New study on hunter-gatherer moms suggests Western child care has a big problem

Stressed out American parents who suspect that child-rearing used to be easier may be right.

The average mother among one Congolese foraging people has at least 10 people to help hold her baby — and sometimes as many as 20, a paper published Monday has found.

That high level of support means that mothers among the Mbendjele BaYaka people have someone else holding their baby at least half the time, according to research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

That is a level of care “a world away,” unheard of in wealthy industrialized countries — but one that may have been normal across most of human history, the researchers reported.

For the vast majority of human existence, “we lived as hunter-gatherers. Therefore, contemporary hunter-gatherer societies can offer clues as to whether there are certain child-rearing systems to which infants, and their mothers, may be psychologically adapted,” lead author Nikhil Chaudhary said.

Specifically, Chaudhary speculated that humans may have evolved in “communal living arrangements” analogous to those seen today in societies like the Mbendjele — and largely absent in the world’s richest modern countries.

“If contemporary hunter-gatherer patterns match those of ancestral populations,” the researchers write, then for infants to spend substantial amounts of times without interactions from caregivers is “likely an evolutionarily novel situation.”

“This may explain why infants can find separation so distressing.”

The idea that hunter-gatherers provide a record of the human past is a fraught concept, the researchers acknowledged in their paper. 

Twentieth-century inquiries into the origin of human social structures often rested on the idea that forager peoples like the Mbendjele represented “living fossils’ of a time before civilization — rather than being fully modern peoples in their own right.

Current anthropological thought suggests that while their tools may be largely made of stone, wood and bone, peoples like the Mbendjele are adapting to, making use of and sometimes reacting against the high-tech world that surrounds them. To even say “peoples like the Mbendjele” conflates a human past of almost unfathomable diversity into a few highly specific examples.

But the difference between child care among hunter-gatherers and the “WEIRD” countries — those that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic — can still shed light on “the factors which affect children’s vulnerability to adverse psychological outcomes,” the researchers wrote.

These discrepancies are striking. Mbendjele infants are generally in close physical contact with caregivers — who carry them in slings on their hips or backs — for seven to nine hours of daylight hours.

Much of that contact is skin-to-skin, a form of contact now accepted by Western doctors as providing a wide array of physical and emotional benefits.

It’s also a form of contact most Western kids get far less of than their peers in some hunter-gatherer societies. 

While hunter-gatherer peoples differ on the precise amount of daytime kids spend connected to caregivers — the Kung people average about five hours; the Aka even more than nine — infants in Canada and Holland received less than half an hour of close contact per day.

That means those children are “likely receiving less contact than has been typical throughout human prehistory,” the researchers write.

Closing that contact gap could have a host of benefits, the researchers note. The practice’s many benefits include lowering maternal depression and enhancing infants’ brain development and sense of security.

Parents in WEIRD countries can give infants more contact time by taking a leaf out of the Mbendjele book and wearing them in a sling, or by massaging their infants.

But, crucially, this level of contact is largely possible only because parents aren’t the only ones called on to provide it. 

Instead, dense networks of around a dozen Mbendjele “allomothers” — mom stand-ins ranging from older siblings to aunts and uncles to parents’ friends — are on call to respond within a few seconds with food, caresses or play.

These groups are a mixed bag: a stable “core” made up of a handful of particularly trusted friends and family, surrounded by a rotating cast of more casual help — which gives kids the comfort of a network of consistent caregivers, while allowing the most committed members of that network to get some relief.

By contrast, in the comparatively wealthy nations of the West, most mothers have only their partners, parents or expensive professionals to lean on — if they are lucky.

In part this is owed to different patterns of family life: American family life is defined by small kin groups often dispersed across a continent. Researchers noted that government policy and low levels of social support for new mothers also contributed to the stress of parenting.

For example, family leave for mothers is usually longer than for their partners — meaning that once those partners go back to work, Western moms often face must face down a crying child they have no one to hand off to — a situation rare or even unprecedented in human history.

That situation isn’t just stressful, it’s potentially dangerous, researchers noted. 

Situations where there is just one (often overwhelmed) caregiver facing uncontrolled crying are more likely to end with desperate parents hitting, yelling at or shaking their children.

But these are rare outcomes, however serious. What is far more common in the West is a creeping burnout — because even families with access to professional child care generally only get it to allow them to work, not hang out, sleep or engage in leisure activities.

And children of parents who can only afford less expensive day cares — institutions with relatively high numbers of children for every caregiver, and with high degrees of turnover — may get little more than “supervision” from an overworked and distracted workforce.

Instead, they urge WEIRD governments to prioritize ”high-quality child care support.”

This includes high ratios of caregivers to children — the Mbendjele tend to provide a staggering 10-to-1, while standard practice in the U.S. day care industry is nearly reversed, with a maximum of six children per adult. 

It also includes the kind of employment policies that make it possible for that cast of caregivers to be stable, rather than constantly changing.

Researchers acknowledge that such reforms aren’t cheap — at least, not on the front end. But they argued that they would likely lead to healthier children and mothers — “the reduced risk of abuse and neglect, and enhancement of maternal condition and caregiving.”

Such services, they suggest, wouldn’t be a new intrusion of social democracy, but the reinstatement of something very old. This combination of consistence and high caregiver ratios, they write, “are resources that have likely been available to children for the vast majority of our species’ evolutionary history.”