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.