Space Opera Fans discussion

Some of the world building in SF books includes some strange child rearing practices considered by their cultures as normal. For this discussion I'm going to skip all the variations on "throw the kids into the wilderness and any who survive to adolescence capture and civilize".

Lots of books include some variation on the British upper class nursery, with a paid expert in charge of a small number of children but living in the general household of some relative.

Mirabile by Janet Kagan is about (3rd?) generation pioneers on a colony planet. Most children appear to be raised by professional Raisers who keep 6-12 youngsters in a sort of pipeline, with the teens mostly going off to apprenticeships and new infants replacing them. Older kids help with the younger ones.

In the Tolari Space series The Marann by Christie Meierz the Tolari are empathic and a very tight bond is formed between the mother and unborn child, so much so that if the mother dies her child under the age of five almost always does too. Mothers stay very close to the young kids. If the child is intended to be the sperm donor's heir, the child goes to the father at age five with a rather traumatic breaking of the bond then establishing a new bond with the father.

The aliens in Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon consider parents as too immature to raise children. Trusted elders live in neutral enclaves and raise the children. A given set of triplets or whatever is entrusted to one particular elder, who spends some time daily with them but does have assistance.

Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin is weird. Each child is assigned specific languages to learn from a pre-verbal age and spends an hour or two with a speaker of that language every day. This includes alien and human languages. As the child ages more languages are added. That was a really strange book.....

That's enough to start us off methinks. What's another child raising practice you recall from SF?

There's mention of "creche rasing" in Midshipman's Hope by David Feintuch. Or it might be one of the later books in the Seafort series, I can't remember offhand, and can't check because 99% of my books etc are in storage while I get new windows/carpets/bed etc. in my room.

Children are brought up communally while their actual parents go about their lives/work etc.

On the one hand, the kids grow up with lots of "brothers and sisters".

But on the other, the kids don't really get to know their own parents.

Good one! Crèche raising happens in a lot of books, at least as an option for orphans or in a colonization effort with lots of zygotes for genetic diversity and a need for massive population growth. It's also a common way to raise clones, like the azi in Cyteen or the Xtrang in Liaden Universe.