Mothers and Others

"This is another book by an anthropologist, although, rather than being a social anthropologist like Alma Gottlieb, Sarah Hrdy is a physical anthropologist who looks at different types of primates. So she is looking at human babies from the perspective of evolution. What this book is really about is how caregiving and our relationship between caregivers and children actually evolves, and she makes the very interesting argument that our particular evolutionary niche is such that we can’t just depend on mothers to provide care. We are more like other kinds of primates, who utilise a whole extended family network of caregivers. She thinks that humans have quite a lot in common with certain species of primates like langurs, more in some ways than we do with chimpanzees and gorillas, and that might explain our patterns of childcare. One of the reasons that I like Sarah Hrdy’s work so much is that she makes the point that it actually isn’t as natural as we think for mothers to be at home in the suburbs with their babies. Actually, we need a whole community of carers to raise a child, like fathers, grannies and grandpas and uncles and aunties. The real challenge for us is how we can do that. And one obvious thing we can do is try to have pre-schools and institutions that replicate what we would do in a kind of village community. So not a school for three year olds, but a pre-school that is more like the ideal village, where children can explore and play and be with adults who care about them and watch them do the things they do. It also points us towards a society where it is much easier for biological parents to be with the children and to combine work with taking care of their children, which is what we would have had in our evolutionary past."

"Hrdy is an evolutionary anthropologist and her research challenges the widely held view that the nuclear family – the trinity of father, mother and child – is the traditional or original human family, dating back to the Stone Age. Hrdy finds that this was not true of Stone Age families, or of people who actually live by hunting and gathering. Instead, we evolved as “communal breeders”. Given the conditions of early hominid existence, our survival as a species hinged on “alloparenting”, meaning simply the investment of others who are not the biological parents in the raising of a child. Since mutual understanding facilitates alloparenting, evolution selected for those qualities that facilitate mutual understanding – empathy, mind-reading, and collaboration. It’s not the nuclear family or exclusive maternal care but rather mutual understanding and extended families that are coded into our genes. Hrdy thus takes on the “man-as-hunter” hypothesis, which has been and in some instances continues to be promulgated by sociobiologists and politicians. At the heart of this model is a “sex-contract”: A pact between a hunter who provides for his mate who repays him with sexual fidelity so the provider can be certain that the children he invests in carry at least half of his genes. Hrdy reports that although this model describes family life among our great ape ancestors, it does not apply to our hominid forebears. In the light of new evidence, the hunting hypothesis has “effectively collapsed”. The alloparenting model displaces the patriarchal family by showing it to be neither traditional nor original in an evolutionary sense. What’s more, as Hrdy points out, “patriarchal ideologies that focused on both the chastity of women and the perpetuation and augmentation of male lineages undercut the long-standing priority of putting children’s well-being first”. As she says, “This is revolutionary stuff.” It changes what being human means. Given that alloparenting was necessary for survival, babies who were better at gauging the intentions of others and engaging with them were also better at eliciting care and hence more likely to survive into adulthood and reproduce. Researchers now find that the best environment for raising children is not the nuclear family but rather three secure relationships, meaning three relationships (gender non-specific) that convey the clear message, “You will be cared for no matter what.” Alloparenting enhances a child’s capacity for empathy and cooperation by demonstrating that there are people in the environment other than the mother who can be responsive and caring. Studies of resilient children show that in the face of nuclear or other family dysfunction, they will find others to whom they can turn – a grandparent, neighbour, housekeeper or whomever. Take our president. He was raised by his mother and alloparents – her parents – and an alloparent – Michelle Obama’s mother – now resides in the White House."

"This book shows us that mothers do something that is absolutely central to the great human talent – they are consummate coalition builders. Sarah Hrdy is a great primatologist and feminist. There has often been unease in the feminist movement at the idea that our biology should ever play an important part in understanding who we are as men and women. Hrdy has done more than any other individual to bring a sophisticated understanding of biology to the heart of a feminist perspective that we can live with in the 21st century. What she emphasises is that the old idea that human beings were fundamentally pair-bonded and that women were permanently shackled to men for the whole of their reproductive life, needs to be nuanced by an understanding of how women actually construct the coalitions that provide care to their offspring. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter She reminds us that human offspring can be handled socially in a way that’s completely impossible for other primates. You can go to a mother whose baby was born recently and take the baby out of her hands and pass it around a circle of admiring family and friends without the mother going crazy. You try doing that to a female chimpanzee and you’ll be lucky to escape with your life. There’s something really powerful about the idea that human childcare is a collaborative process in which the mother is not the only person who looks after the baby. She is at the centre of a large coalition of individuals who all do their bit. This coalition can include the biological father, but it doesn’t have to. Just as important are siblings, cousins, grandparents, uncles and aunts. Sarah Hrdy tells us that human childcare is a powerfully collaborative group endeavour. It’s not just about mothers on their own and it’s not just about pair bonds either – it’s about a whole team that brings the human baby into adulthood. The point is that modern mothers who are juggling the demands of different activities and arranging childcare aren’t doing something unnatural, they’re doing something profoundly natural. She also reminds us that the fact that it’s natural doesn’t mean that it’s free of tension. In her picture, as in Darwin’s, cooperative breeding isn’t a serene parade of agreeableness – it’s a tense, stress-filled activity. But the point is that we are creatures that have evolved to be used to tense, stress-filled activity – that’s what human cooperation is like. People who fantasise about human social life as being either about unremitting competition, or about collaborations that are entirely easy and stress free, have missed the point. Human society is profoundly collaborative but that doesn’t make it stress free."