As another example, among Africa’s Mbuti Pygmies studied by Colin Turnbull, children imitate their parents by playing with a tiny bow and arrow, a strip of a hunting net, or a miniature basket (Plate 20), and by building a miniature house, catching frogs, and chasing a cooperative grandparent who agrees to pretend to be an antelope. “For children, life is one long frolic interspersed with a healthy sprinkle of spankings and slappings…. And one day they find that the games they have been playing are not games any longer, but the real thing, for they have become adults. The hunting is now real hunting; their tree climbing is in earnest search of inaccessible honey; their acrobatics on the swings are repeated almost daily, in other forms, in the pursuit of elusive game, or in avoiding the malicious forest buffalo. It happens so gradually that they hardly notice the change at first, for even when they are proud and famous hunters their life is still full of fun and laughter.”
Whereas for small-scale societies education follows naturally from social life, in some modern societies even the rudiments of social life require explicit education. For example, in parts of modern American cities where people do not know their neighbors, and where car traffic and potential kidnappers and a lack of sidewalks mean that children cannot safely walk to play with other kids, children have to be taught formally how to play with other children in classes termed “mommy and me classes.” There, a mother or another care-giver brings her child to a classroom with a trained teacher and a dozen other children and their mothers. The children sit in an inner circle, the mothers and care-givers sit in an outer circle and gain experience of child play, and the children are taught how to take turns speaking, listening, and handing objects back and forth to other children. There are many features of modern American society that my New Guinea friends consider bizarre, but nothing astonished them more than being told that American children need specified places, times, and instruction in order to learn how to meet and play with each other.
Their kids and our kids
Finally, let’s reflect on differences in child-rearing practices between small-scale societies and state societies. Of course, there is much variation among industrial state societies today in the modern world. Ideals and practices of raising children differ between the U.S., Germany, Sweden, Japan, and an Israeli kibbutz. Within any given one of those state societies, there are differences between farmers, urban poor people, and the urban middle class. There are also differences from generation to generation within a given state society: child-rearing practices in the U.S. today are unlike those prevalent in the 1930s.
Nevertheless, there are still some basic similarities among all of those state societies, and some basic differences between state and non-state societies. State governments have their own separate interests regarding the state’s children, and those interests do not necessarily coincide with the interests of a child’s parents. Small-scale non-state societies also have their own interests, but a state society’s interests are more explicit, administered by more centralized top-down leadership, and backed up by well-defined enforcing powers. All states want children who, as adults, will become useful and obedient citizens, soldiers, and workers. States tend to object to having their future citizens killed at birth, or permitted to become burned by fires. States also tend to have views about the education of their future citizens, and about their citizens’ sexual conduct. Those shared goals of states promote some convergence among states in their policies regarding children; the child-rearing practices of non-state societies vary over a much wider spectrum than do the practices of state societies. Within non-state societies, hunter-gatherer societies are subject to convergent pressures of their own: they share some basic similarities of child-rearing with each other, but as a group they differ from states as a group.
States do have military and technological advantages, and advantages of vastly larger populations, over hunter-gatherers. Throughout recent millennia, those advantages have enabled states to conquer hunter-gatherers, so that the modern world map is now divided completely among states, and few hunter-gatherer groups have survived. But even though states are much more powerful than hunter-gatherer bands, that doesn’t necessarily imply that states have better ways of raising their children. Some child-rearing practices of hunter-gatherer bands may be ones that we could consider emulating.
Naturally, I’m not saying that we should emulate all child-rearing practices of hunter-gatherers. I don’t recommend that we return to the hunter-gatherer practices of selective infanticide, high risk of death in childbirth, and letting infants play with knives and get burned by fires. Some other features of hunter-gatherer childhoods, like the permissiveness of child sex play, feel uncomfortable to many of us, even though it may be hard to demonstrate that they really are harmful to children. Still other practices are now adopted by some citizens of state societies, but make others of us uncomfortable—such as having infants sleep in the same bedroom or in the same bed as parents, nursing children until age three or four, and avoiding physical punishment of children.
But some other hunter-gatherer child-rearing practices may fit readily into modern state societies. It’s perfectly feasible for us to transport our infants vertically upright and facing forward, rather than horizontally in a pram or vertically upright but facing backwards in a pack. We could respond quickly and consistently to an infant’s crying, practise much more extensive allo-parenting, and have far more physical contact between infants and care-givers. We could encourage self-invented play of children, rather than discourage it by constantly providing complicated so-called educational toys. We could arrange for multi-age child playgroups, rather than playgroups consisting of a uniform age cohort. We could maximize a child’s freedom to explore, insofar as it is safe to do so.
I find myself thinking a lot about the New Guinea people with whom I have been working for the last 49 years, and about the comments of Westerners who have lived for years in hunter-gatherer societies and watched children grow up there. A recurring theme is that the other Westerners and I are struck by the emotional security, self-confidence, curiosity, and autonomy of members of small-scale societies, not only as adults but already as children. We see that people in small-scale societies spend far more time talking to each other than we do, and they spend no time at all on passive entertainment supplied by outsiders, such as television, video games, and books. We are struck by the precocious development of social skills in their children. These are qualities that most of us admire, and would like to see in our own children, but we discourage development of those qualities by ranking and grading our children and constantly telling them what to do. The adolescent identity crises that plague American teen-agers aren’t an issue for hunter-gatherer children. The Westerners who have lived with hunter-gatherers and other small-scale societies speculate that these admirable qualities develop because of the way in which their children are brought up: namely, with constant security and stimulation, as a result of the long nursing period, sleeping near parents for several years, far more social models available to children through allo-parenting, far more social stimulation through constant physical contact and proximity of caretakers, instant caretaker responses to a child’s crying, and the minimal amount of physical punishment.
But our impressions of greater adult security, autonomy, and social skills in small-scale societies are just impressions: they are hard to measure and to prove. Even if these impressions are real, it’s difficult to establish that they are the result of a long nursing period, allo-parenting, and so on. At minimum, though, one can say that hunter-gatherer rearing practices that seem so foreign to us aren’t disastrous, and they don’t produce societies of obvious sociopaths. Instead, they produce individuals capable of coping with big challenges and dangers while still enjoying their lives. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle worked at least tolerably well for the nearly 100,000-year history of behaviorally modern humans. Everybody in the world was a hunter-gatherer until the local origins of agriculture around 11,000 years ago, and nobody in the world lived under a state government until 5,400 years ago. The lessons from all those experiments in child-rearing that lasted for such a long time are worth considering seriously.