The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (36 page)

In hunter-gatherer bands the allo-parenting begins within the first hour after birth. Newborn Aka and Efe infants are passed from hand to hand around the campfire, from one adult or older child to another, to be kissed, bounced, and sung to and spoken to in words that they cannot possibly understand. Anthropologists have even measured the average frequency with which infants are passed around: it averages eight times per hour for Efe and Aka Pygmy infants. Hunter-gatherer mothers share
care of infants with fathers and allo-parents, including grandparents, aunts, great-aunts, other adults, and older siblings. Again, this has been quantified by anthropologists, who have measured the average number of care-givers: 14 for a four-month-old Efe infant, 7 or 8 for an Aka infant, over the course of an observation period of several hours.

In many hunter-gatherer societies, older grandparents often stay in camp with children, enabling the parents to go off and forage unencumbered. Children may be left in the care of their grandparents for days or weeks at a time. Hadza children who have an involved grandmother gain weight faster than do children without involved grandmothers (
Plate 21
). Aunts and uncles also serve as important allo-parents in many traditional societies. For instance, among Bantu of Southern Africa’s Okavango Delta, the strongest influence of an older male on a boy is not from the boy’s father but from a maternal uncle, the mother’s oldest brother. In many societies, brothers and sisters take care of each other’s children. Older siblings, especially older girls and especially in farming and herding societies, often play a major role as care-givers of younger siblings (
Plate 38
).

Daniel Everett, who lived for many years among the Piraha Indians of Brazil, commented, “The biggest difference [of a Piraha child’s life from an American child’s life] is that Piraha children roam about the village and are considered to be related to and partially the responsibility of everyone in the village.” Yora Indian children of Peru take nearly half of their meals with families other than their own parents. The son of American missionary friends of mine, after growing up in a small New Guinea village where he considered all adults as his “aunts” or “uncles,” found the relative lack of allo-parenting a big shock when his parents brought him back to the United States for high school.

As children of small-scale societies grow older, they spend more time making longer visits to stay with other families. I experienced one such case while I was studying birds in New Guinea and hiring local people as porters to carry my supplies from one village to the next. When I arrived at one particular village, most of the porters from the previous village who had brought me there left, and I sought help from people of any age capable of carrying a pack and wanting to earn money. The youngest person who volunteered was a boy about 10 years old, named Talu. He joined me,
expecting to be away from his village for a couple of days. But when we reached my destination after a delay of a week caused by the trail becoming blocked by a river in flood, I sought someone to stay and work with me, and Talu volunteered again. As it thus worked out, Talu remained with me for a month until I finished my study and he walked back to his home. At the time that he had set out with me, his parents had been away from the village, so Talu just came, knowing that other people in the village would tell his parents on their return that he had gone off for a few days. His village friends who also came along as porters and then returned to the village would have told his parents more than a week later that he was going to stay for an uncertain length of time longer. It was evidently considered normal that a 10-year-old boy would decide by himself to go away for an indeterminate length of time.

In some societies those lengthy trips of children without their parents become lengthened even further into recognized adoptions. For example, after the age of 9 or 10, Andaman Island children rarely continue to live with their own parents but are adopted by foster parents, often from a neighboring group, and thereby help to maintain friendly relations between the two groups. Among the Iñupiat of Alaska, adoption of children was common, especially within Iñupiaq groups. Adoption in the modern First World is primarily a link between the adopted child and the adoptive parents, who until recently were not even told the identity of the biological parents, so as to preclude an ongoing relationship of the biological parents with the child or with the adoptive parents. However, for the Iñupiat the adoption served as a link between the two sets of parents and between their groups.

Thus, a major difference between small-scale societies and large state societies is that responsibility for children becomes widely diffused beyond the child’s parents in the small-scale societies. The allo-parents are materially important as additional providers of food and protection. Hence studies around the world agree in showing that the presence of allo-parents improves a child’s chances for survival. But allo-parents are also psychologically important, as additional social influences and models beyond the parents themselves. Anthropologists working with small-scale societies often comment on what strikes them as the precocious development of
social skills among children in those societies, and they speculate that the richness of allo-parental relationships may provide part of the explanation.

Similar benefits of allo-parenting operate in industrial societies as well. Social workers in the United States note that children gain from living in extended, multi-generational families that provide allo-parenting. Babies of unmarried low-income American teenagers, who may be inexperienced or neglectful as mothers, develop faster and acquire more cognitive skills if a grandmother or older sibling is present, or even if a trained college student just makes regular visits to play with the baby. The multiple care-givers in an Israeli kibbutz or in a quality day-care center serve the same function. I have heard many anecdotal stories, among my own friends, of children who were raised by difficult parents but who nevertheless became socially and cognitively competent adults, and who told me that what had saved their sanity was regular contact with a supportive adult other than their parents, even if that adult was just a piano teacher whom they saw once a week for a piano lesson.

There has been a long debate among pediatricians and child psychologists about how best to respond to a child’s crying. Of course, the parent first checks whether the child is in pain or really needs some help. But if there seems to be nothing wrong, is it better to hold and comfort a crying child, or should one put down the child and let it cry until it stops, however long that takes? Does the child cry more if its parents put the child down and walk out of the room, or if they continue to hold it?

Philosophies about this question differ among Western countries, and differ from generation to generation within the same country. When I was living in Germany over 50 years ago, the prevailing view there was that children should be left to cry, and that it was harmful to attend to a child that cried “without reason.” Studies showed that, when a German infant cried, its crying was ignored on the average one out of three times, or else the parent responded only after an interval of between 10 and 30 minutes. German infants were left alone in a crib for a long time, while the mother
went out shopping or was working in another room. The magic words for German parents were that children should acquire
Selbständigkeit
(meaning approximately “self-reliance”) and
Ordnungsliebe
(literally, “love of order,” including self-control and complying with the wishes of others) as quickly as possible. German parents considered American children spoiled, because American parents attended too quickly to a child’s crying. German parents were afraid that too much attention would make a child
verwöhnt
—an important and very, very bad word in German vocabulary regarding children, meaning “spoiled.”

The attitudes of urban American and British parents in the decades from 1920 to 1950 were similar to contemporary German attitudes. American mothers were told by pediatricians and by other experts that regular schedules and cleanliness were all-important for infants, that rapid response would spoil the baby, and that it was essential for babies to learn to play by themselves and to control themselves as early as possible. The anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy described as follows the philosophy prevailing in the United States in the mid-20th century about how to respond to a baby’s crying: “Back in my mother’s day, educated women were under the impression that if a baby cried and his mother rushed to pick him up, she would spoil him, conditioning the baby to cry more.” By the 1980s, when my wife Marie and I were raising our twin sons, that was still the prevalent philosophy about what to do with a baby who cried when being put to bed. We were advised to kiss our babies good-night, tiptoe out of their bedroom, ignore their heart-rending sobs when they heard us leave, come back in 10 minutes, wait for them to quiet down, tiptoe out again, and again ignore the resulting sobs. We felt horrible. Many other modern parents have shared our ordeal, and continue to share it.

In contrast, observers of children in hunter-gatherer societies commonly report that, if an infant begins crying, the parents’ practice is to respond immediately. For example, if an Efe Pygmy infant starts to fuss, the mother or some other care-giver tries to comfort the infant within 10 seconds. If a !Kung infant cries, 88% of crying bouts receive a response (consisting of touching or nursing the infant) within 3 seconds, and almost all bouts receive a response within 10 seconds. Mothers respond to !Kung infants by nursing them, but many responses are by non-mothers (especially other adult women), who react by touching or holding the infant.
The result is that !Kung infants spend at most one minute out of each hour crying, mainly in crying bouts of less than 10 seconds. Because the responses of !Kung care-givers to crying by their infants are prompt and reliable, the total time that !Kung infants spend crying each hour is half that measured for Dutch infants. Many other studies show that one-year-old infants whose crying is ignored end up spending more time crying than do infants whose crying receives a response.

To settle once and for all the question of whether children whose crying is ignored turn out to be healthier adults than do children whose crying receives a prompt response, one would have to do a controlled experiment. The all-powerful experimenter would arbitrarily divide a society’s households into two groups, and the parents of one group of children would be required to ignore their child’s “needless” crying while the other group of parents would respond to crying within three seconds. Twenty years later, when the infants were adults, one could assess which group of children were more autonomous, secure in relationships, self-reliant, self-controlled, unspoiled, and endowed with other virtues emphasized by some modern educators and pediatricians.

Naturally, those well-designed experiments and rigorous assessments have not been carried out. One must instead fall back on the messy natural experiments and unrigorous anecdotes of comparing societies with different child-rearing practices. At least, one can conclude that the prompt responses of hunter-gatherer parents to infants crying do not consistently lead to children who end up conspicuously lacking in autonomy and self-reliance and other virtues. We shall return to the impressionistic answers that scholars have offered to this question of long-term outcomes.

Related to those debates about spoiling a child by promptly responding to its crying are the familiar debates about spoiling a child by avoiding punishing it. There is great variation among human societies in their attitudes towards punishing children: variation within a given society from generation to generation, and variation between similar neighboring societies within the same generation. As for variation within the same society be
tween generations, spanking of children was much more widely practised in the United States in my parents’ generation than it is today. The German chancellor Bismarck commented that, even within a given family, spanked generations tend to alternate with non-spanked generations. That conforms to the experience of many of my American friends: those who were spanked as children swear that they will never inflict such barbaric cruelties on their own children, while those who were not spanked as children swear that it is healthier to administer a brief spanking than to practise the guilt manipulation and other behavioral controls that substitute for spanking, or to spoil kids entirely.

As for variation between contemporary neighboring societies, consider Western Europe today. Sweden forbids spankings; a Swedish parent who spanks a child can be charged with the criminal offense of child abuse. In contrast, many of my educated liberal German and British friends and American evangelical Christian friends believe that it is better to spank a child than not to spank. Spankers are fond of quoting the 17th-century English poet Samuel Butler (“Spare the rod and spoil the child”) and the Athenian playwright Menander (“The man who has never been flogged has never been taught”). Similarly, in modern Africa the Aka Pygmies never beat or even scold their children, and they consider horrible and abusive the child-rearing practices of neighboring Ngandu farmers, who do beat their children.

Variation in physical punishment characterizes or characterized not only modern Europe and Africa but also other times and parts of the world. Within ancient Greece, Athenian children (despite Menander’s dictum) ran around unchecked, while at the same time in Sparta everyone, not just a child’s parents, could beat a child. In New Guinea, while some tribes do not even punish babies for brandishing sharp knives, I encountered an opposite extreme at a small village (Gasten) of a dozen huts around a clearing, where village life took place in full view of all the residents. One morning, I heard angry screaming, and I looked out to see what was happening. A mother was incensed at her daughter of about age eight, shouting at the daughter and hitting her, and the daughter was sobbing and holding her arms in front of her face to ward off the blows. Other adults were watching, and nobody was interfering. The mother got more and more furious. Finally, the mother went over to the edge of the clearing,
bent down to pick up some object, came back to the child, and vigorously rubbed the object into the child’s face, causing her daughter to scream uncontrollably in agony. It turned out that the object was a bunch of stinging nettle leaves. I don’t know what the daughter had done to provoke this punishment, but the mother’s behavior was evidently considered acceptable by all of the onlookers.