#67. Must Moms Be Everything to Their Kids?

In indigenous cultures, children spend far more time with other children than with parents or other adults.

NBS/Artist unknown

Dear friends,

No wonder the birth rate is going down. If I were a young woman today, I would think long and hard before setting out on the journey of birthing a child. [Of course, I’m not a young woman; I’m an old man. But one can imagine.]

Today, if you read what the “experts” say, parents (and you would usually not be mistaken to read that as mothers) are supposed to not just feed, shelter, and comfort their offspring, but also be their conversation partners, playmates, security detail (guarding them always until they are …what, 12, 14, 17 years old?), shuttle drivers (to and from school and all sorts of other “enrichment” activities), homework monitors, and on and on.

You are either expected to do all that or, if you are rich enough, hire someone else to do it while you monitor that someone else in whatever ways you can to make sure they do it right. If something goes wrong, it’s your fault.

The problem is, we’ve destroyed most of the child’s natural social world, so parents (moms) feel called upon to take on what others, in a normal human environment, would have taken on. I got to thinking about all this when I read a recent article, by anthropologist Gabriel Scheidecker, entitled: Parents, caregivers, and peers: Patterns of complementarity in the social world of children in rural Madagascar, in Current Anthropology, Vol 64, #3.

Scheidecker’s Description of Infant and Toddler Life in a Madagascar Village

Scheidecker’s research focused on the activities and social companions of children in their first three years of life in a subsistence farming village in Madagascar. Here is a summary of some of the major points he makes in the article:

• For the first six months of life, the children were in close proximity to their mothers in more than 60% of the observations. This was short-lived, however. The 2- and 3-year-olds on average spent 90% of their time out of sight of their mother.

• Mothers unanimously explained that their exclusive capacity to breastfeed their own children was the only reason for their prominent role in their children’s first few months of life. They considered weaning, usually at the end of the second year, as the end of their special role.

• Even while being held and nursed by their mother, infants were far more likely to be looking at and amused by other children in their vicinity than to be looking at their mother. Other children were nearly always around.

• Beginning around age 15 months, all the toddlers had regular caregivers who themselves were children, anywhere from 6 years old to 18, though most often between 10 and 14. These were usually siblings or cousins of the cared-for toddler.

• Mothers and other caregivers described care purely in physical terms. Their job was to feed and calm the child, to promote physical growth. When Scheidecker tried to get mothers to talk about their role in the child’s mental development, they would deny any role. In their view, children’s minds “develop well enough without their help, as children play and explore the world around them with other children, who are constantly around and naturally interested in play.”

• Although the adults recognized the value of play for children’s mental growth, they viewed play as entirely the children’s activity. They did not create special play settings or toys for children, nor did they intervene in children’s play. As illustration of how independent even the very young children were in play, Scheidecker gives the following description of a scene he observed of little children playing on a door lying on the ground:

“The six children were between 1 and 4 years old and related by kinship. They took turns jumping on one side of the door in order to rock the children sitting opposite. They laughed together, occasionally looked at each other, and exchanged words. After a while a 10-month-old boy came by and was invited by his 3-year-old brother to join in. Although he was obviously attracted by what he saw, he did not dare take a seat on the makeshift seesaw. Except for me, no adult was around— and no one had purposefully created this seesaw. As in this case, the partners in egalitarian interactions were hardly equals, given variations in age and competency. Yet their participation, even of the 10-month-old, depended on their own agency, and their interactions followed a reciprocal pattern. Playing jointly with objects, communicating face-to-face, and laughing together all imply reciprocity through sharing or turn taking.”

• Toddlers made little use of language and were emotionally restrained with parents or other adults, but were very talkative and emotionally expressive with other children in play.

Scheidecker concludes from her observations that, among these people, caregivers and peers have very different but complementary roles in any given child’s development. Caregivers provide what the child needs to grow physically, but children provide what the child needs for all the rest of growth—cognitive, linguistic, social, and emotional growth.

Can We Find a Middle Ground?

The social group that Scheidecker studied represents an extreme on the dimension of little reliance on adults and great reliance on natural interactions among children in children’s development. It is more extreme in this way than most other indigenous societies that have been studied. It is more extreme than I personally would desire, and my guess is that the same is true for you. Yet it is far closer to other indigenous societies than it is to ours, and we would do well to learn some lessons from it.

I presented this work not to illustrate the ideal arrangement but to illustrate how amazingly competent children are in supporting one another’s development when given the opportunity. Children really are much better play partners for children, and thereby facilitators of one another’s cognitive, linguistic, social, and emotional development, than are we adults. My own desire for more social interaction with my child than occurred in this village, if I were a parent now, is probably selfish. I would want it even if my child didn’t need it. But our culture has gone way too far in the direction of relying on adults and excluding peers from children’s social lives. What we have done is harmful to children and to parents.

In our culture today—more so than has ever been true in the past anywhere in the world—children are deprived of a world of other children. Almost the only place where they are in contact with other children (aside from siblings and many don’t have siblings) is in school and other adult-controlled settings where their freedom to interact in their own ways with one another is suppressed. As I have expounded upon elsewhere (e.g. here and here), I am convinced that our adult domination of children and exclusion of them from freedom with peers is a major cause of the high rates of anxiety and depression among children today.

Some years ago, I met a young woman who had come to the United States from a rural community in Kenya at age 16. She told me that the first impression she had of the US is how unhappy the children here are compared to those in the impoverished village in Kenya she had left behind. “They are all on leashes here,” she said. “Nobody wants to be on a leash.”

Something to think about.

Further Thoughts

I know it is hard to provide children with a normal childhood in today’s world, but there are ways to move in that direction. In a Letter #46, I described 13 possible ways to bring more play and independence into children’s lives.

And now, what do you think about all this? This Substack is, in part, a forum for discussion. Your thoughts and questions are valued and treated respectfully by me and other readers, regardless of the degree to which we agree or disagree. Readers’ comments add to the value of these letters for everyone.

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With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Note: This letter is a slight modification of an essay I previously published as a Psychology Today blog post.