Our Mothers’ Backs

“…the !Kung Bushmen have been called `affluent’, but a mother carries her child with her at all times up to four years of age; this is equivalent to about 4,900 miles in the course of gathering the plant foods which are the Bushmen’s primary subsistence resource. On each trek a woman carries the child both ways, and on the return trip is also loaded with several days’ supply of roots, nuts, berries, and firewood.” Population Pressure and Cultural Adjustment,Virginia Abernethy, page 34.

How did we get from this egalitarian arrangement, where women work and care for children at the same time, to the sorts of society where women’s feet were bound in order to keep them from leaving the house? Or the feminine ideal of the highly corseted woman who is incapable of physical exertion because she has trouble breathing?

Agriculture created social stratification. Affluent women did not need to work. A rich man’s wife could concentrate on child-rearing alone. This was considered a way to lighten a woman’s workload. A woman might even have servants who relieved her of the need to do anything, including caring for her own children. In every society where some women didn’t work outside the home, many more women labored in the fields and in domestic service, and carried heavy burdens. There has never been a society where complete indolence was the norm for women.

Feminism attempted to “liberate” women who were reasonably well off from the sometimes stultifying expectation that they not take on undue burdens beyond the domestic sphere.

In the current debate about child-care, a survey of modern day hunter-gatherer societies has been used as a way to determine what sort of child care arrangments human infants and small children need. Infants evolved to develop under certain conditions, it is argued, and it’s important to find a childcare arrangement that fosters optimal cognitive development.

The !Kung bushmen, for instance, have been used to bolster an argument that human young need constant contact with the mother, and hence the modern day mother should not work outside the home.

Opponents of this viewpoint argue that daycare is perfectly natural, because in most hunter-gatherer societies women help each other with child care. There is a high degree of cooperation among tribal women. “It takes a village to raise a child.”

In fact, both views present an unrealistic idealization. A woman who has no social network has difficulty raising a child alone, even if working for others is not economically required. The child cannot develop optimally without social contacts and without seeing his mother interacting with others in a natural social setting. On the other hand, it is not true that leaving a child in a daycare center where he has no intimate, long term relationship with individual caretakers is the equivalent of cooperative child care in a hunter-gatherer tribe.

“As for maternal primacy in hunter-gatherers, it is strongly supported by the !Kung studies and consistently evident in older ethnographies, and it is also found in recent scientific studies, including those presented as exceptions to this rule. Most notably, perhaps, it is very evident in the Agta, the only hunter-gatherer culture on record where women do half the hunting. If maternal primacy were facultative, it seems the Agta would depart from it. They do not, nor do any other hunter-gatherers studied so far. Exclusive maternal care is non-existent and was never claimed, but maternal primacy is a feautre of hunter-gatherer childhood. It may be that maternal primacy affords an opportunity for attachment that gives the mother a unique place in the hierarchy of infant attachments.”Melvin Konner, “Hunter gatherer infancy and childhood: the !Kung and others” page 62, Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods.

When I was in law school, I had a friend who was a feminist. I was nineteen at the time and she was about thirty-three. She was married and had a three year old daughter. I really wanted to have a child, too, right then, but there was pressure on me to become a professional. My feminist friend had taught high school, not because she wanted to teach, but because, when she was growing up, there were, according to her, only three jobs that women could have outside the home: nurse, teacher, and secretary. Of the three, she thought being a teacher was the least demeaning, so that’s what she chose. As soon as women lawyers became commonplace, my friend went back to school to join their ranks. She was no pioneer feminist. She was definitely rank and file.

Every time I mentioned that some women might enjoy staying home and raising children, my friend would frown and say: “Nobody really wants to do that. They’re just being brainwashed.”

Sword and I and the Infantino Carrier: This photo was taken on January 1, 2000 in Taichung

I didn’t consider myself brainwashed, but I could think of nothing I wanted more at that moment than to quit school and stay home to raise a baby. It was only social pressure that kept me from doing it.

I wondered why my friend wanted to believe that everyone wanted what she wanted. Couldn’t each individual choose what was best for her? Why do we have to be so normative? Why must there be only one path?

I now know the answer. People don’t live in a social vacuum. The choices others make can severely limit their own choices.People don’t work just because of the mental challenge or the monetary inducement. Many people enjoy working because it’s a nice environment in which to socialize.

My friend’s daughter and my daughter were inseparable when they started preschool together

Today, when the majority of women work, the women who stay home and their children are often isolated and lonely. It’s not because taking care of a child is hard that many would-be stay-at-home mothers burn out and go back to work. It’s because all their friends are at work and there’s nobody to talk to all day long, except for a helpless little child. It was never meant to be like that.

When I was growing up, my mother stayed at home, but so did most of her friends. My mother was not stuck at home, forced to converse with a small child all day long. She and her friends would visit each other in their homes. Some of my best memories of my early childhood were of sitting under the table and listening to the women talk.

Younger children rely on older children: Bow takes Sword’s hand so they can explore together

Children do best, not when they are the constant focus of their caretaker’s attention, but when they are allowed to observe the social interactions of their parents. This prepares them for social lives of their own.

Piggyback: On my 46th birthday, still carrying Bow, who is a little over four years of age. The Piggyback ride becomes harder to sustain after the child attains the age of five.

I have been on both sides of the mommy divide. I worked outside the home during my daughter’s first two years. My mother helped for the first few months, but after that I had a nanny. When the nanny arrived, I left. When I got home, the nanny left. My daughter was never in daycare, but this arrangment was less than optimal, because she never saw me and the nanny socializing together. If I had to do it over again, I would invite the nanny to dinner sometimes, or go visit her on her day off, if she could stand to have us. My daughter would have benefited from seeing more adult interactions, and from not always being the focus of our attention.

It’s fine for someone other than the mother to help care for a child. The hunter-gatherers do this, too. What is not so great is if the person helping is essentially a stranger. Children need to feel that whoever is taking care of them is part of the family. This doesn’t mean caretakers have to be blood kin, but they shouldn’t be just hired hands. They have to be part of the parents’ social circle, for the sake of the child’s social development.

When my daughter was two, we settled down in the Ozarks, on ten acres of our own, and I became a stay-at-home mom, waiting for the birth of chimpanzee who would become my son Bow. I loved all the time I got to spend with Sword, but was not so thrilled with the extreme social isolation that we had to contend with.

In the summer of 2002, my friend June came to visit us from Taiwan, bringing her daughter Delight. During the two months of their visit, the two girls rekindled their earlier friendship, and Delight accompanied Sword to preschool for the first two weeks. Neither girl spoke English, but as long as they were together, my daughter did not find the preschool environment too stressful. Delight, who is 17 months her elder, was always looking out fo her.

In hunter-gatherer societies, once a child stops riding on the parent’s back, he is often cared for by older siblings in a group of multiaged children, all of them members of the same tribe. They play at being little adults, and their exploration of adult roles is tolerated by the entire community.

When I first adopted Bow, I intended to raise him in every way like a human. However, I soon found that unless I carried him on my back, I couldn’t get anything done. He was a real trouble maker on the ground, but if he was riding on my back, he let me decide where we were going, and what we were going to do.

I continued to carry him on my back until a couple of months after he turned five. It was the only way I could integrate my role as his mother with the other roles I play.

It was only in the past few weeks, after viewing Moribito with my daughter, that I began to realize that the chimpanzee way of childcare and the human way diverged very, very recently. We were all carried on our mothers’ backs, even after the invention of agriculture, unless we were very wealthy — or of the royal blood.

Today, almost every child is like Prince Chagum, never having been carried on her back by his mother, and having no idea by what effort his food is procured. Most modern children are starved for intimate contact with parents, but paradoxically, they receive too much attention during the short periods when their parents are available.

When you carry your child on your back, he gets to watch and learn about the world in which you live. He is aware that his welfare and yours are one, and he knows that he’s not the one calling the shots.

The tragedy of modern child care is that the average child has become a prince, pampered and spoiled into thinking he is the center of the universe, unaware of the ways in which his parents procure food, on the one hand, and on the other hand, completely deprived of the intimacy and security of constant contact with his mother and her social circle.

• ǃKung people – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Population Pressure and Cultural Adjustment

• http://books.google.com/books?id=I6g_02nUi4sC&pg=PA34&lpg=PA34&dq=%2BBushmen+mothers&

Efe People

• Efé – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia