Among farming peoples there is variation, with the most punitive being herders whose valuable livestock are at stake if a child looking after the livestock misbehaves. In some farming communities, discipline of children is lax, and they have few responsibilities and also few opportunities to damage valuable possessions, until they reach puberty. For example, among the people of the Trobriand Islands near New Guinea, who are farmers without livestock except for pigs, children are neither punished nor expected to obey. The ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski wrote of the Trobriand Islanders, “Often…I would hear a youngster told to do this or that, and generally the thing, whatever it was, would be asked as a favor, though sometimes the request might be backed up by a threat of violence. The parent would either coax or scold or ask as from one equal to another. A simple command, implying the expectation of natural obedience, is never heard from parents to child in the Trobriands…. When I suggested, after some flagrant infantile misdeed, that it would mend matters for the future if the child were beaten or otherwise punished in cold blood, the idea appeared unnatural and immoral to my [Trobriand] friends.”
A friend who has lived for many years among a herding people of East Africa told me that the herders’ children there behave like little juvenile delinquents until the age of male circumcision, at which time they are expected to assume responsibilities. Then, following an initiation ceremony, boys begin herding the valuable cows, girls begin caring for siblings, and both begin to be disciplined. Among the Tallensi people of Ghana in West Africa, no one hesitates to punish a child who seems to deserve it, e.g., for dawdling while driving cattle. One Tallensi man pointed out to a visiting British anthropologist a scar that had resulted from his being severely whipped as a small boy. A Tallensi elder explained, “If you don’t harass your child, he will not gain sense”—similar to Butler’s dictum “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”
Child autonomy
How much freedom or encouragement do children have to explore their environment? Are children permitted to do dangerous things, with the expectation that they must learn from their mistakes? Or are parents protective of their children’s safety, and do parents curtail exploration and pull kids away if they start to do something that could be dangerous?
The answer to this question varies among societies. However, a tentative generalization is that individual autonomy, even of children, is a more cherished ideal in hunter-gatherer bands than in state societies, where the state considers that it has an interest in its children, does not want children to get hurt by doing as they please, and forbids parents to let a child harm itself. I write these lines just after I picked up a rental car at an airport. The recording that was broadcast to us passengers on the shuttle bus from the airport baggage claim to the rental car lot warned us, “Federal law requires children under five years of age or weighing under 80 pounds to be transported in a federally approved car seat.” Hunter-gatherers would consider that warning to be none of the business of anyone other than the child and perhaps its parents and band members, but certainly not of a distant bureaucrat. At the risk of overgeneralizing, one could say that hunter-gatherers are fiercely egalitarian, and that they don’t tell anyone, not even a child, to do anything. Generalizing or overgeneralizing further, small-scale societies appear to be not nearly as convinced as are we WEIRD moderns of the idea that parents are responsible for a child’s development, and that they can influence how a child turns out.
That theme of autonomy has been emphasized by observers of many hunter-gatherer societies. For example, Aka Pygmy children have access to the same resources as do adults, whereas in the U.S. there are many adults-only resources that are off-limits to kids, such as weapons, alcohol, and breakable objects. Among the Martu people of the Western Australian desert, the worst offense is to impose on a child’s will, even if the child is only three years old. The Piraha Indians consider children just as human beings, not in need of coddling or special protection. In Daniel Everett’s words, “They [Piraha children] are treated fairly and allowance is made for their size and relative physical weakness, but by and large they are not considered qualitatively different from adults… the Pirahas have an undercurrent of Darwinism running through their parenting philosophy. This style of parenting has the result of producing very tough and resilient adults who do not believe that anyone owes them anything. Citizens of the Piraha nation know that each day’s survival depends on their individual skills and hardiness…. The Pirahas’ view that children are equal citizens of society means that there is no prohibition that applies to children but does not equally apply to adults and vice versa…. They have to decide for themselves to do or not to do what their society expects of them. Eventually they learn that it is in their best interests to listen to their parents a bit.”
Some hunter-gatherer and small-scale farming societies don’t intervene when children or even infants are doing dangerous things that may in fact harm them, and that could expose a Western parent to criminal prosecution. I mentioned earlier my surprise, in the New Guinea Highlands, to learn that the fire scars borne by so many adults of Enu’s adoptive tribe were often acquired in infancy, when an infant was playing next to a fire, and its parents considered that child autonomy extended to a baby’s having the right to touch or get close to the fire and to suffer the consequences. Hadza infants are permitted to grasp and suck on sharp knives (Plate 19). Here is an incident observed by Daniel Everett among the Piraha Indians: “We noticed that a [Piraha] toddler about two years old was sitting in the hut behind the man we were interviewing. The child was playing with a sharp kitchen knife, about nine inches in length. He was swinging the knife blade around him, often coming close to his eyes, his chest, his arm, and other body parts one would not like to slice off or perforate. What really got our attention, though, was that when he dropped the knife, his mother—talking to someone else—reached back nonchalantly without interrupting her conversation, picked up the knife, and handed it back to the toddler. No one told him not to cut himself or hurt himself with the knife. And he didn’t, but I have seen other Piraha children cut themselves severely with knives.”
Nevertheless, not all small-scale societies permit children to explore freely and do dangerous things. Variation in the freedom that children enjoy seems to me partly understandable from several considerations. Two are the considerations that I already discussed as accounting for more physical punishment among herders and farmers than among hunter-gatherers. While hunter-gatherer societies tend to be egalitarian, many farming and herding societies recognize different rights for men and women, or for younger and older people. The hunter-gatherer societies also tend to have fewer valuable possessions that a child could damage than do farmers and herders. Both of those considerations may contribute to hunter-gatherer children enjoying greater freedom to explore.
In addition, how much freedom children enjoy seems to depend partly on how dangerous the environment is, or is perceived to be. Some environments are relatively safe for children, but others are dangerous because of either environmental hazards or else dangers from people. Consider the following spectrum of environments, from the most dangerous to the least dangerous, paralleled by a range of child-rearing practices from adults severely restricting the freedom of young children to adults permitting young children to wander.
Among the most dangerous environments are the New World’s tropical rainforests, which teem with biting, stinging, poisonous insects (army ants, bees, scorpions, spiders, and wasps), dangerous mammals (jaguars, peccaries, and pumas), large poisonous snakes (fer-de-lance and bushmasters), and stinging plants. No infant or small child left alone would survive for long in the Amazon rainforest. Hence, Kim Hill and A. Magdalena Hurtado write, “[Ache] infants under one year of age spend about 93% of their daylight time in tactile contact with a mother or father, and they are never set down on the ground or left alone for more than a few seconds… it is not until about three years of age that Ache children begin to spend significant amounts of time more than one meter from their mother. Even still, Ache children between three and four years of age spend 76% of their daylight time less than one meter away from their mother and are monitored almost constantly.” As a result, Hill and Hurtado commented, Ache children don’t learn to walk independently until they are 21 to 23 months old, 9 months later than American children. Ache children between three and five years of age are often carried piggyback in the forest by an adult, rather than being allowed to walk. Only when an Ache child is five years old does it begin to explore the forest on its own legs, but even then Ache children remain within 50 meters of an adult for most of the time.