In recent decades, there has at last been increasing interest in comparative studies of child-rearing by small-scale societies. For instance, there have been half a dozen dedicated studies of children, not just incidental to other anthropological observations, among some of the world’s last human groups still obtaining much of their subsistence by hunting and gathering: the Efe and Aka Pygmies of African rainforests, the !Kung of southern African deserts, the Hadza of East Africa, the Ache Indians of Paraguay, and the Agta of the Philippines. In this chapter I shall discuss what such studies of small-scale societies have shown us about childbirth and infanticide, nursing and weaning, infant/adult physical contact, the role of fathers and of care-givers other than the parents, responses to a child crying, punishment of children, a child’s freedom to explore, and children’s play and education.
Childbirth
Today, childbirth in Westernized societies usually takes place in a hospital, with the help of trained professionals: physicians, midwives, and nurses. Mortality of infants and mothers associated with childbirth is low. But traditional childbirth was different. Before or in the absence of modern medicine, death of the infant and/or the mother in childbirth was much more common than it is now.
The circumstances of childbirth vary among traditional societies. In the simplest case, very exceptionally, a cultural ideal is for the mother to give birth alone and unassisted. For instance, among the !Kung people of southern African deserts, a woman about to give birth is expected to walk a few hundred yards from the camp and give birth alone. In practice, especially for a first-time !Kung mother, she may be accompanied by other women to help, but with successive births the mother is more likely to achieve that ideal of giving birth alone. However, even if the mother does so, she remains close enough to camp that other women can hear the first cries of the baby and then go join the mother to help in cutting the umbilical cord, cleaning the baby, and carrying it back to the camp.
The Piraha Indians of Brazil (Plate 11) are another group in which women often give birth unassisted. The commitment of the Piraha to that ideal is illustrated by an experience of linguist Steve Sheldon, related by Daniel Everett: “Steve Sheldon recounted a story once of a woman giving birth alone on a beach. Something went wrong. A breech birth. The woman was in agony. ‘Help me, please! The baby will not come,’ she cried out. The Pirahas sat passively, some looking tense, some talking normally. ‘I’m dying! This hurts. The baby will not come!’ she screamed. No one answered. It was late afternoon. Steve started toward her. ‘No! she doesn’t want you. She wants her parents,’ he was told, the implication clearly being that he was not to go to her. But her parents were not around and no one else was going to her aid. The evening came and her cries came regularly, but ever more weakly. Finally, they stopped. In the morning Steve learned that she and the baby had died on the beach, unassisted…. [This tragic incident] tells us that the Pirahas let a young woman die, alone and without help, because of their belief that people must be strong and get through difficulties on their own.”
Much more commonly, traditional childbirth takes place with the assistance of other women. For example, among the Kaulong people of New Britain, whose men are obsessed with the polluting effects of women during menstruation and childbirth, a woman about to give birth goes to a shelter in the forest, accompanied by several older women. At the opposite extreme are societies in which birth is virtually a public event. Among the Agta people of the Philippines, a woman gives birth in a house in the camp, and everyone in camp may crowd into the house and shout out instructions to the mother and midwife (“push,” “pull,” “don’t do that”).
Infanticide
Infanticide—the intentional acknowledged killing of an infant—is illegal in most state societies today. In many traditional societies, however, infanticide is acceptable under certain circumstances. While this practice horrifies us, it is difficult to see what else the societies could do under some of the conditions associated with infanticide. One such condition is when an infant is born deformed or weak. Many traditional societies experience lean seasons of marginal food supply, when it becomes difficult for the small number of productive adults to provide food for the larger number of non-producing children and old people. An additional consuming but non-productive mouth is then a burden that the society can ill afford.
Another circumstance associated with infanticide is a short birth interval: i.e., an infant born within only two years of the birth of the mother’s previous child that is still nursing and being carried. It is difficult or impossible for a woman to produce enough milk for a two-year-old and also for a newborn, and to carry not just one but two children while shifting camp. For the same reason, twin births by hunter-gatherer women may result in the killing or neglect of at least one of the twins. Here is an interview with an Ache Indian named Kuchingi reported by Kim Hill and A. Magdalena Hurtado: “The one [the sibling] who followed me [in birth order] was killed. It was a short birth spacing. My mother killed him because I was small. ‘You won’t have enough milk for the older one [i.e., Kuchingi],’ she was told. ‘You must feed the older one.’ Then she killed my brother, the one who was born after me.”
Still another factor predisposing towards infanticide at childbirth is if the father is absent or dead, and thus unable to help feed the mother and protect the child. For a single mother, life is hard even today. It was harder in the past, especially in societies in which lack of a father tended to result in a higher probability of a child dying, e.g., because fathers provided most of the calories or protected their children against violence by other men.
Finally, in some traditional societies the ratio of boys to girls increases from birth to adolescence, as a result of female infants dying through passive neglect, or (in exceptional cases) even being intentionally killed by strangling, exposure, or burying alive—because many societies value boys over girls. For example, among the Ache Indians, 14% of boys but 23% of girls have been killed by the age of 10. The absence of either the father or the mother increases by four-fold the chance that an Ache child will be killed by homicide, but the risk is higher for girls than for boys. In modern China and India that widespread valuing of boys over girls results in an excess of infant boys by a new mechanism: pre-natal sex determination permitting the selective abortion of female fetuses.
The !Kung consider it a mother’s obligation to evaluate the case for or against infanticide at the time of childbirth. The sociologist Nancy Howell wrote, “The custom that women should or can give birth alone gives the mother the unquestioned right to control infanticide. At the scene of the birth, usually before the baby is named and certainly before bringing the baby back to the village, it is the mother’s responsibility to examine the baby carefully for birth defects. If it is deformed, it is the mother’s duty to smother it. Many !Kung informants told me that this examination and decision is a regular and necessary part of the process of giving birth. !Kung infanticide is not equivalent to murder in their eyes, since they do not consider birth to be the beginning of life of a zun/wa [a !Kung person]. Life begins with giving a name and the acceptance of the baby as a social person back in the village after the birth. Before that time, infanticide is part of the mother’s prerogatives and responsibility, culturally prescribed for birth defects and for one of each set of twins born. There are no pairs of twins surviving in the population….”
However, infanticide is certainly not universal in traditional societies and is less common than infant death due to “benign neglect.” (That euphemism means that an infant is not actively killed but instead dies through neglect, e.g., due to the mother stopping nursing, or nursing the infant less often, or rarely cleaning or washing the infant.) For example, when Allan Holmberg lived among a group of Siriono Indians in Bolivia, he found that infanticide and abortion were unknown. Even though 15% of Siriono children were born with club feet, and only one out of five of those children survived to adulthood and raised a family, those children received norma
l love and feeding.
Weaning and birth interval
In the U.S. the proportion of infants who were nursed at all by their mothers, and the age at which those nursed infants were weaned, decreased through much of the 20th century. For example, by the 1970s only 5% of American children were being nursed at the age of six months. In contrast, among hunter-gatherers not in contact with farmers and without access to farmed foods, infants are nursed far beyond six months, because the only suitable infant food available to them is mother’s milk: they have no access to cow’s milk, baby formula, or soft food replacements. The age of weaning averaged over seven hunter-gatherer groups is about three years old, an age at which children finally become capable of fully nourishing themselves by chewing enough firm food. While some solid pre-chewed foods may be introduced around the age of six months, a hunter-gatherer child may not be fully weaned off its mother’s milk until the mother is pregnant with the next child. Individual !Kung children continue to nurse beyond the age of four if a next sibling has not yet been born. Studies show that, the older the age of a !Kung child when it is weaned, the more likely is the child to survive to adulthood. But in settled agricultural populations and among hunter-gatherers trading with farmers, those weaning ages and birth intervals of two and a half to four years for nomadic hunter-gatherers decrease to an average age of two years, because farmers do have livestock milk and soft cereal gruels onto which to wean a small child. For instance, when the !Kung themselves settle down to become farmers, as has been happening increasingly in recent decades, their birth interval quickly drops from three and a half years to the two years typical of farmers.
The ultimate evolutionary causes and the proximate physiological mechanisms responsible for those long birth intervals of nomadic hunter-gatherers have been the subject of much discussion. It appears that the ultimate reasons are two-fold. First, a mother without access to cow’s milk or cereal gruel, and hence likely to nurse a child until the age of three or more years, cannot produce enough milk to nurse both a newborn and a not-yet-weaned older child. If she tried, one of those children would be likely to starve for lack of milk.
The other reason is that only when a child is around four years old or more does it become capable of walking fast enough to keep up with its parents when they are shifting camp. Younger children have to be carried then. While walking, a 90-pound !Kung woman has to carry an under-four-year-old child of up to 28 pounds, a load of wild vegetables weighing from 15 to 40 pounds or more, and several pounds of water, plus utensils. That’s already a large burden, and it would be even heavier if a younger infant were added to the load. We thus have a second ultimate evolutionary factor contributing to the rapid decrease in birth interval when nomadic hunter-gatherers settle down to become farmers: most farmers live in permanent villages and don’t face the problem of having to carry all children less than four years old whenever they shift camp.
That late weaning age means that, for a hunter-gatherer mother, much physical and emotional energy goes into the rearing of one child. Western observers have the impression that a !Kung child’s very close relationship with the mother, and the exclusive attention that it enjoys for several years without younger siblings, provide an emotional security in childhood that translates itself into the emotional security of !Kung adults. But when a hunter-gatherer child finally does become weaned, the result can be traumatic. Within a short time, the child receives much less maternal attention, becomes hungry without mother’s milk, has to cede to the next infant its sleeping place at night next to the mother, and may be increasingly expected to enter the adult world. !Kung children being weaned are miserable and have tantrums. !Kung who survive to become old adults still look back on weaning 70 years earlier as a painful experience. In camps of Piraha Indians at night, one often hears children screaming, almost always because they are being weaned. Nevertheless, while traditional societies do wean at a later age than do modern Americans, the specific patterns vary among societies. For example, Bofi and Aka Pygmy children wean gradually rather than abruptly, tantrums are rare, and weaning is often initiated by the child rather than by the mother.
On-demand nursing
Those two ultimate causes responsible for the long birth intervals of hunter-gatherers leave open the question of the proximate physiological mechanism ensuring that there are not two children less than several years old to be cared for simultaneously. One mechanism is the resort to neglect or (less often) infanticide, as we have already mentioned: if a hunter-gatherer mother becomes pregnant when her previous child is still less than two and a half years old, then she may neglect or even kill the newborn, knowing that she cannot take care of it as well as of the older child. The other proximate factor is that physiological mechanisms operating in a mother nursing according to the on-demand schedule of frequent feedings characteristic of hunter-gatherer babies (as opposed to the infrequent nursing bouts set for the convenience of the mother in Western society) make it less likely that a nursing mother will become pregnant, even if she resumes sex while nursing.
In hunter-gatherer groups in which nursing has been specifically studied, it is often “on demand.” That is, the infant has constant access to the mother’s breast, is held in contact with the mother during the day, sleeps next to the mother at night, and can nurse at any time it wants, whether or not the mother is awake. For example, measurements among the !Kung have shown that an infant nurses on the average four times per hour during the day, 2 minutes per nursing bout, with an average interval of only 14 minutes between bouts. The mother wakes to nurse the infant at least twice a night, and the infant nurses without waking the mother several times per night. This constant opportunity for nursing on demand usually continues for at least three years of the !Kung child’s life. In contrast, many or most mothers in modern societies schedule nursing at times when the mother’s activities permit it. The organization of a mother’s work, whether the work is a job outside the house or domestic work within the house, often involves mother-child separations of several hours. The result is many fewer daily nursing bouts than the dozens of bouts for a hunter-gatherer mother, longer individual bouts, and much longer intervals between bouts.
That high nursing frequency of hunter-gatherer mothers has physiological consequences. As mentioned above, nursing hunter-gatherer mothers usually do not conceive for several years after a child’s birth, even if the mother resumes sexual activity. Evidently, something about traditional on-demand nursing acts as a contraceptive. One hypothesis is termed “lactational amenorrhea”: suckling releases maternal hormones that not only stimulate the secretion of milk but that may also inhibit ovulation (a woman’s release of eggs). But that inhibition of ovulation requires a constant regime of frequent nursing; a few bouts of nursing per day do not suffice. The other hypothesis is termed the “critical-fat hypothesis”: ovulation requires that the mother’s fat levels exceed a certain critical threshold. In a nursing woman from a traditional society without abundant food, the high energy costs of milk production keep the mother’s fat level below that critical value. Thus, sexually active nursing mothers in modern Western industrial societies, unlike their hunter-gatherer counterparts, may still conceive (to their surprise) for either or both of two reasons: their nursing frequency is much too low for hormonally induced lactational amenorrhea; and they are sufficiently well nourished that their body fat levels remain above the critical threshold for ovulation, even despite the caloric expenditure of lactation. Many educated Western mothers have heard of lactational amenorrhea, but fewer have heard that it is effective only at high nursing frequencies. A friend of mine who recently, to her dismay, conceived again only a few months after the birth of her previous child thereby joined the long list of modern women exclaiming, “But I thought that I couldn’t conceive while I was nursing!”
Nursing frequency differs among mammal species. Some mammals, including chimpanzees and most other primate species, bats, and kangaroos, nurse continuously. Other mammals,
of which rabbits and antelopes are prime examples, nurse discontinuously: a mother rabbit or antelope leaves her infant hidden in the grass or in a den while she goes out to forage, then she returns after a long interval and suckles the infant only a few times per day. Human hunter-gatherers resemble chimpanzees and Old World monkeys in being continuous nursers. But that pattern, which we inherited from our primate ancestors and presumably maintained for the millions of years of human evolution separate from the evolution of chimpanzees, changed only in the thousands of years since the origins of farming, when we developed lifestyles involving mother-infant separations. Modern human mothers have acquired the suckling habits of rabbits, while retaining the lactational physiology of chimpanzees and monkeys.
Infant-adult contact
Associated with those mammalian species differences in nursing frequency are differences in the percentage of an infant’s time spent in contact with an adult (especially with the mother). In the discontinuously nursing species the infant is in contact with the mother just for brief bouts of nursing and care. In the continuously nursing species the mother carries the infant while she forages: a mother kangaroo keeps the infant in her pouch, a mother bat holds the infant on her stomach even while she is flying, and chimpanzee and Old World monkey mothers carry the infant on their back.
In modern industrial societies today, we follow the rabbit-antelope pattern: the mother or someone else occasionally picks up and holds the infant in order to feed it or play with it, but does not carry the infant constantly; the infant spends much or most of the time during the day in a crib or playpen; and at night the infant sleeps by itself, usually in a separate room from the parents. However, we probably continued to follow our ancestral ape-monkey model throughout almost all of human history, until within the last few thousand years. Studies of modern hunter-gatherers show that an infant is held almost constantly throughout the day, either by the mother or by someone else. When the mother is walking, the infant is held in carrying devices, such as the slings of the !Kung, string bags in New Guinea, and cradle boards in the north temperate zones. Most hunter-gatherers, especially in mild climates, have constant skin-to-skin contact between the infant and its care-giver. In every known society of human hunter-gatherers and of higher primates, mother and infant sleep immediately nearby, usually in the same bed or on the same mat. A cross-cultural sample of 90 traditional human societies identified not a single one with mother and infant sleeping in separate rooms: that current Western practice is a recent invention responsible for the struggles at putting kids to bed that torment modern Western parents. American pediatricians now recommend not having an infant sleep in the same bed with its parents, because of occasional cases of the infant ending up crushed or else overheating; but virtually all infants in human history until the last few thousand years did sleep in the same bed with the mother and usually also with the father, without widespread reports of the dire consequences feared by pediatricians. That may be because hunter-gatherers sleep on the hard ground or on hard mats; a parent is more likely to roll over onto an infant in our modern soft beds.
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? Page 22