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Sharing Child Care: Mom Is Not Enough

MOTHERS RARELY RAISE their infants in isolation. Our society is exceptional in giving mothers primary responsibility for infant care in an isolated domestic setting with exceptionally sharp boundaries, with or without supplementary help from the father, a grandmother, a babysitter, or a child care center. In the world as a whole, there is greater variation in multiple-care practices: cooperation among adult women in extended or joint families; the use of children who are older siblings of the infant; the involvement of fathers; fostering and adoption, that is, sending infants to other families (related or not) for care; the hiring of live-in nannies; and the collective nurseries of Israeli kibbutz communities before 1990.

    Breast-Feeding the Children of Others?

In agrarian societies, persons other than the mother are always involved in infant care. Among the Hausa, adult women in the walled compound sometimes even breast-feed each other’s babies. On seeing a young Hausa woman nurse her older co-wife’s baby, Sarah asked if she often did so. “Of course. This is my co-wife’s week to cook for the household, so if her baby cries when she’s really busy, I’ll give him the breast. And the week that I cook she nurses my child when I’m really busy.” Since a senior co-wife in Africa is often jealous of the “new bride,” Sarah was surprised to hear of this arrangement. She learned later, however, that with a husband and four children, the older woman had decided that she needed help with domestic work and had chosen a young relative to marry her husband.

Among the Gusii, older siblings or other children routinely care for babies when the mother is working in the fields or trading in the market. A Gusii mother is horrified by the thought of another woman breast-feeding her baby, but there are other African cultures in which women breast-feed each other’s infants.¹ Among the Efe pygmy hunter-gatherers of central Africa, young infants are breast-fed by most of the women in the local group; this kind of “wet-nursing” is also a common practice of the Beng of the Ivory Coast in West Africa, and it begins right after birth, when the mother has only colostrum in her breasts and she gives the baby to her own mother or another lactating kinswoman for breast-feeding.² Later, Beng infants are occasionally and casually breast-fed by other kin and neighbors—as well as “dry nursed” at the breasts of older women.³ In the 1980s Sarah was told by village women in Mexico that, since formula was unaffordable, the mother-in-law of any woman who died soon after giving birth would nurse the infant. When Sarah asked how this was possible, given that the older woman was unlikely to have milk, she was told that the mother-in-law might well have a baby of her own. (The fertility rate was falling precipitously, but in the countryside families of seven and eight children were still the norm.) Even if her childbearing was over, a mother who had nursed children could do so again. All she needed to do, Sarah was assured, was have the child suck at her breast and after a while milk would come.

The anthropologists who have observed breast-feeding by women other than the child’s mother often relate it to a sense of shared responsibility for children in the community. This contrasts with the historical cases from European and American history, in which rural or lower-class women were hired as wet nurses by families who could afford to pay them. It is clear that breast-feeding another woman’s infant is not merely a theoretical possibility but one that has been institutionalized in some societies and reflects broader social attitudes and practices.

    Trust and Sharing: Hausa Versus Gusii

The Hausa and Gusii mothers Sarah observed made strikingly different assumptions about who would help them in caring for their infants. Young Hausa mothers took it for granted that older women would share the care, whether they were in their husband’s compound, where they normally resided, or visiting their mother’s compound. They could make this assumption because the women of their densely populated walled compounds formed a warm, cooperative group that nurtured their children together, at least part of the time. In the context of such groups, a mother who got divorced (a frequent occurrence among the Hausa) could assume that others in her kin network would help care for her young children.

A Gusii mother, by contrast, had her own house next to her fields and for the most part could not rely on other women for help in infant care, as described in the last chapter. She assumed that her marriage was permanent (divorce, once rare, had been increasing but was still infrequent), but she was thrust into competition with the other women of the homestead over whom the husband favored among his co-wives and the future inheritance of his land. Thus, she did not trust the other women to have benign feelings toward her or her children. Indeed, Gusii mythology holds that cooking was invented because of jealousy between co-wives (en areka). The story goes that, in the days when Gusii ate their food raw, a woman mistakenly believed that heating food would poison her co-wife—only to discover the benefits of it! Though some co-wives and sisters-in-law got on well, women within the homestead trusted each other far less than women in the Hausa compound. A Gusii mother relied on her own older children or a child brought in from her parents’ family to help her care for her infants. The sibling caregiver (omoreri)—usually a girl, but sometimes a boy—remained the preferred choice of all Gusii mothers, despite the complications imposed by universal schooling by the 1970s.

The sharing of infant care among women of a domestic group is found not only among the Hausa but also among the Beng of the Ivory Coast and other West African peoples. The anthropologist Alma Gottlieb emphasizes the multiplicity of caregiving for the Beng infant starting at birth. When the mother has returned to work in the fields, she has both child and adult caregivers who pass the baby around so much that by the time the mother returns later in the day she might not even know who shared the care. They engage the infant in cheerful face-to-face interactions and mock conversations in which they pretend to answer the questions they ask the baby. The spontaneous cooperation and emotional expressiveness observed by Gottlieb is in striking contrast with the infant care of the Gusii.

    India and Indonesia

The sharing of infant care by mothers in a domestic setting is widespread in the joint families of India and other countries of South Asia, where brothers and their wives and children live together as a socially integrated and hierarchical group. Daytime home observations in “Shanti Nagar,” a village in Haryana state, near New Delhi in north India, conducted by the psychologist Dinesh Sharma in 1993–1994 showed that infants six to twelve months old were cared for by their mothers only about 40 percent of the time; grandmothers, aunts, and the father were among the other caregivers.⁴ Care by the mother declined sharply after eighteen months, and multiple caregiving continued to be prominent during the child’s second and third years after birth. In smaller households, with fewer adult women apart from the mother, fathers were more frequently involved in infant care.

The joint family is a very talkative environment. In “Shanti Nagar” thirty-five years earlier (1958–1959), when the village was more isolated and fewer mothers had attended school, “mothers and siblings talked to children constantly from birth onward,” the anthropologists Ruth and Stanley Freed reported,

and a child was always in the presence of speaking and communicating adults and children. . . . Mothers or surrogates talked to the children about what was being done. They seemed to expect them to understand even before they began to speak.

Overt signs of affection . . . were directed chiefly to small children and infants. Mothers would kiss infants on the face and hug them, but would more often show affection to toddlers. . . .

In most families, older children displayed affection to infants and small children.⁵

These are parents in an agrarian culture whose infant care practices more closely resemble those of our own culture in talk and the expression of affection than we have seen among the Gusii and Nso, but their standards of care and interaction have been developed in the context of the highly sociable setting of joint families in rural Haryana, where children as well as adults are affectionate to the young. In any event, discrete practices like talking to and kissing or hugging babies can be embedded in differing conceptions of infant care.

The anthropologist Susan Seymour reported as follows on joint families in the traditional part of the city of Bubaneshwar, capital of the northeastern Indian state of Orissa (now Odiya):

In infancy and early childhood . . . one learns to depend upon a variety of other persons. If your mother is not free to hold and carry you, someone else will be. If you have been displaced by a new sibling, then your grandmother or aunt might become your principal source of care and attention. She might become the person who, for example, sleeps with you at night or bathes you in the morning. Although all of your basic needs will be tended to, much of the time this will be done by someone other than your mother or father. Multiple caretaking is the rule rather than the exception.⁶

Seymour presented her ethnographic material on infant care in the old section of Bubaneshwar as “socialization for interdependence,” emphasizing that children were always with others, often in body contact and co-sleeping at night. At the same time, she argued that these practices did not constitute child-centered “indulgence” because the mother did not relinquish control, the prime example being the daily bath that mothers impose on their crying babies regardless of their protests. Thus, though infant care in the Indian joint family may resemble American middle-class care in the amount of talking and expressing of affection, the Indian mother’s practices are distinguished by a goal of interdependence fostered by body contact and a multiplicity of caretakers and by her hierarchical insistence on practices unpleasant to the infant. As Seymour stated:

Old Town mothers respond anywhere from several seconds to several minutes after an infant begins to cry and then rarely nurse it to satisfaction. Typically, they pick up a child and nurse it on one breast for a few minutes and then deliberately remove it before it is satisfied. When the child begins to cry again, it is given the other breast, which is again removed before the child has reached satisfaction. A complex sequence of infant crying and delayed maternal response is thus set in motion in which the mother retains control and the child has to keep “asking” for more.⁷

Is this assertion of maternal control an expression of agrarian hierarchical values in the infant care practices of the joint family? Perhaps, but if so, it shows that such values can take different forms across cultures and in India are merged or blended with other values (verbal communication, expressing affection) in forms specific to the Indian context. Beyond that context, the extended or joint families of West Africa as well as India create environments for infant care with multiple caregiving that facilitate interdependence in the developing child.

The anthropologist Birgitt Röttger-Rössler reported a similar situation among the Makassar rice farmers of south Sulawesi in Indonesia.⁸ From early infancy each child is encouraged to—and does—form close relationships with numerous kin. Grandmothers are particularly prominent in infant care, and young children frequently prefer their grandmothers to their parents, even to the extent of leaving their parents. Multiple caregiving is the default condition of infancy among the Makassar, and it is also fully integrated into the life of the growing child, whose relationships with both paternal and maternal kin become crucial sources of support in adulthood.

    Siblings: Children Caring for Babies

Sibling caregiving is widespread in the agrarian communities of Africa, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and indigenous North America. But in its typical form, with a five- to nine-year-old daughter caring for a baby, it would be defined as criminal neglect in the contemporary United States, and parents who did it would be subject to arrest and a possible prison sentence. This raises the question: how is it that a practice so widespread in the agrarian world can be treated as a crime in our society? The answer begins with the difference between a rural village in which neighboring parents and other adults were available to supervise each other’s children and an anonymous city in which such supervision became impossible and the exploitation of children in factories became common. Urbanization and industrialization in Europe and the United States led to the demand for laws protecting children, and with the expansion of these legal protections during the last century, responsibility for children’s care was taken away from parents.

But there is more to the answer than the transformation of an agrarian society into an urban-industrial one: a six-year-old girl in an agrarian community is simply more prepared to assume responsibility for a baby than her counterpart in our contemporary society. Our children in America are raised to play, to enjoy themselves; we are less hierarchical, and we tolerate disobedience. We may be right not to trust our children with anything as serious as taking care of a baby by themselves. By comparison, the Gusii and other agrarian peoples may be taking fewer risks by strapping a baby on the girl’s back for a few hours, leaving her with a few simple instructions in a place not far from adults who can be called upon if things go wrong. Their girls have learned from their earliest years that respect and obedience come first, and they have usually shown that they pay attention to parental instructions. There are still risks, ones we may be unwilling to tolerate, but they have no choice but to do so. In an African society with high fertility, there is a child labor force ready to be used. Anthropologists have also argued that sibling caregiving, involving what primatologists call a “multi-age group of juveniles,” provides a better learning environment for young children than age-graded environments such as the Western school—a point we shall take up later.⁹

    Fathers Caring for Infants?

Fathers are much less involved in infant care, but there is considerable variation, from extreme cases where fathers have hardly any contact with infants, as in much of East Africa (among the Gusii and other agricultural peoples), to those like the Aka hunter-gatherers of the Central African Republic, where fathers play a major part in the routine care of babies.¹⁰ Similarly, in one of the earliest ethnographic reports, Bronislaw Malinowski described in detail the father’s constant and loving care for babies among the Trobriand Islanders in Melanesia.¹¹ Most human societies lie between these two extremes: fathers are not responsible for day-to-day care and may or may not take an interest in their children during infancy. Fathers in India play a significant, but not primary, role in the infant care of joint families. In our field experiences, fathers in central Mexico were notable for the affection they lavished on their babies and young children. In Europe and the United States, there is a trend toward much more father involvement in infant care, even in countries that do not provide parental leave for men.

    Foster Care and Adoption: Sending Babies to Others

West Africa is the region from which the proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” originated. The “village,” however, is not always local but a social network of kin and others that can stretch from a remote rural area to a major city, where there are women who can be called upon to provide foster care for an infant or child. West Africa has a distinctive history of long-distance trade, apprenticeship, rural-urban migration, frequent divorce, and—in the middle decades of the twentieth century—childless women willing to take care of other women’s offspring.¹² In this context, the fostering of children, young and older, near and far, became common.

Among the Mende people of Sierra Leone, there were areas where the 1975 census showed that more than half of all children under two years of age were under the care of someone other than their mother.¹³ The anthropologist Caroline Bledsoe found that babies as young as four months were fostered, and in the area where she worked 40 percent of the fostered children had arrived in the community—and 23.7 percent of the out-fostered children had been sent out of it—when they were twenty-three months old or less. The usual foster parent was a “granny,” sometimes but not always the child’s biological grandmother; varying in age from thirty-four to elderly, she would care for the child sometimes in reciprocation for support she was receiving or sometimes because she aimed to have the child help her in the future. Infants and toddlers tended to be sent from the town to the countryside for care, while older children were sent from the countryside to the town, where they could seek educational and occupational advantages, including craft apprenticeships. For young mothers, foster care could make it easier for them to work in town or start a new marriage after divorce. For the receiving “grannies,” the young children could relieve their isolation, help them in domestic tasks, and sustain their connections to the parents and others in the kin network.

As we mentioned in the introduction, fostering is common among the Hausa; indeed, almost all children are sent away for weaning, and though some are returned to their mothers after a short period, others remain with foster mothers for years. It is also common for a childless wealthy woman to adopt the child of a poor dependent, such as a house servant or her “bond-friend”—her best friend from girlhood. “Your bond-friend can deny you nothing,” Sarah was told. “If you have no children of your own and she has several, you may ask her for her baby, and at weaning she will give her to you.” That child will be raised to adulthood in her adoptive mother’s household, marry from her house, and inherit her property. Kinship fostering in its varied forms has long been common among West African migrants to London and Paris, but we do not have observational studies of their foster care during infancy.

    The Pacific

Adoption of children within the kin group is found widely across the Pacific region, including Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia.¹⁴ Some of it can be understood as redistributing children within a local kinship-based community from those who have many to those who are childless but have land or other family resources. These are small communities in which divorce and childlessness can make it convenient for a woman who has borne a child to give the child to a woman who wants a child but doesn’t have one. Those who adopt children in this way have also been described as promoting social solidarity and cementing ties among kin by taking in these young children and raising them as their own. Many such adopted children know who their biological parents are. While we know of no observational studies of children adopted in infancy in Oceania, adoptive and biological babies do not seem to be treated differently.

Most of the people who receive very young children in fosterage or adoption arrangements in West Africa and the Pacific Islands are married couples or adult women of reproductive or postmenopausal ages, like the biological grandmothers of the children sent to them. In this sense there might be evolutionary requirements operating: babies are never sent for foster care or adoption to a child or adolescent, hardly ever to a single man, and rarely to unrelated strangers. Yet the high frequencies of kinship fostering among West Africans and adoption among Pacific Islanders also provide evidence that, like styles of mother-infant interaction and the sharing of care, the personnel involved in the fostering and adoption of infants is not fixed for the species, though there are limits to its variation across populations.

    What Do Babies Need? Thoughts and Reflections

What can we conclude about infant needs from the evidence provided by the varying infant care practices of diverse cultures? First of all, not all possible variations in who cares for infants are actually found in societies, suggesting limits that might really be universal. Adult women are the primary caregivers for infants, even as substitutes for the mother. The widespread role of siblings and other children as supplementary caregivers actually underlines this point, as the children are not given full responsibility for infants. Fathers play a variable role in infant care, often as indirect economic providers, sometimes in socially engaged supplementary care, but never as primary caregivers. These limits, of course, reflect the need for infants to be breast-fed, but in the more than 140 years since bottle-feeding was introduced in Europe and America, disengaging the mother from the necessity of feeding her baby, there have been no strong signs of a trend toward fathers (let alone children) as primary caregivers for infants, though fathers are playing a bigger role than before in some places. This does not mean that there could not be a society in which men are the primary infant caregivers, but it has not yet happened. Thus, there may be species-wide limits on who provides care among humans, despite the variations we have reviewed.

Second, the cultural variations in infant care practices (breast-versus bottle-feeding, skin-to-skin versus face-to-face interaction, talking or not talking to babies) can—and probably do—affect the psychological and social development of children. As we get more observations of infants in their routine settings from different parts of the world, researchers have become more proficient at distinguishing universal frames of communication like (mother-child) “reciprocal interaction” and “joint attention” from the specific learning experiences of the baby in a particular culture. The evidence increasingly shows that mothers and others provide culture-specific developmental pathways for their infants.

Third, infant care practices are clearly influenced by the social, cultural, and moral environments in which parents are embedded, but the outcomes are not simply predictable from dichotomies like agrarian versus urban-industrial societies or other conditions that seem to influence parents. Talking to babies and expressing affection to them, for example, are attributes of modern urban societies, but they are also found among agrarian peoples in West Africa and India. Beng mothers of the Ivory Coast and Hindu mothers in India and Nepal teach us that it is entirely possible to provide both extensive mother-infant body contact and face-to-face communication (although we don’t know how the frequency of face-to-face behavior compares with that of Americans or Europeans). At the same time, the importance of hierarchy for agrarian parents is evident in maternal practices among the Beng, the Indians, and the Makassar, as well as the Gusii and the Nso. In the next chapter, we will consider how the lessons learned in infancy play out in the toddler period.

Finally, there are potential challenges to the assumptions of developmental psychology lurking in some of the regions we have examined. Having described the lack of face-to-face interaction and child-directed speech during infancy in East Africa, the kinship fostering of infants and toddlers in West Africa, the daily enemas for Beng infants (also found among the Zulu of South Africa), and widespread adoption in Micronesia and Tahiti, we have to ask whether the effects are as pathological as might be predicted by Western theories. If not, what do these practices tell us about the validity of those theories, taught by experts to parents as cautionary tales? Is it possible that, as Röttger-Rössler implies, the Makassar of Sulawesi and other peoples who practice multiple caregiving of infants—and who permit babies to choose their caregivers—provide their children with more psychological security than American and Europeans parents? If so, does that mean the psychological generalizations offered by Western psychologists unaware of these variations are not universal after all?