Well, if I must… Attachment is kind of a complicated thing to get into, and it seems some of the older research may have been flawed, but it’s pretty fair to say that parental bonds are very important. I say it that way because I might turn out to be wrong some day, and I’m acknowledging that, but evidence seems to suggest… There’s a lot of argument about how much parents have an influence on their children in the long run, and so on, but let’s not get into that.
Harry Harlow’s awful, awful experiment with rhesus monkeys showed that children need more from their parents than just food. Physical comfort actually mattered more to them than survival! Unsurprisingly, without proper parenting, the monkeys had a lot of problems. Some of them were allowed to have children, and those babies probably fared worse than the original batch. Unfed at best, or flat out murdered by their parents… After being isolated, they just didn’t understand basic social concepts.
It may seem like I’m rambling, because isolation is different from having two dozen parents. Isolation, being the worst case scenario, shows what happens without any parental attachment. Without dedicated parent(s), that they’d spend enough time with to form solid social bonds and to act as good role models, they might end up with any number of problems. I’d sooner teach good parenting than outsource it. Why rely on good parents to balance out the bad, when you could eliminate bad parents entirely?
Granted, it’s a lot harder to do that for seven billion people than a few thousand or however many live on this island utopia. I just don’t think there are that many benefits to sharing a child and leaving them without a real family - and having a family certainly doesn’t exclude the possibility of being a part of the community. So I don’t see what, if any, benefits there would truly be compared to actual good parenting.
All very valid points! I agree that children need one set of role models to look up to and two good parents are better than twenty-two average parents, however the entire point of the MAC (mutual adoption club) is so that children do not become dependent on their parents. It teaches them independence at a very young age, which is a lot of what Island is about - enlightenment through personal choices. The people of Pala capitalize on this by allowing each individual ample room to grow and develop in a variety of settings.
An example other than the MAC is how their work programs are set up. This was earlier in the book so I do not remember it quite as well, but essentially people on the island are encouraged to switch jobs every few years (with obvious exceptions, like career fields such as doctors and teachers) to gain as much knowledge of life as possible. A few years they might be on a fishing vessel, and a few years they might be working the mines. It is all designed so life becomes more of a journey than a destination; all along the way the individual grows.
Children are especially bred to have their own opinions, because the way Pala views life is that it’s very childlike in it’s simplicity. Things are made complicated by industry and strict governments; IE the iron hand suppressing the people. Instead, each individual is given the freedom to discover their own path to enlightenment. Going back to the MAC, children are aware of who their real parents are and often love them to death. But then they also have twenty+ other parents who they love just as much who they can go to for guidance.
This encourages kids to not be rooted down too much; they are free to play and explore and be kids. In the meantime, they have a support structure that is larger than just one house - it’s an entire village of people looking out for everyone else. Imagine being a kid and as you run through the neighborhood, every house you see was once your home. Some for a few weeks, some for a few months, but whenever you walk by the ‘parents’ in that house smile and wave because they know you well; heck, they helped raise you.