If there an historic Darwinian/survival reason for mother's to wake and feed their children on a set schedule?

Question

as opposed to letting the child eat, sleep and wake as they like.

Answer 1

it is not the mother.

when children are hungry they cry and the mother gets up and feed the child.

Answer 2

Babies? Possible so, as parent-child conflict is greatest between mother and child. The child wants all resources for itself, while the mother is trying to parcel out some of those resources to possible future children.

Answer 3

There is no Darwinian reason to have a set schedule as humans had no set schedules in the modern sense until only a few centuries ago.

Prehistoric and Ancient people did not live by hours and minutes or even weeks and months, but simply by daily rythyms and seasons.

Since we evolved in the subtropics, "winter" and "summer" was not about cold vs hot or even longer days or longer nights, but wet or dry seasons and the affects those had on the hunt (as there was no agriculture then)

Babies were fed when they cried so that they would be quiet, because then as now, the sound bothered the parents and probably the rest of the village.

Set schedules are the invention of the modern industrial society of clocks and two working parents.  Victorian English society (which was still influential on early America) valued the ideal of children "seen but not heard" that is, children as compliant little stalwart citizens.

So although it is more "natural" to raise your baby semi feral, this is the modern age and somewhere along the way the modern family must instill modern societal values or else you run the risk of socially damaging the new baby/child.

Answer 4

A set schedule was a 1950s/Victorian thing.  Most babies eat on demand - i.e., when they are hungry.

With breastfed babies, that's usually every 2-4 hours, although some can go longer at night.

I HAVE had to wake my daughter to get her to eat.  It had nothing to do with a schedule.  My b***s were full and I was leaking milk, and I was in serious pain because of the pressure.  That doesn't happen very often, though.

Answer 5

I think this is a pretty recent thing. I never did this and most of my friends don't . Not with small babies anyway. Usually aroung 1 you want them to start having meals with the family though. In ancient (and probably until about 100 yrs ago) the common person wouldn't have a clock to know the time.