Mothers and Others

by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

  (Top) Western fathers may attempt to make up for minimal time spent with infants by packing a lot of excitement into relatively brief encounters. (Bottom) Hunter-gatherer fathers spend considerably more time in intimate and often relaxing proximity to children, as this !Kung father is doing. (Top: S. B. Hrdy/AnthroPhoto. Bottom: Peabody Museum/Marshall Expedition image 2001.29.411)

  Because hunter-gatherers live in tight-knit groups and spend a lot of time in camp, fathers tend to establish intimate associations with their children. In worlds without computers, television, or iPods, the antics of youngsters are primetime entertainment for adults. The highest average frequency of direct father-infant contact reported anywhere in the world comes from Barry Hewlett’s pathbreaking observations of infant care among Aka foragers in Central Africa. Fathers are within arm’s reach of their one- to four-month-old babies more than 50 percent of any 24-hour period and are nuzzling, kissing, hugging, or mostly just holding them a whopping 22 percent of the time they spend in camp. Even when Aka parents go on hunting expeditions in the woods, they take quite young infants and their other children along, being careful to remain in constant contact. Almost invariably, fathers in hunter-gatherer societies spend more time with infants than fathers in most Western societies do, and much more time than fathers in farming societies. Indeed, in many farming societies fathers never hold their infants at all. All the same, even among hunter-gatherer societies, the Aka were extraordinary.56

  The empirical study of allomaternal caregiving among humans began by focusing on fathers, but the more psychologists like Lamb compared notes with anthropologists, the more apparent it became that in the nomadic hunter-gatherer context, mother-only or even primarily maternal care was more nearly an impossible ideal projected onto traditional peoples by Western observers than a species-typical universal. By the mid 1980s and early 1990s, a few researchers in the United States, Holland, and Israel were already beginning to question the monotropic focus of attachment theory and to ask what the effect of multiple caretakers was for the development of infants.57 A team headed by the Israeli psychologist Abraham Sagi and his Dutch collaborator Marinus van IJzendoorn undertook an ambitious series of studies in Israel and the Netherlands to compare children cared for primarily by mothers with those cared for by both mothers and other adults. Their findings led them to question whether “only a stable relationship with regularly recurring interaction episodes” could produce a harmonious Bowlbian “match” between mothers and their babies.58

  Aka fathers are within earshot of their infants most of the time, often holding them during daytime and sleeping near them at night. However, rather than communicating commitment through focused attention and hyper-stimulating play, as Western fathers tend to do, an Aka father communicates by literally “being there” for children, both in camp and when families go into the forest to hunt. As the anthropologist Barry Hewlett put it in his book on Aka fathering, “The Aka father-child relationship is intimate not because of quality time but because the father knows his child exceptionally well through regular interactions.” (Hewlett 1991a)

  In line with a great deal of attachment research, van IJzendoorn, Sagi, and their colleagues found that the level of security in the infant’s attachment to his mother was a good predictor of “later socioemotional development.” However, infants readily formed attachments to other people as well, forging different types of attachments to different individuals. For example, a child might be insecurely attached to his mother but securely attached to an aunt or grandmother.59 Overall, children seemed to do best when they have three secure relationships—that is, three relationships that send the clear message “You will be cared for no matter what.” Such findings led van IJzendoorn and Sagi to conclude that “the most powerful predictor of later socioemotional development involves the quality of the entire attachment network.” They termed this their “integration model.”60

  Israeli kibbutzim provided natural laboratories for studying how infants integrated different relationships and for learning more about how a child’s sleeping arrangement affected attachment formation. At birth, babies in the kibbutzim were assigned to a particular nursery group. Typically there were two caregivers, called metapelet (Hebrew for “caregiver”), for every six infants. Babies were fed and cared for exclusively by their mothers during the first three months, and they continued to be fed by their mothers until at least six months, even after they had begun to spend time in the nursery and were getting to know their metapelet. Metaplot (the plural of metapelet) were typically well trained and unusually motivated women who had voluntarily chosen a job in childcare. As mothers returned to work for increasingly long hours, metaplot gradually took over most daytime care. In these respects, all 37 kibbutzim encompassed in the study were quite similar, but they differed with respect to where babies spent the night. Each baby had his or her own crib in a separate quiet room for daytime naps, but the sample was split between kibbutzim where babies went home late each afternoon and stayed at home for the night with their families and those where babies went home in the late afternoon but then returned to spend the night in a communal nursery, tended by rotating and relatively less familiar night nurses.

  Infants who spent the night in communal nurseries tended to be less securely attached to their mothers, and also less securely attached to caretakers generally.61 It is tempting to interpret the greater sense of security derived from sleeping near the mother in line with the comparative evidence across primates and foraging societies. As Hewlett puts it, “Humans communicate at night and it makes sense that trust and confidence should develop during the night just as it does during the day.” Influenced by his time among the Aka, Hewlett now regards co-sleeping as a key cultural variant linked to the frequency and scope of other relationships, such as sharing.62

  Mother-infant co-sleeping may be as close to a primate universal in childcare as can be found. Even among species with lots of shared care, babies are in contact with their mothers at night. Consider the marmoset. Although babies spend much of their day clinging to their fathers, at night they are on their mothers. Videotaped records also show that mothers are the ones most likely to be awakened by their babies during the night.63 The existence of this near-universal suggests that human infants who find it distressing to be put alone in a dark room at night, or who find bedtime especially stressful when away from home, are well within what we might call their “primate rights.”

  MULTIPLE ATTACHMENTS AND THEIR INTEGRATION

  So far in this chapter I have focused on how shared care leads to the development of enhanced capacities for mental attribution. In the process, it sets the stage for directional selection favoring infants who possess better abilities to read someone else’s intentions, while concurrently promoting intersubjective communication—critical baby steps toward the evolution of emotionally modern humans. It is time now to consider how having relationships with multiple caretakers affects other aspects of cognitive and socioemotional development.

  One of the most striking findings from the Israeli study was that infants securely attached to their metaplot were also more self-confident and socially sophisticated several years later when they entered kinder-garten.64 This correlation reminded Sagi and van IJzendoorn of an earlier finding by psychological anthropologists working among Gusii agricultural villagers in Kenya. Even though a Gusii child’s nutritional status was best predicted by the security of his attachment to his mother, cognitive performance was better predicted by the security of his attachment to other caretakers.65 As Sagi and van IJzendoorn mulled over their results and began to think more about the findings from the African case, they concluded that “an extended network was the best predictor of later advanced functioning.” The strongest predictor of empathy, dominance, independence, and achievement orientation often turned out to be a strong attachment to a nonparental caretaker. They could find no significant associations between socioemotional development and the quality of children’s attachments to t
heir parents.66

  To anyone accustomed to conventional Western wisdom that children develop optimally when cared for by a single sensitive and reliably responsive individual—namely, the mother—these results may at first seem startling, even nonsensical. But on closer consideration, what the results from Israeli, Dutch, and East African studies actually show is not that having a responsive mother does not matter (of course it does) but that infants nurtured by multiple caretakers grow up not only feeling secure but with better-developed and more enhanced capacities to view the world from multiple perspectives. As Lamb suspected early on based on his observations of infants jointly attached to both mother and father, awareness of diverse perspectives from early in life can make a child more empathetic as well as contribute to more sophisticated capacities for attributing mental and emotional states to others.

  A greater integration of different perspectives is scarcely guaranteed by all daycare contexts, especially many of the ones available to Western mothers these days.67 However, several features characteristic of hunter-gatherer societies increase the prospects of a secure caretaking environment. Because forager communities are composed of flexible assemblages of close and more distant blood relations and kin by marriage, all potential caretakers would be familiar. A typical group of 25–35 members will be both culturally homogeneous and very conservative.

  In contrast to the spiraling rate of change that characterizes modern societies, the worldview of individuals in a hunter-gatherer group remains remarkably consistent across generations. Individuals might come and go, outsiders might be occasionally “fostered” in, yet day to day a child’s extended family and especially the cultural context people were embedded in would remain extremely predictable compared with the fast rate of cultural change children and adults alike encounter in the modern world. Among people like the Aka, Hewlett stresses, childcare customs are vertically transmitted and everyone conforms to the same customs. This results in highly conserved childrearing practices and great consistency among caretakers, further promoting secure attachment to caregivers.68

  THE WORLD AS A “GIVING” PLACE

  A capacity for compassion is characteristically human. Yet its expression in any particular human depends on both heritable propensities and each person’s experiences over the course of development. At fourteen months of age, two identical twins having virtually 100 percent of their genes in common will be more alike in how they respond to an experimenter who pretends to pinch her finger on a clipboard and gives an exaggerated “Ooooh” sound than will fraternal twins, who share only half of their genes.69 But such empathy also has a learned component, which is acquired by learning to look at and experience the world from someone else’s perspective.

  Psychologists are increasingly struck by how early and eagerly children seek to establish connections with others and how connected to others children feel right from an early age. They are eager to help and to share, not just with their mothers but with various others, even strangers, so long as their mother or a familiar companion is close by and they feel safe. As early as the second year of life, children appear ready, even desperately eager, to comfort someone who seems sad, to help someone in distress.70 Their interest in how someone else feels toward them, or how others respond to a particular object or game like peek-a-boo, develops even earlier.71 Perhaps by four months of age, certainly by the end of the first year, babies are sufficiently aware of other people’s responses (and to some extent opinions) to seek their approval, often being quite coy in how they solicit praise. Babies may also look embarrassed when someone else’s expectations are not met.72 Such reactions require a sense of self as distinct from but related to others.

  Learning about this self occurs in the context of early experiences with other people. Typically, infants become accustomed to trusting and relying on others or else they learn not to. As the evolutionary psychiatrist Randy Nesse once told me, “As soon as we become convinced love is not possible, love becomes impossible.” The same is true of trust.73 Bowlby conceptualized this process as acquiring an “internal working model” for how the world and the people inhabiting that world are likely to work.74 What is striking about the worldviews of foragers (among people as widely dispersed as the Mbuti of Central Africa, Nayaka foragers of South India, the Batek of Malaysia, Australian Aborigines, and the North American Cree) is that they tend to share a view of their physical environment as a “giving” place occupied by others who are also liable to be well-disposed and generous.75 They view their physical world as being in line with benevolent social relationships. Thus, the Mbuti refer to the forest as a place that gives “food, shelter and clothing just like their parents.” The Nayaka simply say, “The forest is as a parent.”76

  Confidence about one’s place in the world does not mean life is necessarily easy. Among our hunter-gatherer ancestors, food was often scarce, predators ever present. Over generations, children would have watched with dismay as half or more of their siblings and cousins died at young ages. Yet by definition, individuals who did survive would have done so surrounded by others who cared for and shared with them. This endowed them with a personal confidence notably different from that of many modern people who grow up in environments with more available resources but less caring. People with French and German agricultural ancestors like my own are more likely to have been reared to beware of strangers. Many of us were put to bed with folktales about the world “outside over there,” a scary place peopled by impoverished widows, cruel stepmothers, hungry orphans, and unwanted children who lived surrounded by a dangerous forest where malign creatures—wolves and witches—lurked.77 To an Mbuti child, the forest is not so much dangerous as nurturing—it is a benignly encompassing mother-figure. Such a child is taught to be at least initially (until encountering information to the contrary) curious rather than fearful of outsiders.

  Intrigued by the notion that “foragers are, in general, more likely than people with other subsistence modes to develop trusting and confident views of others, the self, and the environment,” Barry Hewlett and Michael Lamb teamed up with the German psychologists Birgit Leyendecker and Axel Scholmerich to ascertain whether this was really true. If it was true, they were interested in identifying specific mechanisms, such as patterns of childcare, that underlay the trusting worldviews typical of hunter-gatherers.78 The team delved deeply into existing cross-cultural reports on infant care and then compared daily experiences of three- to four-month-old infants among Central African Aka foragers, nearby Ngandu farmers, and upper-middle-class Americans living near Washington, D.C., quantifying their different caretaking patterns. How often were babies held? By whom? How long were babies left alone?

  Hewlett and his collaborators knew how much foraging societies differ from one another and were well aware of the limitations surrounding this first-of-its-kind study. But what impressed them were the commonalities in the emotional milieu that forager children grow up in. Aka children were nearly continuously held by someone, touched more often, breastfed more frequently (sometimes by more than one individual), and responded to more reliably than were infants among nearby Ngandu farmers or among upper-middle-class American children. Such early experiences, they suggest, help explain why children in foraging societies tend to acquire working models of their world as a “giving place.”79 But even among farmers and postindustrialites, children who were accustomed to multiple caregivers grew up less likely to fear strangers.80

  Understandably, childcare arrangements shaped by local hazards and subsistence modes vary greatly and have their own effects on childhood outlooks. Savanna foragers who worry about hyenas by night and lions at any time strive never to be left alone, while a peasant mother who is not able to take her child with her to work in a faraway field, and has no other person to leave him with but also does not have to worry about prowling leopards, may leave her swaddled infant hanging from a peg on the back of a door, safe at least from crawling into the fire and out of reach of foraging, omnivor
ous pigs.81 Yet beyond actual environmental hazards, the Hewlett survey indicates that the way children interact with their caretakers influences their sense of belonging and shapes how they feel about the environment they live in.

  BECOMING EMPATHETIC AND OTHERWISE EMOTIONALLY MODERN

  One of psychology’s more robust findings is that children learn to attribute mental states to other people from early experiences interacting with them. To care about others requires a sense of self along with the capacity to conceptualize others as separate selves with their own mental states and feelings.

  In a classic 1994 paper entitled “Theory of Mind Is Contagious: You Catch It from Your Sibs,” psychologists Josef Perner and colleagues reported that the more brothers and sisters a four-year-old had, the better she did on false-belief tests.82 Understanding that someone else can hold a view about the world different from one’s own is the first step in being able to understand that someone else might think something that you know is not so. The games children play provide excellent opportunities for finding this out. False-belief experiments have become one of my own favorite parlor games for entertaining children (and myself). Ask a two-year-old sitting in his mother’s lap to watch while you carefully set a cookie on the table. Next, ask his mother to shut her eyes, and hide the cookie on your lap, under the table. Then ask the two-year-old where his mother (eyes still shut) thinks the cookie is. A child younger than three or four years lacks sufficient “theory of mind” to be able to understand that his mother has a different understanding of the situation than he does. He will almost always tell you that his mother thinks the cookie is under the table (where the cookie actually happens to be), even though she could not see the cookie being put there and thus could not know that. Almost all four-year-olds and a few children as young as three will announce that their mother thinks the cookie is still on the table, where it is not.