The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?

by Jared Diamond

  For example, !Kung infants spend their first year of life in skin-to-skin contact with the mother or another care-giver for 90% of the time. !Kung infants are carried by the mother wherever she goes, interrupted only when the infant is passed from the mother to other care-givers. A !Kung child begins to separate more frequently from its mother after the age of one and a half, but those separations are initiated almost entirely by the child itself, in order to play with other children. The daily contact time between the !Kung child and care-givers other than the mother exceeds all contact time (including contact with the mother) for modern Western children.

  One of the commonest Western devices for transporting a child is the stroller, which provides no physical contact between the baby and the care-giver (Plate 39). In many strollers, the infant is nearly horizontal, and sometimes facing backwards. Hence the infant does not see the world as its care-giver sees the world. In recent decades in the United States, devices for transporting children in a vertical (upright) position have been more common, such as baby carriers, backpacks, and chest pouches, but many of those devices have the child facing backwards. In contrast, traditional carrying devices, such as slings or holding a child on one’s shoulders, usually place the child vertically upright, facing forwards, and seeing the same world that the care-giver sees (Plates 21, 38). The constant contact even when the caretaker is walking, the constant sharing of the care-giver’s field of view, and transport in the vertical position may contribute to !Kung infants being advanced (compared to American infants) in some aspects of their neuromotor development.

  In warm climates, it is practical to have constant skin-to-skin contact between a naked baby and a mostly naked mother. That is more difficult in cold climates. Hence about half of traditional societies, mostly those in the temperate zones, swaddle their infants, i.e., wrap the infant in warm fabric. The swaddled infant is often strapped to a board called a cradle board. That practice was formerly widespread around the world, mainly in societies at high latitudes. The basic idea of swaddling and of the cradle board is to wrap the baby as protection against the cold, and to restrict the baby’s ability to move its body and limbs. Navajo Indian mothers who use cradle boards explain that the purpose is to induce the child to go to sleep, or to keep the child asleep if the child is put on the cradle board when it is already asleep. The Navajo mother usually adds that the cradle board prevents the infant from suddenly jerking while asleep and thereby waking itself up. A Navajo infant spends 60%–70% of its time on a cradle board for the first six months of life. Cradle boards were formerly also common practice in Europe but began to disappear there a few centuries ago.

  To many of us moderns, the idea of a cradle board or swaddling is abhorrent—or was, until swaddling recently came back into vogue. The notion of personal freedom means a lot to us, and a cradle board or swaddling undoubtedly does restrict an infant’s personal freedom. We are prone to assume that cradle boards or swaddling retard a child’s development and inflict lasting psychological damage. In fact, there are no personality or motor differences, or differences in age of independent walking, between Navajo children who were or were not kept on a cradle board, or between cradle-boarded Navajo children and nearby Anglo-American children. The probable explanation is that, by the age that an infant starts to crawl, the infant is spending half of its day off of the cradle board anyway, and most of the time that it spends on the cradle board is when the infant is asleep. Actually, immobilizing an infant on a cradle board lets the infant be kept near its mother, and taken with the mother when she goes anywhere. Hence it is argued that doing away with cradle boards brings no real advantages in freedom, stimulation, or neuromotor development. Typical Western children sleeping in separate rooms, transported in baby carriages, and left in cribs during the day are often socially more isolated than are cradle-boarded Navajo children.

  Fathers and allo-parents

  The investment of fathers in caring for their offspring varies greatly among animal species. At one extreme are some species, such as ostriches and sea horses, in which, after a male has fertilized a female and the female has produced eggs, the female goes off and leaves brooding of the eggs and care for the hatched offspring entirely to the father. At the opposite extreme are many species of mammals and some birds: after the male fertilizes the female, the male deserts her to pursue other females, and the entire burden of parenting falls upon the female. Most species of monkeys and apes fall between these two extremes but nearer the latter one: the father lives with the mother and her offspring, perhaps as part of a larger troop, but provides the offspring with little other than protection.

  In humans, paternal care is low by the standards of ostriches, high by the standards of apes and most other primate species, but the father’s involvement in the care of infants is less than that of the mother in all known human societies. Nevertheless, fathers play a significant role in food provisioning, protection, and education in most human societies, with the result that the death of a child’s biological father decreases a child’s probability of surviving in some societies. Fathers’ involvement tends to be greater for older children (especially for sons) than for infants, and fathers in modern societies usually succeed in delegating many aspects of child care, such as changing diapers, wiping bottoms and noses, and bathing a child.

  Among human societies, there is much variation in that involvement of fathers, partly related to a society’s subsistence ecology. Paternal involvement is highest in societies in which women spend time obtaining most of the food. For instance, Aka Pygmy fathers furnish more direct care to their infants than do the fathers of any other studied human population (Plate 8), perhaps related to the fact that Aka Pygmy mothers not only gather plant foods but also participate in hunting with nets. On the average, child care by fathers, and also women’s contribution to the food supply, are higher in societies of hunter-gatherers than in societies of herders. Fathers’ direct care of their children tends to be low in societies, such as those of New Guinea Highlanders and African Bantu groups, in which the men devote much of their time and identity to being warriors, and to protecting their family against aggressive other men. In much of the New Guinea Highlands, men traditionally even lived in separate communal men’s houses, together with their sons after the age of six, while each wife lived in a separate hut with her daughters and young sons. The men and boys ate by themselves, consuming food that a man’s wife and a boy’s mother brought to the men’s house.

  What about the child-rearing contribution of care-givers other than the mother and the father? In modern Western society, a child’s parents are typically by far its dominant care-givers. The role of “allo-parents”—i.e., individuals who are not the biological parents but who do some care-giving—has even been decreasing in recent decades, as families move more often and over longer distances, and children no longer have the former constant availability of grandparents and aunts and uncles living nearby. This is of course not to deny that babysitters, schoolteachers, grandparents, and older siblings may also be significant care-givers and influences. But allo-parenting is much more important, and parents play a less dominant role, in traditional societies.

  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 on-going 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.

  Responses to crying infants

  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, obs
ervers 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.