Mothers and Others
Page 9
Once a baby has nursed at his mother’s breast and lactation is under way, a woman’s hormonal and neurological responses to this stimulation, combined with visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory cues, produce a powerful emotional attachment to her baby. Once she passes this tipping point, a mother’s passionate desire to keep her baby safe usually overrides other (including conscious) considerations. This is why if a mother is going to abandon her infant, she usually does so immediately, before her milk comes in and before mother-infant bonding is past the point of no return.
A STRIKING DEPARTURE FROM OTHER APES
Human babies resemble other ape babies in their powerful desire to be held close, and as with all apes, nothing suits them better than warm and continuous contact with a responsive mother. But humans enter the world on vastly different terms. They are born to a hairless mother whose commitment to her infant is contingent on far more than her own prior experience or physical condition. Her commitment depends as well on her assessment of her baby’s particular attributes and on how much social support she anticipates receiving.18 Near-term women are just as restless and alert to conceivable sources of harm to their baby as other apes would be. They are just as vigilant right before and right after birth, and prone to postpartum anxiety. Even in a modern context, with their infant sleeping soundly in a crib inside a walled, well-heated nursery, new mothers compulsively check again and again to be sure that their baby is still breathing, still safe, still comfortable. I vividly recall my own spontaneous fantasies after bringing a new baby home from the hospital, imagining the most implausible dangers. Years later I was astonished to learn from Yale psychiatrist James Leckman that such anxious, obsessively compulsive fantasies are typical of most new mothers.19
Women are just as prone as other apes to worry about the well-being of new babies. But what hunter-gatherer mothers do not do postpartum is refuse to let anyone else come near or hold their baby. This is an important difference. A brief survey of caretaking practices across traditional hunting and gathering peoples—the closest proxies for Pleistocene hominins we have—reveals that even though nomadic foragers differ in where and how they make a living, babies are universally treated with warm indulgence. Hunter-gatherers are no different from apes in this respect. Babies are never left alone and are constantly held by someone, but that someone is not invariably the mother.20 Human mothers are just as hypervigilant; they are just not so hyperpossessive. From the outset a human mother will allow other group members (typically relatives) to take and hold her baby.
The first systematic study of infant care among hunter-gatherers by the anthropologist Mel Konner described how !Kung infants were carried long distances across the veldt on their mother’s back or else held in a sling vertically at their mother’s side, in “continuous skin-to-skin contact”—a description that invited comparisons with other apes, leading Konner himself and the rest of us to overlook what was really a striking difference between humans and other apes, the amount of time that infants were held by others as well.21 In fact, !Kung infants did spend more time in direct, intimate contact with their mothers than is typical of foraging peoples generally, and far more time in contact with their mothers than is typical of infants in farming or postindustrial societies. But even !Kung infants were held by others some 25 percent of the time—a big difference from other apes, among whom new infants are never held by anyone other than their mother.22
In this extraordinary portrait, members of a Ju/’hoansi (!Kung) band cluster about a newborn. The photograph, by the late Marjorie Shostak, was taken just after the mother gave birth alone in “the bush” and then returned to camp a short distance away. She handed the baby to her mother, who gently massaged the baby and “shaped” its skull with her palms in the customary way. (Marjorie Shostak/Anthro-Photo)
Iconic images of mothers traveling long distances with their babies carried at their sides in a leather sling produced the impression that mothers were the exclusive caretakers of babies. Because the pioneering field observations among the !Kung were extremely influential, this image was extrapolated to hunter-gatherers generally. (Richard Lee/AnthroPhoto)
Hunter-gatherers vary a lot in how they make their living, depending on local terrain and what kind of game and wild plants are available.23 But in all locations, even with the invention of devices like slings, carrying infants is energetically costly, by some estimates even more costly than lactation, which takes about 500 calories per day to sustain.24 It is not surprising that mothers allow other group members to hold their babies. A quick survey of available ethnography indicates how widespread shared care is among foraging peoples. “From their position on the mother’s hip,” writes Konner, babies among the !Kung San
have available to them [the mother’s] entire social world . . . When the mother is standing, the infant’s face is just at the eye-level of desperately maternal 11- to 12-year-old girls who frequently approach and initiate brief, intense, face-to-face interactions including smiling and vocalization. When not in the sling [babies] are passed from hand to hand around a fire for similar interactions with one adult or child after another. They are kissed on their faces, bellies, genitals, sung to, bounced, entertained, encouraged, even addressed at length in conversational tones long before they can understand words. Throughout the first year there is rarely any dearth of such attention and love.25
“The Hadza child’s first year of life,” writes the ethologist Nick Blurton Jones, “appears not to differ greatly from that of the !Kung infant . . . The mother is the principal caretaker . . . Suckling is frequent, and often, but by no means always ‘on demand.’” As with other apes, the baby is in continuous contact with someone, frequently the mother, but is also held by grandmothers, great-aunts, older siblings, fathers, and even visitors from neighboring groups.26 Other group members are so attracted by this new addition to the community that Hadza newborns are held by alloparents 85 percent of the time in the first days right after birth. Thereafter, mothers take over more of the care.27
Infant sharing is even more common among Central African foragers. In nomadic communities composed of 25–30 Aka or Efe, mothers share their babies with group members immediately after birth and then keep right on sharing. Among the Mbuti, “the mother emerges and presents the child to the camp,” whereupon “she hands the [baby] to a few of her closest friends and family, not just for them to look at him but for them to hold him close to their bodies.”28 Over the first days of his life, all females in the vicinity “attempt to comfort a distressed or fussy infant.”29 Among the Aka, the mother’s mother typically takes the neonate right after birth, washes him in a stream, wraps him in cloth, and holds him until the placenta is delivered. Among the Efe, other women cluster around a woman in labor, several of them acting as midwives.30
Both Efe and Aka women pass the infant around after birth, and regardless of whether they are actually lactating, they may comfort the newborn by allowing him to suck on their nipples. Over the next 48 hours or so, before the mother’s own milk comes in, the baby will also be nursed—as often as two or three times a day—by one or more lactating allomothers.31 If a lactating woman does not currently reside in camp, a wet nurse may be temporarily recruited from another village.32 Although shared suckling is not observed among wild apes, it occurs at least occasionally in 87 percent of typical foraging societies documented in the Human Relations Area Files.33
Because nut groves where women collect food were often miles from camp, !Kung women carried their infants with them. This way, if babies wanted to nurse, they could. In a hot, arid world without pasteurized milk or baby bottles, breast milk was often the only way to keep babies safely hydrated. The harsh Kalahari conditions were probably one reason why !Kung infants spent relatively more time than do Aka or Efe infants in direct contact with their mothers. (Peabody Museum/Marshall Expedition image 2001.29.410)
Around the world, wherever traditional ways of life persist—that is, in communities where mothers ha
ve not yet begun to live in compartmentalized families and started to worry about not exposing their babies to germs—shared care is the rule. Far from Africa, the Agta in the Philippines still live as foragers and are famous for women’s participation in hunting. A newborn Agta will be “eagerly passed from person to person until all in attendance have had an opportunity to snuggle, nuzzle, sniff, and admire the newborn . . . Thereafter he enjoys constant cuddling, carrying, loving, sniffing, and affectionate genital stimulation.”34 Similarly, among Ongee foragers on the Andaman Islands off the eastern coast of India, and among Trobriand Islanders in the Pacific, infants are routinely shared and are suckled by lactating allomothers.
Focusing on the best-studied hunter-gatherer societies, we find a continuum, with people like the !Kung engaging in comparatively little infant-sharing and people like the Efe doing a lot of it. The Hadza fall somewhere in between, with babies under four years of age held by their mothers 69 percent of the time and held by allomothers, mostly relatives, the rest of the time.35 These proportions are reversed among the Efe, where allomothers hold babies 60 percent of the time during daylight—more than their own lactating mothers do. But even in the Efe case, where babies pass from caretaker to caretaker on average eight times an hour, mothers hold babies more than any other single individual. And as is true for all apes, !Kung, Efe, and Aka infants spend their nights nestled next to their mothers.
Even with such extensive babysitting at their disposal, Aka and Efe mothers are rarely far away from their infants and are available to breastfeed on demand as often as several times per hour.36 No wonder babies are emotionally most strongly attached to their mothers. But with all these commonalities, what stands out and contrasts with other apes is that these mothers trust others and allow them to take their infants shortly after birth.
So why are postpartum women so much more tolerant of group members than other apes living in the wild? Humans’ large neocortex is an obvious possibility. Not only do human mothers need more help getting big-brained babies through narrow birth canals but they are better able to evaluate the costs and benefits of their own behavior.37 Conscious awareness that they will need help rearing their babies renders human mothers more discriminating. Mothers also understand how beneficial it is for a baby to be introduced to a community of others. By sharing her baby, the mother sends a clear signal that both she and her offspring will be counting on help from the clan. By exposing alloparents to the sight, sound, and smell of her alluring little charge, the mother lays the groundwork for emotional ties binding her baby to potential caretakers and vice versa.
But other factors are involved as well. If human mothers exhibit greater postpartum tolerance of others, it must be because they are more confident of the benign intentions of those around them. Their trust is sufficient to override the compulsive hypervigilance universally found in new ape mothers. In Chapter 8, I examine why postpartum women should be more trusting and tolerant of groupmates than other apes are.
BORN IN A NEW MILIEU
Efe babies average 14 different caretakers in the first days of life.38 Male caregivers are usually fathers, brothers, or cousins, less often grandfathers or uncles. Females are typically older sisters, aunts, or grandmothers. Cousins are less frequently involved, possibly because they have their own younger siblings to care for.39 More distant relations also help out—sometimes orphans fostered in from elsewhere, possibly acting as au pairs in exchange for their board. Babies soon become powerfully bonded to their mothers, but right from birth they are introduced to a range of alloparents who also become familiar to them.
The Efe are an extreme case, but in general hunter-gatherer babies are exposed to, cared for, stimulated, and entertained by a wider cast of characters than other apes are. Perhaps even more remarkably, they are also provisioned by alloparents, who comfort and distract their charges by offering a breast or mouth-to-mouth kisses laced with the juice of ripe berries or sugary ground powder from baobab pods.40 Sweetened saliva adds an extra and exciting dimension to the pleasurable sensations of kissing. As young as three to four months, babies receive premasticated mouthfuls of food from allomothers, who push these delicacies in with their tongues. In a particularly detailed study of allomaternal care, Barry Hewlett and his colleagues found that 15 of 20 three-month-old Aka infants were being provisioned in this way.41 From an early age, food sharing becomes a highlight of relations with allomothers—the amuse bouche to the decades of alloparental provisioning to follow.
Sharing food with immatures still too young to obtain or process food for themselves has been a critical but often-overlooked chapter of the human story. Alloparental provisioning has been well-studied in birds, however, where males are almost as likely to provide for young as females are. In other cooperatively breeding mammals like wild dogs, wolves, or meerkats, not only do alloparents of both sexes routinely bring back food to the den but lactating mothers also suckle another female’s young. Yet no other immatures depend on others to provision them for years the way that human children do.
An Efe infant is born into an ever-expanding social world, passed between mother and allomother, and among allomothers, in the days just after birth. (steve Winn/AnthroPhoto)
Among chimpanzees, who also grow up slowly, infants are provisioned insofar as they are permitted to grab food from their mothers. A youngster as old as two years has been observed to push pouted lips into his mother’s face until she delivers a lipfull of shared food right into his mouth.42 But only among humans is maternal and alloparental generosity initiated from the first months and then sustained for years. Premasticated mouthfuls of baby food are followed by finger foods, which are followed by nuts and cooked roots, collected and often laboriously processed by grandmothers and great-aunts—and most delectably of all, honey or meat brought in by the father, the child’s uncle, or other hunters. Everyone receives a share of the highly prized meat. I agree with Daniel Stern’s remark that “we grow up in a soup of other people’s feelings and desires,” but I doubt that Dr. Stern intended for his metaphor about edible milieus to apply quite so literally.43
(Top) This eight-year-old Yanomamo allomother hugs and gently rocks a three-month-old baby, as she kisses him on the mouth, transferring sweet saliva. (Bottom) This Himba grandmother delivers food in mouth-to-mouth transfer, only to have the baby playfully return the favor. Early ethologist Eibl-Eibesfeldt referred to such behaviors as “kiss-feeding” after similar behaviors seen in birds and some other primates. (I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt/Human Ethology Archives)
Even though no other ape shares care and provisioning of young as spontaneously or as routinely as humans do, shared care and provisioning is found in some other primates. But before turning to these cases, I need to explain how a fixation with mother-only care initially led evolutionists to overlook alternative modes of infant care.
WHAT ATTACHMENT THEORISTS OVERLOOKED
Within the field of developmental psychology, the most influential evolutionist since Darwin was unquestionably John Bowlby. Back in the middle of the last century, this kindly, evolutionarily-minded psychiatrist set about situating the emotional needs of developing infants within what he termed humankind’s “environment of evolutionary adaptedness.” Attachment theory, arguably evolutionary theory’s most important contribution to human well-being, has grown out of Bowlby’s insights into the need of primate infants to feel secure and to forge emotional attachments to a primary caretaker. What follows here and in the next chapter is meant to correct an underlying assumption about the universality of exclusive maternal care in primates, not to challenge Bowlby’s fundamental insights.
Back in my mother’s day, anyone with a college-level course in psychology would have been at least subliminally aware of the behaviorist John Watson’s famous (now infamous) admonition to be ashamed of “the mawkish, sentimental way you have been handling your child.”44 Watson warned that it was ill-advised to pick up a crying baby. It would spoil the child and condition him to cry more
. Far better to let the baby cry it out. From the late 1960s onward, however, with the spread of attachment theory, such attitudes changed.
Unlike Watson, who viewed crying as perverse, Bowlby viewed it as natural, shaped by Darwinian selection during humankind’s 70-million-year primate heritage. Far from being spoiled egotists, babies were responding adaptively, in ways that would have kept their ancestors safe from predation by hyenas and leopards and from other hazards of their ancestral environments. In words that to my sociobiologically conditioned ears still sound remarkably fresh today, Bowlby wrote: “When he is born, an infant is far from being a tabula rasa. On the contrary he is equipped with a number of behavioral systems ready to be activated but each system is already biased so that it is activated by stimuli falling within one or more broad ranges.”45
Little humans are born preprogrammed to look for eyes, follow their gaze, seek out faces, especially “prettier” feminine faces (though babies routinely settle for less), and quickly memorize their mother’s voice and smell, seeking to maintain contact with her and in time forge a powerful emotional attachment to this all-important other.46 Forget the behaviorists. Post-Bowlby, babies are viewed as well within their rights to cry when left alone.