While the Yucatec pattern of child care conforms on the whole to the pattern seen in other agrarian societies, it is currently becoming destabilized as the society becomes more modern. Some of the developing customs are maladaptive, at least in the short run.
Fertility, Infant Feeding, and Change in Yucatcin Gail A . Howrigan
Recent changes in reproductive parameters and infant feeding practices in rural YucatLn present a challenge to the view of human parental care as adaptive behavior. During the late 1970s, young women had very large families with decreasing birth intervals, thus reducing the time and attention given to each infant. Concurrently, they increasingly bottle-fed their infants, the infants having frequent bouts of gastrointestinal illness due to poor hygienic conditions. These two related trends continue, despite explicit parental concern for their infants' health and welfare and despite a system of child care that in general functions well to meet those concerns. This chapter describes recent trends in reproduction and infant feeding, documents some of their consequences, and attempts to reconcile the changes with LeVine's (1974) revised theory of parental behavior.