According to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics, the number of newborns in 2021 is 10.62 million, and the average age of women in childbearing has also been rising, which experts are very worried about, what are they worried about?
It turns out that such a low fertility rate may lead to a subsequent shortage of young labor in the country, which will accelerate the aging process.
Population ageing
Hindered by the attitude of the post-90s and post-00s who resist marriage and children, some experts said that the goal of the second child should be placed on the post-70s, but some post-70s women have faced menopause and no fertility.
Why are women's reproductive period so short? Why does menopause exist? Is this human evolution or degradation? What should the "grumpy" family members of women's menopause do?
Next, let's talk about why menopause exists, the role of the "grandmother hypothesis" in nature on evolution, and how to appease menopausal women, why the female body has such characteristics.
menopause
Why menopause exists
The current demographic situation is very worrying for many experts, after all, the marriage rate and fertility rate are declining, and whenever this problem is pushed to the Internet, everyone will express their views.
In addition to economic, social and cultural factors, more people have raised the question of female physiology, believing that women's menopause has shortened the reproductive period, if not, the population should be more, do you think this statement is reasonable?
A family
In fact, there is no reason, because the reproductive period of women is not short, but because the modern living conditions and medical conditions are very good, so that the human life expectancy has become longer, in the contrast of life expectancy, the reproductive period is somewhat short.
To know that the reproductive period has accounted for one-third of women's lives, or even more, we can't selfishly ask women to have a reproductive period throughout their lives, they can only exist for the sake of having children, right?
Donna Holmes Parks, an associate professor of clinical biology at the University of Idaho, argues:
Human longevity is a modern phenomenon. In ancient times, he said, few people lived to be over 50 years old, and before the Industrial Revolution, most people would have died before the age of 35, the age at which fertility of both sexes began to decline.
The vast majority of mammals in nature do not have "menopause", such as chimpanzees that have always been called "related" to humans, and the female orangutans in the population can still give birth even if they are old, and the sexual organs and life span of these females are basically the same.
Unlike human women, natural menopause occurs between the ages of 45 and 55, which doctors call menopause.
Female orangutans and small orangutans
Of course, scientists have found that individual whales also have menopause, such as killer whales, beluga whales and pilot whales, etc., and the females among them also have obvious menopausal characteristics.
For example, killer whales, females no longer shoulder the responsibility of reproduction after the age of 30 or 40, but help raise young killer whales, you can understand it as "grandma with grandchildren" will be more graphic. But why do women have menopause?
Or why menopause, premature loss of fertility.
Killer whale mothers and baby killer whales
Some scientists believe that this is closely related to human fertility difficulties, human women have a longer pregnancy cycle, face more challenges, and a little carelessness may be "one corpse and two lives", which can be seen from the ancient saying that giving birth to a child is a cross-ghost gate.
Therefore, young women need to use the help of experienced women to give birth, and for new mothers, there will be more problems in the process of raising children in the future.
There are many discomforts during pregnancy
Older women play a big role at this time, and imagine what would happen if menopause didn't enter menopause.
This means that older women will continue to have children forever, so they don't have the extra energy to pass on the experience or take care of the offspring.
That's why it's said that menopause came out, perhaps to help humans evolve.
After all, humans start by choosing to evolve the brain, and the route we take is to "carefully breed" individuals, rather than being born many at once like oviparous animals, relying on numbers to win.
Therefore, sacrificing part of the fertility time of women to promote the evolution of the population is a matter of advantages outweighing disadvantages.
Ostriches lay many eggs at a time
Moreover, every time you give birth to a woman's body, it is difficult to say that if there is no menopause, women who have been giving birth and have been losing money can live so long.
With such a speculation, Kristin Hawkes, an anthropologist at the University of Utah in the United States, discovered the important role of "grandmother" for a tribe in the process of studying the food collection of Tanzanian tribal women, and thus proposed the theory of the "grandmother hypothesis".
Women in primitive tribes
The "grandmother hypothesis" theory
In fact, the grandmother hypothesis has long been noticed, and in 1957, George Williams published a paper speculating that human descendants can grow up in this way, and "grandmother" is indispensable.
Of course, if the grandmother mentioned here returns to the primitive era, it does not refer only to the elderly women who are related by blood, but to all the "grandmothers" in the tribe who will take good care of the unrelated children.
We mentioned above the behavior of female killer whales in stopping reproduction and helping to care for small killer whales, and it has been observed that these older female killer whales play an important role in the growth stages of the population.
As a qualified "grandmother", it may be necessary to take care of several at the same time.
Scientists believe this phenomenon occurs because killer whales are also social animals, and intelligent them may have evolved some kind of social structure, which is somewhat similar to the evolution of humans in the past.
Killer whales are matrilineal societies
The 2019 study found:
When there are fewer salmon around, grandmother killer whales can lead young killer whales to feed. In addition, killer whales whose grandmothers died had a 3.5 times higher risk of death than killer whales whose grandmothers were still alive. This effect is more pronounced in times of lack of food and weakens in years when food is plentiful.
At this time, some people will say, since there is a grandmother hypothesis, why is there no grandfather hypothesis?
Is it true that grandfathers did not play a role in evolution as much as grandmothers?
Literary work "My Grandfather's Garden and Me"
This also has to be from the relative reproductive period, women will not ovulate after menopause, so they do not have fertility.
From the relevant data, men's sperm are still active at the age of 60, and there has been no conclusion that men can cap the reproductive age.
And because of the difference in body size, the division of labor between men and women in primitive societies is very different, and men mainly undertake the work of going out to hunt, even if they become "grandfathers", they are still like this, and they rarely participate in the daily care of children like grandmothers.
Men go out hunting
It can be seen that the emergence of female menopause is entirely due to natural selection under environmental changes. Both physiologically and socially, it is more advantageous for women to have menopause or menopause, after all, in the grandmother hypothesis, women in primitive societies only had time to take on the responsibility of collecting and raising grandchildren.
But menopausal women do make people very "scared", due to the influence of physical hormones, they sometimes become very irritable or excited, then how can we as family members comfort them?
Women of primitive tribes
Helping women through difficult menopause
Everyone's impression of women's menopause may be unreasonable, hysterical, and the negative emotions often played out in these TV series.
Many people think that it is not menopause, and as for whether it has become so, it is ultimately a lack of understanding of the pain that women suffer from menopause.
Menopause symptoms
First, menopause means that a woman's ovarian function begins to decline from a state of vitality and eventually disappears, yes, it does.
It is necessary to know that the ovaries are closely related to the hormones of the female body, and the effect of hormones on people is needless to say, so the decline of ovarian function will trigger a chain reaction of the body.
The amount of estrogen secreted in women varies with age
In this case, women often experience depression, anxiety and even cognitive impairment, which is a psychological or spiritual problem.
The physiological level is manifested as hot flashes, insomnia, genitourinary tract atrophy, etc., so female menopause irritability is due to the "double attack" of physical and psychological.
So, as family, what do we do?
Care for Mom
The first need to pay attention to their emotional changes, if necessary, you can take them to see a psychologist to alleviate their inner anxiety and depression.
The second is to alleviate the pressure of menopause from the aspect of life, that is, there is time to give them a massage, reduce women's housework time, and give them more time to experience life.
Finally, tolerance and understanding, do not feel that menopause is "doing", it is their unreasonable trouble, to understand their uncontrolled performance under the influence of the body.