PKC Family Tree at Jalenack

PKC Family Tree

By Sam | May 9th, 2005 | 25 Comments | General

This is something very random that came to my mind one day and I decided that I would let you’ll have a look at it. I think this has tons and tons of problems. And I’m curious what you think is good about this (if anything), and why you think this wouldn’t work (mainly what I’m interested in).

A family tree

This picture gives a visual aid to the words below. This picture may or may not actually aid you in figuring out what I mean.

Picture yourself as one of the parents, I’ll describe what’s going on from there. You would have kids at a younger age then our society does today because; instead of you caring for your kids your parents would care for them. Thus, the persons who would be caring for your kids are people who are more mature, older, and are better established.

Since one’s body is programmed to have kids at a younger age, this would allow teens to have kids at the age their bodies are programed to have kids. With the PKC tree teens would have kids and someone more responsible and older (the teens’ parents) who would take care of them. This would create a chain where every kid would be taken care of by two generations above them instead of just one generation above them. Now why doesn’t this work?

Problems:
This tree creates many problems. And I have to say, I think it’s a really bad idea but I thought it was interesting.

In no particular order.

1. First off if your engaging in a partnership in you teen years, taking care of the baby is one thing this would solve. But you’d still have to decide on your life partner at a very young age. Which would most likely turn into a divorce later on. Then who does what?

2. This tree has no accommodations for non-heterosexuals.

3. The population would increase by double because people would be having kids at a younger age. Thus making the world overpopulation problem even more of a problem then before.

4. Instead of having two guardians you would have four (or more).

5. Things would get super complicated if one had more than two kids. Or really things would get really complicated anyway who do you actually care for?

So what do you have to say? There are more things that don’t work, what are they? What’s your overall opinion?

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There've been 25 whole comments

6:20 pm on 5/11/2005 1. Jackie

My mom, dad, aunt, uncle, and I had a long argument about this a while ago. Well, it wasn’t exactly this, but on the same general topic. Basically we were thinking up ways to reduce world population (or something like that) and my aunt had this notion that if everyone has two kids, the world population would grow, and we had to explain that having two kids would just equal out the system, because by having two, each pair just replaces themselves. (It got into then more generations are born in your lifetime, and blah blah blah… simply put you have to disregard present population and overlap for it to work, each pair having two sets an equilibrium. Then you have to deal with all the complications, etc, which ends up with the population actually decreasing…) Hmm maybe this topic isn’t as connected as I thought it was, though it does apply to point #3…

Another thing that doesn’t work about the PKC Tree, having kids at a young age would be very traumatizing, especially as we are in high school. On the guy’s part, there isn’t too much, but imagine half of high school girls walking around the halls pregnant…the stairs would be impossible Then there is the whole which grandparents, are you going to devote to one person for the rest of your life etc etc. I’m sure that a whole system for this could be developed, but I think it’s wise to not make epicycles (score, finally a context to use this…read up on Ptolemy people!) I think that if one was to completely design a culture, this might work, but in our society today…….no.

1:41 pm on 5/22/2005 2. erin

It also doesn’t account for unconditional love. In general, after mothers give birth to their children they have an unbreakable bond between them and they have natural instincts to care for them.

10:11 pm on 5/23/2005 3. Nella

Hey, I’m game. Let’s try it. I’ll go out and irresponsibly have sex, and then dump the kid on my mom, or my partner’s parents (I don’t think I would want my kid growing up with my dad.) Then I go and live my life for twenty years, and when I’m forty or fifty, and my kid has had sex irresponsibly, I would be so ready to settle down and take care of some child of my direct bloodline. Sounds great! That would honestly suit me, because I don’t want to have kids until I’m forty or fifty anyway.

8:41 am on 5/24/2005 4. Tom

I think you already have this happening in a lot of housing projects in America. Most of the kids I taught were being raised by their grandparents. It wasn’t working out too well. You also have the problem that the grandparents and great-grandparents are more likely to die. This causes big problems for this idea. You also have less energy as you age which makes taking care of kids harder.
Considering how difficult it is just to keep a couple together in our society imagine what would happen with 6 couples. Could they “divorce” the other couples? Fight for custody? There would be a lot of problems.

9:39 pm on 5/24/2005 5. Nella

Half the girls already do walk around pregnant. (Silly anatomy class!)

4:29 pm on 5/26/2005 6. Sam

Lumpy pregnancies.