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, observers 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.
To settle once and for all the question of whether children whose crying is ignored turn out to be healthier adults than do children whose crying receives a prompt response, one would have to do a controlled experiment. The all-powerful experimenter would arbitrarily divide a society’s households into two groups, and the parents of one group of children would be required to ignore their child’s “needless” crying while the other group of parents would respond to crying within three seconds. Twenty years later, when the infants were adults, one could assess which group of children were more autonomous, secure in relationships, self-reliant, self-controlled, unspoiled, and endowed with other virtues emphasized by some modern educators and pediatricians.