>>110428695The Grottan have been conformed to have that small a number of members.
And all the other clans have hundreds of members if not more, and they sure as fuck didn't build that many puppets for them.
Redistributing the babies to other pairs would make sense, if it would otherwise cause a few pairs to look after 20 children, if the women are rare. Of cause we don't know if they are, but that is a potential scenario.
And small human populations always have a roughly 50-50 split between the sexes, which helps in creating the nuclear family model. But groups that small, often have more group focused child raising, where the children are generally taken care of by all the women of the tribe. Groups of women taking care of the children is nothing new, and men did most of the physical work, because they're better equipped for it.
Gelflings are a race where women are the leaders. Their traditional roles for the sexes, might be completely different from humans, and as a result, men taking care of children might be completely normal for them. It's not like Deet and her brother are born from both of them anyway, unless male Gelflings can impregnate each other, which I doubt they can.
And yes, all of this is generally just speculation, but your question has no concrete answer, so I'm trying to give you potential explanations instead.
