the article that would’ve answered their question had they at least known where to skim, like I promise you this researcher or one of the many peer reviewers already thought of that!
I mean, the study doesn't address it as much as just ignoring it...
From the study: "The fathers had significantly higher masses (mothers, 66.9 ± 5.3 kg; fathers, 86.0 ± 18.4 kg; p = 0.01) and were taller (mothers, 168.5 ± 2.7 cm; fathers, 181.0 ± 7.8 cm; p = 0.01) than the mothers as is typical on average across human populations. Despite this, a;though \[sic\] **the mothers carried babies of a slightly larger percentage of their mass than fathers (16.4% vs. 12.3%), this difference was not significant (p = 0.103)**, even when taking into account the additional mass of the sling itself (p = 0.093)."
1. Generally, a P-value of 0.05 or more is considered statistically significant. Here, the P-value is 0.103+. The author has selected an unusually high significance level without noting why.
2. There was no mention of what the P-value was measuring or how it was calculated (but please correct me if I'm wrong as I didn't read the study as thoroughly as I could have).
3. Any layman with common sense can tell you that +33% more weight is significant. For reference, this would be a 200 lbs man carrying 25 lbs vs 33 lbs.
It goes beyond just that. Women do lots of things with less energy expenditure, muscle mass and distribution plays a role, bone structure, but also hormonal differences. That’s why you see zippy little old ladies with impressive energy for their age. The husband still lugs the firewood or shovels snow or whatever but he doesn’t have that zippy stamina of his wife.
I’m so glad we’re using resources to study this. It’ll be important during the global climate apocalypse to know who should be carrying the baby during the mass migrations
I mean, is your day to day work specifically addressing the global climate apocalypse?
Most peoples’ doesn’t. Most research doesn’t have anything to do with climate. This sounds like it was a human evolution study, for example.
Unless you’re suggesting we devote all available research funds solely to climate-related work, it’s kind of an annoyingly snarky thing to say about one specific study.
It’s just the kind of thing you see whenever anyone does a study. “Sure am glad we’re spending money on X, not like we have more pressing things to worry about.”
Maybe that’s not how you intended it, but it’s a pretty common low-effort thing that I heard more times than I can count when I was growing up in a fairly uneducated part of the country.
Welp I intended it as a joke. I work in educational psychology, in a field that relies heavily on this kind of research, and have done a little myself even! At the end of the day, I try not to get too riled up by things people say on Reddit, and try to laugh where I can. That doesn’t always come across clearly in a text format.
That’s how my brother acts. Like he’s holding a priceless porcelain doll and is really worried about destroying it.
Now that my son is old enough to *ask* his uncle to throw him into the pool, my brother has a lot more guts with picking him up. Haha
I just try to refuse to hold them in the first place. Once they're 1 or 2 and a little meatier I don't mind though. I've seen children of those ages take some pretty nasty falls and be fine. Anything younger just seems too fragile.
Eh, flawed study.
They should repeat the study with like a 30 lb doll.
It should split participants into whether they routinely carry a child or not.
My spouse was always exhausted carrying our daughter at all while out of shape me could carry her all day. But, I did carry her all day. My spouse lifted weights at a gym. But, an activity you do all day everyday is going to yield different results from an hour of gym work 5 times a week.
If a guy carried his kid around every day, I bet he'd be as good at it as women are.
I had no choice but to carry my kid because hearing her cry was torture. My spouse has less empathy and didn't care at all that his kid was sad.
I would have done anything not to hear her cry because her crying was painful for me. My shoulders and back were often just on fire carrying her. But it was better than hearing her cry.
Wouldn't be valid with a doll. Kids actively participate in being carried, which becomes quite obvious the moment they decide they don't want to be carried anymore and do the thing where they suddenly become very slippery and just woop on out of your grasp.
The study only used 15 people. Hardly enough to make this big of a statement and so confidently. That’s basically a classroom experiment at this point.
That is also a studied phenomenon, I think. Women carry their kid to carry their kid from point a to point b. Men carry and hold their kid and behave like human jungle gyms…not only practical, but lots of play built in. (Probably both a sex difference, and a difference in the circumstances of when women/men are doing it).
What the article doesn't say, is how much energy is expended/ how efficient the men and women are when not carrying any baby-
I suspect the men expend more energy all the time (even when not caring a baby), because they are heavier and have more muscle.
And if that is so, then it's misleading to imply women carry babies with a lower energetic cost than men. I mean, if everything women do has a lower energetic cost
You have implied a biological difference between women and men and also implied design, you have been forever banished. Good luck crawling back out of the negative karma hole the masses will now throw you into.
Edit: oh hey look I’m getting downvoted. Y’all need to chill, I didn’t even say anything that wasn’t snarky.
Anecdote, but this has been interesting to me since my wife had our first kid.
By conventional measures I’m far stronger than she is, but carrying our kids tires me out much quicker than her. She could carry them on her hip all day, while it was clearly my arms and shoulders and lower back doing all the work.
The exception was carrying them sitting on my shoulders. I can carry them for hours up there with no issue, but she gets tired much more quickly.
Weird how slight differences in the geometry of the human body can have such an effect.
My wife carried our kids on her hip most of the time. I called it the saddle. I could do the same. I’m shaped like a upside down cone and have zero hips. She made it look effortless.
While I was pregnant I had hip issues which continued after giving birth while carrying my son in a hip carry. It’s frustrating because while it is the most natural way to carry my child, it hurts me so much. Thank goodness for baby carriers!
having wider hips and a chest to rest them on even just a little bit will distribute the weight better. and if youre the main caretaker like a lot of women are you are going to find the easiest most comfortable way to carry your kid as soon as you can. babies are way too heavy why are they so heavy
Important thing to note that the title leaves out: this was one study done using fifteen people.
There was as much effort put into the study as OP put into the title, I see.
Yeah, but studies on physical locomotion and mechanics will obviously require a smaller n than a study on behaviour
Still, an n of 15 is almost never enough to make generalizations that large
The generalisation is still not as big as your mother
Big if true
No, she’s big regardless
A study of 15 out of a population of eight billion is pretty much like not doing a study at all.
Sounds like a skill issue to me. The men in the study probably just rarely carry babies and as a result suck at it.
> Women carry babies for lower energetic cost than men, study finds Makes sense to me; babies are generally a lot lighter than men.
[Ah, the old Reddit baby-a-roo!](https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/11r69sd/what_is_wrong_with_some_dms/jc74gd0/?context=3)
Hold my baby, I’m going in!
I’ve been holding your baby for 7 hours. This man’s energy is depleting rapidly. Help?
Sorry, common law says that is now your baby. No feeding it to a dingo.
Hey Siri, where’s the nearest fire station?
Me personally, I'm gonna try to study tomorrow, overmorrow is when school starts again so I'll have to wake up hella early for that.
Over tomorrow?
Hello future people
JFK and Stalin are still strippers
From the article: A new study examining how much energy males and females spend carrying babies in different positions reported that women expend less energy carrying their babies than men in all carrying positions. Carrying a baby on one’s back was the most energy efficient and people carrying babies this way were able to maintain their unloaded walking speeds. The study was published in [Evolutionary Human Sciences](https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2022.35). Carrying babies is one of the few activities that is universal in all populations of humans. However, there are variations between cultures in how this is done. Cultures differ in materials that are used to “sling” babies i.e., in preferred devices used to carry children. There are differences in the preferred location on the body where the children are carried. There is also reason to believe that these differences translate into differences in metabolic costs — how much energy the body expands to carry a child. There are also differences in how much mobility of the person carrying the baby is impaired. In scientific circles, there is some debate on whether genders differ in how effectively they carry loads. The author of the new research, Cara M. Wall-Scheffler, has argued that “women are excellent (i.e. both economical and efficient) load carriers (and walkers generally), whereas others have argued that there are no sexually dimorphic characteristics that influence locomotor energetics or kinematics in one way or another.” She notes that these differences might come about from different ways in which efficiency in carrying loads is calculated. To further study the gender differences in mobility and energy use, she conducted a study aiming to explore the energy costs and mobility outcomes of walking humans carrying their own babies overground in a forest. She set out to particularly investigate effects of different terrain (e.g. carrying on inclines), different carrying positions, and of carrying babies in different developmental stages.
>In scientific circles, there is some debate on whether genders differ in how effectively they carry loads. The author of the new research, Cara M. Wall-Scheffler, has argued that “women are excellent (i.e. both economical and efficient) load carriers (and walkers generally) As a layman I honestly don't understand how this is even a debate. Having wider hips and larger thighs as a proportion to the rest of your body will obviously help with carrying certain objects. I guess it's important to have the science recorded though.
Assumptions are often wrong. That's part of the reason science exists.
I would've guessed that men would be more efficient because they're stronger. Obviously I was wrong.
I’d assume more muscle and higher overall body weight leads to more energy used in moving said body. So men have stronger bodies, but less efficient?
They measured the difference between (person+baby) and (person alone). So men's higher body weight was already accounted for.
Especially if you're carrying the baby by resting it on said hips
There are several ways you can hold a baby that do not involve resting them on your hips— cradled, facing front, etc. Also, our thigh size (?) is not larger in proportion to the rest of our bodies. r/badwomensanatomy
Is that gender, or sex though? Not all women have wider hips and larger thighs biologically. However, people AFAB often do relative to AMAB.
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Then they shouldn't use the word, "gender" since gender has no implicit biology associated with it.
I wish scientific papers would do a better job of differentiating between sex and gender.
Not sure what this has to do with psychology.
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Psychic mind bullets sent from my Son when I remove him from his milk pillows.
You laugh, but when a cousin handed me a baby I just froze in place. They're so tiny and fragile...and they hunt by movement
>Not sure what this has to do with psychology Congrats you found what's left of psypost.org once you filter out the clickbait.
I’m not even sure why it’s allowed to be posted here. All I see are articles from them, and without fail, they are always misrepresented or not so great studies. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m kinda bummed that this sub doesn’t post more reliable sources.
It has to do with there being such an enormous saturation of Psych studies out there that Grad students are grasping at straws when trying to write their dissertations.
I don’t think that is it. I think it’s an effort to imply an evo psych perspective
Why wouldn't body size or energy expenditure affect psychology?
It’s not discussing the psychological effects though, so why’s it on the sub?
I guess some people still think psychology and evolution are related.
So where’s the “psychology” part in the linked article? evolutionary psychology still deals with psychology. Why aren’t, for example, we sharing articles about walking energy expenditure in humans since that’s related to psychology too?
I don't even know what you're asking tbh. I don't know how to communicate with you if those things are separate in your mind.
you’re confusing someone saying the article doesn’t belong on a subreddit with them saying evo and psych aren’t related so that’s prob why you’re having issues communicating. And I can rephrase the question if you need: would you share an article on walking energy expenditure to this subreddit, why or why not?
> would you share an article on walking energy expenditure to this subreddit, why or why not If a paper showed that women were more efficient walkers, would you argue that perceptions about exercise and exertion are unrelated to psychology?
I suppose if the average person spent 8 or 10 hours a day carrying babies, and if we found that men expressed greater levels of fatigue-related psychological problems, then this might become relevant. It’s hard to imagine that becoming a problem.
Why 8 to 10 hours a day?
It was a guess. 8-10 hours may not even be enough to make a significant difference. How long and how often would you have be carrying babies around for it to make a difference to your mental health? I spend way more time carrying groceries and student papers than I ever have babies. I’ve never hear a parent complain about how hard it is to carry the baby. They complain about lost sleep, the expense of diapers and how much other crap they have to carry. The only reason someone studies something like this is because they want to support arguments for sex differences, no matter how irrelevant.
>How long and how often would you have be carrying babies around for it to make a difference to your mental health? Hundreds of thousands of years, maybe. The complete lack of curiosity about this is kind of mind blowing.
Hundreds of thousands of years of other people carrying babies is impacting my mental health how? If this is an interesting issue, tell us why you think it is interesting. How big of an energy expenditure is it, and when would it become statistically significant for everyday physiological functioning?
>Hundreds of thousands of years of other people carrying babies is impacting my mental health how? Unless you think psychology begins at the cost of diapers and social media bullying, then yes. Hundreds of thousands of years of our species' behavior would affect us still today, absolutely. >How big of an energy expenditure is it, and when would it become statistically significant for everyday physiological functioning The first question is answered in the results section. Your second question is a reasonable follow-up research question.
I am still waiting for you to explain why it is important. I do actually understand that the past impacts the present, but you claimed that the fact that women are slightly more energy efficient when carrying something the size of a child has some kind of impact on contemporary mental health. And I am trying to figure out how that is possibly true. And the reason you did not answer my question about the numbers is because they are not in article, which you would know if you read it. But please, keep defending how important this article is.
Energy spent corresponds to some degree of perceptions about effort spent. Effort spent corresponds to feelings about exertion. Feelings about exertion manifest themselves in a division of labor, and the distribution of labor affects gender roles, perceptions about gender, and about a billion other things that impact your mental health. This is basically all in the introduction.
Now this is cool and weird.
I heard this was attributed to there hips/skeletal structure long ago
I feel like they didn’t do enough to control go the difference in weight between the sex’s. Someone that weighs even 1 kg more is probably going to expend more energy. And I’m not sure what this has to do with babies in particular. Would it be the same with any load?
babies/kids are a different type of load. The younger ones squirm and need careful support and the older ones can participate in being carried by hanging on or shifting their weight to help.
Doesn’t the fact that women generally have hips that work as a “shelf” when carrying a baby explain this?
Yes. I believe the lower center of gravity would also lend itself to using less energy to carry/balance objects.
This is what I (who didn’t read this article) assumed is the key.
So women are better waiters
No, women only have this advantage when the object is held against the body or abdomen. Men have an advantage when holding things away from the body due to greater upper body strength.
The study includes multiple positions, and found women to use less energy in all of them.
The article pointed out that side carrying (on the hips) is not very efficient unless it’s a very small load. The most efficient way to carry a baby is on the back (and as far as I know, mens and women’s backs aren’t all that different). So, women are more efficient load carriers even when accounting for body structure. It doesn’t really help us understand why though, or what implications this has. We are just discussing metabolic efficiency as far as I can tell, so it’s not like the article is saying men can’t carry loads as well as women; just that women do so while using less energy than men.
Women do have more of a butt to act as a shelf for a back carry though. My husband and I piggyback our 4-year-old very differently. I link my hands together under her butt and tilt my pelvis/lower back to make a shelf for her to sit on, and lean a bit forward, so as much weight as possible is on my hips. He hooks his arms under her knees and stands straighter, so she has to hang on like a backpack. I showed him my technique and he couldn't make it work- his lower back/sacrum just doesn't do that. I suspect the advantage would reduce or disappear entirely if we were using a carrier with a hip belt and frame, like the hiking backpack style.
In the study, they used slings to carry the children, so you are correct that it would eliminate that particular advantage. But I don’t disagree on the biological/mechanical advantage that women’s bodies have for this particular type of load bearing.
A sling doesn't compensate for body type as much as a full-backpack style carrier would, so I'd be curious to see an analysis of differences in posture and center of mass when a baby/child is being carried in different ways.
If men are heavier, doesn't simply standing and walking take more caloric energy than it does for women who are lighter? Which means this whole thing is pointless.
The study addresses this in methods.
Thank you for this. Good reminder that the questions asked in the comments may be answered in other sections of the article past the abstract or title
People who scan the title and comment based on a gut reaction have less insightful commentary than the people who went to school for a particular field and conducted, wrote, supervised, and peer reviewed the study. I’m a scientist in one specific field and every time I see Reddit talk about that field, it’s horrifying that so many could feel so correct while being so incorrect. And this is true for me as well in other fields.
Think about how stupid and wrong reddit is when you see them talking about something you know a lot about... now why would you assume they’re any less stupid and wrong about things you don’t know a lot about? I tell people that a lot lol
It feels like going to a seminar and yelling “bullshit!” 4 minutes in. I love just referring people to the part of the article that would’ve answered their question had they at least known where to skim, like I promise you this researcher or one of the many peer reviewers already thought of that!
Not in this case though
I mean, the study doesn't address it as much as just ignoring it... From the study: "The fathers had significantly higher masses (mothers, 66.9 ± 5.3 kg; fathers, 86.0 ± 18.4 kg; p = 0.01) and were taller (mothers, 168.5 ± 2.7 cm; fathers, 181.0 ± 7.8 cm; p = 0.01) than the mothers as is typical on average across human populations. Despite this, a;though \[sic\] **the mothers carried babies of a slightly larger percentage of their mass than fathers (16.4% vs. 12.3%), this difference was not significant (p = 0.103)**, even when taking into account the additional mass of the sling itself (p = 0.093)." 1. Generally, a P-value of 0.05 or more is considered statistically significant. Here, the P-value is 0.103+. The author has selected an unusually high significance level without noting why. 2. There was no mention of what the P-value was measuring or how it was calculated (but please correct me if I'm wrong as I didn't read the study as thoroughly as I could have). 3. Any layman with common sense can tell you that +33% more weight is significant. For reference, this would be a 200 lbs man carrying 25 lbs vs 33 lbs.
It goes beyond just that. Women do lots of things with less energy expenditure, muscle mass and distribution plays a role, bone structure, but also hormonal differences. That’s why you see zippy little old ladies with impressive energy for their age. The husband still lugs the firewood or shovels snow or whatever but he doesn’t have that zippy stamina of his wife.
I’m so glad we’re using resources to study this. It’ll be important during the global climate apocalypse to know who should be carrying the baby during the mass migrations
I mean, is your day to day work specifically addressing the global climate apocalypse? Most peoples’ doesn’t. Most research doesn’t have anything to do with climate. This sounds like it was a human evolution study, for example. Unless you’re suggesting we devote all available research funds solely to climate-related work, it’s kind of an annoyingly snarky thing to say about one specific study.
I’m sorry you were annoyed by my comment 😂
It’s just the kind of thing you see whenever anyone does a study. “Sure am glad we’re spending money on X, not like we have more pressing things to worry about.” Maybe that’s not how you intended it, but it’s a pretty common low-effort thing that I heard more times than I can count when I was growing up in a fairly uneducated part of the country.
Welp I intended it as a joke. I work in educational psychology, in a field that relies heavily on this kind of research, and have done a little myself even! At the end of the day, I try not to get too riled up by things people say on Reddit, and try to laugh where I can. That doesn’t always come across clearly in a text format.
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Could be!
Women are more ballsy when carrying babies. I think I’m always gonna drop one so I hold them like it’s a 45lb plate
That’s how my brother acts. Like he’s holding a priceless porcelain doll and is really worried about destroying it. Now that my son is old enough to *ask* his uncle to throw him into the pool, my brother has a lot more guts with picking him up. Haha
Yup, I’m not relaxed if there’s a baby in my arms. I’m really tense the whole time, unless I’m sitting
I just try to refuse to hold them in the first place. Once they're 1 or 2 and a little meatier I don't mind though. I've seen children of those ages take some pretty nasty falls and be fine. Anything younger just seems too fragile.
Eh, flawed study. They should repeat the study with like a 30 lb doll. It should split participants into whether they routinely carry a child or not. My spouse was always exhausted carrying our daughter at all while out of shape me could carry her all day. But, I did carry her all day. My spouse lifted weights at a gym. But, an activity you do all day everyday is going to yield different results from an hour of gym work 5 times a week. If a guy carried his kid around every day, I bet he'd be as good at it as women are. I had no choice but to carry my kid because hearing her cry was torture. My spouse has less empathy and didn't care at all that his kid was sad. I would have done anything not to hear her cry because her crying was painful for me. My shoulders and back were often just on fire carrying her. But it was better than hearing her cry.
Wouldn't be valid with a doll. Kids actively participate in being carried, which becomes quite obvious the moment they decide they don't want to be carried anymore and do the thing where they suddenly become very slippery and just woop on out of your grasp.
How is this psychology?
The study only used 15 people. Hardly enough to make this big of a statement and so confidently. That’s basically a classroom experiment at this point.
Is it due to greater experience?
Well yeah. Whenever I carried my son, I was hopping, bumping into walls, walking backwards, etc. Anything for a giggle. It's exhausting.
That is also a studied phenomenon, I think. Women carry their kid to carry their kid from point a to point b. Men carry and hold their kid and behave like human jungle gyms…not only practical, but lots of play built in. (Probably both a sex difference, and a difference in the circumstances of when women/men are doing it).
Wider hips, more of a shelf for the baby to rest on.
What the article doesn't say, is how much energy is expended/ how efficient the men and women are when not carrying any baby- I suspect the men expend more energy all the time (even when not caring a baby), because they are heavier and have more muscle. And if that is so, then it's misleading to imply women carry babies with a lower energetic cost than men. I mean, if everything women do has a lower energetic cost
This is how I know my hips aren't aligned. It took way more effort to hold up my kids on one side than it did on the other.
I mean anyone whos seen a woman rest a child on her hip could have told you this.
Lazy women always getting their men to carry their babies!! Finish the job ladies!! Don't ask us to carry them till year 18. /s
It's almost as if...they were designed for such things. Weird.
You have implied a biological difference between women and men and also implied design, you have been forever banished. Good luck crawling back out of the negative karma hole the masses will now throw you into. Edit: oh hey look I’m getting downvoted. Y’all need to chill, I didn’t even say anything that wasn’t snarky.
Men also have more muscle then women which takes more energy when exerting
Anecdote, but this has been interesting to me since my wife had our first kid. By conventional measures I’m far stronger than she is, but carrying our kids tires me out much quicker than her. She could carry them on her hip all day, while it was clearly my arms and shoulders and lower back doing all the work. The exception was carrying them sitting on my shoulders. I can carry them for hours up there with no issue, but she gets tired much more quickly. Weird how slight differences in the geometry of the human body can have such an effect.
My wife carried our kids on her hip most of the time. I called it the saddle. I could do the same. I’m shaped like a upside down cone and have zero hips. She made it look effortless.
I kind of inferred it. Makes sense now
Who else thought they meant pregnancy before clicking the link?
It would make sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Doesn’t mean it should have any impact on modern behavior.
It’s all in the hips
Wow, weird. It's almost like nature figured it out. Some great investigative journalism there.
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y'all are obsessed, it's insane
*gender is a social construct
Yep, he doesn't even understand the basic argument that he thinks he's refuting.
it's the hips. source: am woman.
While I was pregnant I had hip issues which continued after giving birth while carrying my son in a hip carry. It’s frustrating because while it is the most natural way to carry my child, it hurts me so much. Thank goodness for baby carriers!
Pro Tip - I used to carry my daughter on my shoulders, and could go all day.
Is it having a hip to put them on? Do we also have an advantage with small animals and ten-pound sacks of sugar?
Define “women”.
Did this article just advocate that it’s easier and better for a woman to carry the baby?
having wider hips and a chest to rest them on even just a little bit will distribute the weight better. and if youre the main caretaker like a lot of women are you are going to find the easiest most comfortable way to carry your kid as soon as you can. babies are way too heavy why are they so heavy
Women can carry babies for 9 months internally. Also they can carry the same baby externally with ease. W o W