But lately I’ve taken more of an interest in everything that happened in between, simply because I want to know how the hell we got from A to B. If you take a topic like breastfeeding, the way our ancestors breastfed their babies was so dramatically different from how we are told to breastfeed today, it naturally begs the question: why did we stop doing things the ancient way?

There’s no way of truly knowing how our Paleolithic ancestors breastfed, and I expect there was some level of variation between societies and between mother-infant dyads within a given society, but across many small-scale pre-industrial societies (not just hunter-gatherers), the breastfeeding pattern is consistently frequent, on-demand, day and night, for short bouts.

My favorite study on hunter-gatherer nursing patterns is Melvin Konner’s 1980 paper, published in the prestigious journal Science, titled “Nursing frequency, gonadal function, and birth spacing among !Kung hunter-gatherers.” Konner found that !Kung mothers nursed their infants briefly but constantly — roughly every 13 minutes throughout the day, for about 90 seconds at a time, and multiple times through the night. And this was for infants ranging 12 weeks all the way up to 15 months old. In the study, infant age was strongly correlated with interbout interval – the intervals got longer as the child got older – which means the newborns in the study nursed even more frequently than once every 13 minutes. They were constantly at the breast.

Konner also found that this pattern of frequent nursing had a striking effect on women’s hormones, by keeping prolactin levels elevated, which suppressed estradiol and progesterone, which prevented ovulation. Crucially, it’s not the total time spent nursing that matters — it’s the interval between bouts. Shorter intervals = higher prolactin and lower levels of reproductive hormones. He hypothesized that this is one reason why interbirth intervals were so much longer among the !Kung (4 years, on average).

I’ll admit that the !Kung take the cake among hunter-gatherers for hardcore breastfeeding, but most mothers in most hunter-gatherer societies, from what I’ve read, breastfeed babies extremely frequently.

This is wildly different from how I was told to breastfeed. I was advised – by well-meaning doctors, lactation consultants, and midwives – to follow a schedule, space feeds at regular intervals, drain my breasts completely, and avoid letting my baby “snack.” I was also told, of course, never to sleep with my baby, which made spacing out night feeds an absolute necessity.

My grandmother, on the other hand, was told not to breastfeed at all. In 1950s America, formula feeding had become the medical establishment’s strong preference, and was seen as modern, scientific, and precise. Breastfeeding, by contrast, was seen as primitive, unreliable, and faintly embarrassing. Fortunately, being the no-bullshit, super thrifty, coupon-cutting, scam-detecting Midwestern woman that she was, my grandmother told them to go to hell and breastfed all four of her children.

But how did we get from around-the-clock, on-demand breastfeeding to powdered milk substitutes and feeding schedules? Who came up with this? What were their motivations and intentions? What was the evidence behind the advice? Who won and who lost?

I think the story is an interesting one, not because it yields some kind of moral imperative about how we all ought to feed our babies, but because it captures how various macro-level cultural shifts dramatically altered the way we think about motherhood. These forces shifted power away from intergenerational feminine wisdom and hands-on experience to scientific male “expertise” and unapologetically aggressive entrepreneurs. That power dynamic is still in play, though it’s somewhat harder to see these days, because we’re still in it. But that’s why it’s interesting to study the past — so we don’t make the same mistakes again.

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Initially, I wanted to write a response to “The New Right’s Very Old Vision of Men” (what the heck do they even mean by “very old” here? The 1950s is not old. Ancient Greece is not even old. The Paleolithic is old) but then I realized that there’s another question being skirted in all of this that bugs me even more:

Why are conservatives so obsessed with evolutionary psychology?

At one point in the viral Jordan Peterson vs. Helen Lewis interview, Peterson starts railing on left-leaning ideological capture in universities (a point to which I am not entirely unsympathetic) and says this:

[Leftist ideologues] are destroying the universities, and that’s not a good thing. And they’re particularly destroying the social sciences and the humanities. The sciences are safe so far, but not for long...There isn’t a competing position on campuses except among the evolutionary biologists and the evolutionary psychologists, and they’re under complete attack. They’re certainly next on the chopping block as far as I can tell.”

Listening to that, I was kind of flummoxed. You see, I studied evolutionary biology at Stanford, and (although this was 15 years ago) I was not under the impression that the humanities and biology departments were at war. They probably did not interact and talk to one another as much as they should have. But it’s not like the biology lectures I sat in on included searing take-downs of gender studies department papers. (My favorite biology professor, Robert Sapolsky, did occasionally take pot-shots at the worst of the “social construct” school of thought. In his blockbuster book Behave he called a paper with the title “PMS is a mode for the expression of women’s anger resulting from her oppressed position in American capitalist society” a “howler”. But last I checked, no one was circulating petitions to fire him.)

And furthermore, although the biology professors were certainly more likely than some of the humanities people to admit that men and women are different (anatomically and behaviorally), that genetics matter (no one is a blank slate), or that we share an unfortunate natural proclivity for aggression and hierarchy with every other primate, they were, for the most part, pretty ideologically left-leaning. They were more likely to come barefoot to a lecture than wearing a suit, they were pretty gung-ho on environmental activism, they were 100% atheist, and they were generally in favor of things like income redistribution and universal healthcare.

Peterson would probably take this as evidence of the fact that ideological capture has penetrated so deep into the universities by now that even the biology departments have not come out unscathed. To be sure, some biology departments have produced some shamefully bad science in the name of justifying leftist political ideologies within the last ten years. But for the most part, evolutionary biologists lean left because…well, because there is nothing in evolutionary biology that says they shouldn’t. The only people using evolutionary biology to justify a conservative worldview — who feel it’s the only logical take-away based on the “science” — are the people who don’t know very much about evolutionary biology. They are the kinds of people who think we can make a straight leap from lobster behavior to human behavior without reckoning with the 350 millions years of evolution that happened since we parted ways on the tree of life.

When I first started this newsletter, I was honestly quite surprised by how many conservative-leaning thinkers it drew. I myself was a card-carrying liberal feminist (although I have since drifted right on some issues), and I was talking about things like our evolutionary legacy of allomaternal care, birth spacing, breastfeeding, and gender egalitarianism in hunter-gatherer societies. These hardly felt like themes that should be popular with conservatives.

Then again, my husband pointed out to me that, almost by definition, there is no more “conservative” worldview than the worldview of evolutionary mismatch. What I am essentially arguing, in most of my work, is that replicating certain elements of our ancestral living would be good for our brains and bodies, and would, based on extensive empirical evidence, lead to greater health and happiness for many people, even in modern society. This is certainly not a “progressive” worldview - at least not in the literal sense.

Then again, one of the very reasons why I got so interested in evolutionary biology in the first place was because I was tired of hearing half-truths about “natural” human behavior from people like Peterson. Look, Peterson isn’t stupid, and I actually agree with a lot of what he has to say, but his understanding of evolutionary biology is partial, and he cherry-picks evidence to support his preferred ideologies. You can make an argument that humans are hierarchical and status-conscious, and that this is a very ancient, highly conserved biological urge that can be found even in animals as simple as lobsters OR you can make the argument that humans are actually one of the most egalitarian, sharing, empathetic and collaborative species ever to have walked the earth. The truth is that we have both in us. Focusing too much on one without mentioning the other is not necessarily false, but it’s intellectually flat.

Just in the last year, I’ve heard references to evolutionary biology invoked to justify everything from why women should stay home, why only men should vote, and why cancel culture is women’s fault. Let’s be clear: there is literally no evidence whatsoever that women are biologically primed to seek out mid-level bureaucratic jobs like human resource management, where they waste away their sorry lives forcing men to follow totally pointless rules, like not sexually harassing their female colleagues (why can’t we just go back to the good old days when a little workplace sexual harassment was all part of the fun?). Nor do I think that there is any real evidence to suggest that women are naturally more “meddlesome and quarrelsome,” that our propensity to pop SSRIs is evidence that we have been misled by feminism and should be making more babies, etc etc.

A shitty understanding of evolutionary biology is a dangerous thing, which is exactly why I started this newsletter.

Unfortunately, all of this misunderstanding and misuse of evolutionary biology in conservative circles is giving the whole field a bad name. People like Ezra Klein and Helen Lewis unwittingly contribute to the problem when they conflate every single historical time period and then write off the whole lot as a bunch of conservative nostalgia. In the New Right’s Very Old Vision of Men, they proceeded to shit on not just the 1950s and Ancient Greece, but also all those weird people who are obsessed with “primitive” stuff, like the MAHA movement. Way to lump us all together. To them, the only positive vision for the future of humanity is a futurist one. There was no attempt to make any sense of why prehistory actually matters to modern human psychology in a way that Ancient Greece does not.

So I feel the need to articulate (or perhaps re-articulate) why studying hunter-gatherer societies, and evolutionary biology, really does matter — why this is a serious scientific field worthy of our interest and attention and not just a bunch of weird conservative nostalgia for times gone by.

First if all, I know I sound like a broken record on this point, but all humans lived as hunter-gatherers for 95% (if not 99%) of our history as a species. Most experts in human evolution consider every animal in the genus Homo to be a human. Under that definition, humans first emerged about 2.8 millions years ago, but those first humans were different from us in important ways. Our species, Homo sapiens, emerged about 300,000 years ago (and we keep pushing the timeline back as new discoveries are made), and those humans were already very much like us. In all likelihood, if we could somehow time-travel back a few hundren thousands years and adopt a Paleolithic Homo sapien baby, teach them English and dress them in Gap or H&M, no one would know the difference.

Agriculture, on the other hand, first emerged in some parts of the world about 12,000 years ago, which seems like a long time, but really isn’t compared with 300,000. Since then, the pace of human cultural and societal change has far outstripped evolution’s ability to make changes to our DNA, meaning we are now in a state of “mismatch”: our ancient brains and bodies expect conditions to be very different from what they actually are. You may think you are an AI-enabled futurist God, but the truth is that you are just another hairless bipedal ape who happens to have a smartphone and an internet connection.

I’ll concede that evolution can happen very quickly when selective pressures are high and when the genetics involved are not too complex (single-allele mutations, for instance). Examples include our ability to digest lactose into adulthood for some populations, lighter skin in Nordic peoples, and better starch-digestion, which are all post-agricultural evolutionary adaptations. There’s also compelling evidence that we underwent some major immunological changes in response to new kinds of highly infectious diseases. Evolution can happen very fast in some instances, but the essentials were already in place 300,000 years ago.

I’ll also concede that not every academic agrees with the “evolutionary mismatch” framing of things. There’s an age-old debate among evolutionary scholars about how adaptable humans really are, versus how stuck we still are in the Paleolithic.

On one side of this debate we have the Evolutionary Psychologists. These guys tend to believe that we have this highly inflexible primitive brain which we are desperately trying to use to make sense of a very foreign modern world. To be clear, this is my club. The human adult brain is plastic, but not that plastic. The most powerful and enduring elements of human psychology were shaped long, long before we started planting potatoes.

On the other side, we have the Behavioral Ecologists, who tend to believe that human behavior is infinitely flexible and adaptable, and we adjust to whatever our environment dictates. Obviously, there’s some truth to this as well. Human behavior is indeed more flexible than it is for most other animals. There is no single human ancestral environment, just as there is no single contemporary hunter-gatherer society that can represent every ancestral environment. Humans quickly colonized a broad range of ecological niches, and by studying contemporary hunter-gatherer populations, we have come to understand how the constraints of these various environments influence culture and social structure.

When I asked Dr. Nikhil Chaudhary, a professor at University of Cambridge in human evolution and behavioral ecology, he put it this way:

“I think part of the issue is that different disciplines, even within the evolutionary social sciences or evolutionary sciences, have these starting assumptions which are a bit too broad brushed. So evolutionary psychology really emphasizes mismatch: we’ve got stone age minds and adaptive lag. And then another key discipline is human behavioral ecology, which really highlights how flexible we are, how responsive we are to environmental changes and different conditions and to some degree rejects the idea of mismatch. And I think in reality neither are right. There are different levels of adaptability, some traits are more flexible than others, and to disregard mismatch is somewhat naive and equally to think mismatch is always the case is also naive.”

Dr. Chaudhary was also quite emphatic about the fact that studying hunter-gatherer societies is just the starting point. It gives us windows into areas of potential evolutionary mismatch that only further empirical studies can confirm. We cannot just say, “hunter-gatherers do things this way, and Westerners do things differently, and the old way is automatically better because it’s ancestral.”

That said, my interest in hunter-gatherer societies is not purely driven by an interest in evolutionary psychology and evolutionary mismatch, and I try to be clear about this in my writing. There are actually three specific reasons why I am interested in these ancient cultures:

1. Uncovering mismatches between how we evolved to live and how we live now. To determine whether something is actually a good candidate for “evolutionary mismatch” requires that we look at universals across hunter-gatherer societies that are largely absent from contemporary society: things like frequent and extended breastfeeding, allomaternal care, and multi-age playgroups for children. If there’s fossil evidence, that should be considered as well. For instance, we can learn things about the historical age of weaning from fossilized teeth, and it generally lines up with what we see in hunter-gatherer societies. And then it should be triangulated with the existing empirical or lab evidence. So, for instance, there is a large body of research supporting the health benefits of breastfeeding for both mothers and babies in contemporary, Western populations. So I feel pretty comfortable saying that contemporary breastfeeding practices (lower initiation rates, lower frequency, shorter duration) are a case of evolutionary mismatch. Other hunter-gatherer universals like mother-infant co-sleeping have mixed support in modern empirical studies. But I still think it’s worth knowing that co-sleeping is the evolutionary norm. That makes the debate look different. We are starting from a fundamentally different assumption.

2. Busting myths about what’s “natural” for humans, especially for women and mothers. As discussed above, there has been so much abuse and misuse of evolutionary science in order to justify women’s role in society, and understanding the truth about women’s roles in hunter-gatherer societies is a powerful antidote. In this case I am less interested in universals, since a practice does not need to be common across every hunter-gatherer society in order to disprove contemporary myths about what’s “natural.” For instance, I often talk about how, in many hunter-gatherer societies, women are the primary breadwinners, because their foraging efforts bring in more calories than men’s hunting. This is not true in every hunter-gatherer society, nor should it be used as evidence that women today have to work outside the home to be happy and healthy (the evidence does not suggest that working mothers are any more or less happy than stay-at-home mothers, as long as these lifestyles are freely chosen). What it does allow us to say with great certainty, however, is that there is nothing unnatural or biologically aberrant about women wanting to work for economic gain, and wanting to outsource some childcare in order to do so.

3. Learning new ways of doing things from cultures that are very different from ours. Sometimes I cross the line from being an evolutionary biologist to a cultural anthropologist. There are plenty of people out there studying small-scale societies for no other reason than that they are interesting. It’s interesting to see how people organize themselves and make sense of their world in cultures very different from our own. Good cultural anthropologists know how to put their own ideologies and cultural biases aside and meet people where they are at. This is, in and of itself, a good life skill. But it also helps you see the faultlines in your own ideologies where previously you might have had a blind spot. Or it helps you imagine a new way of doing things you might never have imagined. When I write about things like parenting strategies, or gender relations, I am wearing the hat of a cultural anthropologist more than an evolutionary biologist (although many evolutionary biologists also argue for long-standing universals in gender relations and parent-child relationships).

Hunter-gatherer societies really do have things to teach us, whether about a shared ancient psychology, more healthy ways to approach modern living, or longstanding cultural practices that keep humans’ worst impulses in check. It shouldn’t be written off just because it’s occasionally misunderstood and misused by people who don’t know what they are talking about, or because it cuts across contemporary political ideologies in a way that can feel confusing or uncomfortable.

At one point in the Peterson-Lewis interview, Peterson accuses Lewis (somewhat unfairly) of “not integrating the specifics of your personal experience with what you’ve been taught to synthesize something that’s genuine and surprising and engaging…That’s the pathology of ideological possession.” This is one point on which Peterson and I agree. At some point, ideologies become a substitute for thinking. When you can predict every single point of view a person holds based on their position on a single issue, it’s boring, it’s shallow, and it’s probably wrong on some level.

In my case, I feel that studying hunter-gatherer societies, with an open mind, rather than as a search for evidence to support my pre-existing worldview, has been a great gift. I’ve broken with some of my ideological dogmas and I’ve reinforced others. All in all, I find that I am happier for it. My life as a mother makes more sense this way. And I want to help others find that same equilibrium — at least, those who are ready to hear it.

My guest in this episode is Dr. Darby Saxbe, clinical psychologist and professor at USC, whose new book Dad Brain is out now. Darby runs a lab studying the neurobiology of social relationships — and she’s been doing some of the most interesting work out there on what actually happens to men’s brains and bodies when they become fathers.

We covered a lot of ground in this conversation: why testosterone drops when men have kids (and why that’s a feature, not a bug), what two very different small-scale societies reveal about the “right” way to be a dad, and why the modern expectation that one man should be the primary breadwinner, a super hands-on parent, your best friend and a spicy romantic partner all at once is kind of a recipe for marital disaster.

We also got into the manosphere’s testosterone obsession, why we’re underpaying teachers and what that has to do with masculinity, and what it would actually take to build a society that values care.

Darby is a Substack friend of mine — our friendship started when she wrote a gracious rebuttal to my most controversial piece ever on feminism — so this one felt particularly fun. I think you’ll enjoy it.

Best,

Elena

I know, I know. This is not necessarily the kind of parenting I have advocated for in the past. But, to quote Keynes, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

As I mentioned last week, I have been trying to piece together a theory of hunter-gatherer parenting based on quotes and snippets from various anthropologists, rather than rigorous, in-depth studies (because these are few and far between, and hard to find). I feel I was particularly misled by the Barry Hewlett quote about the Aka, “One does not coerce others or tell them what to do, including children.” This led me to believe that the Aka literally do not tell their children what to do, ever. That is a radically permissive way to parent!

But when I started drilling down on this notion, I quickly found it was not true. The first wake-up was when I rewatched Caterpillar Moon, which is a documentary about the Aka, and looked for specific instances of parents telling children what to do. I found plenty! And they were quite authoritative in the way they did it!

And then there’s this wonderful dissertation by Dasa Bombjakova, about parenting strategies among the Mbendjele BaYaka, which I reviewed in depth last week, and which emphasizes how high the expectations are for children’s contributions in those societies, and how teaching is often done through a combination of demonstration and short, exclamatory or declarative commands: “Look! Follow! Touch!”

But Dr. Bombjakova also emphasized, as do many hunter-gatherer anthropologists, that children also have quite a lot of autonomy in BaYaka society. That feels somewhat contradictory. Is it?

I’ve been turning this over in my head all week, and I think the answer is no, it is not. Here’s the distinction: hunter-gatherer parents are not shy about telling their children what to do, but they rarely tell them what not to do. That’s been a bit of a revelation for me, and it has radically, in the space of less than a week, changed how our family functions — for the better.

If we go back to the original quote from Barry Hewlett, in context, what he actually said was this: “[In Aka culture], respect for an individual’s autonomy is a core cultural value and foundational schema. One does not coerce or tell others what to do, including children…if an infant wants to play with a machete, she is allowed to do so.” So what he is actually saying here is that parents do not impose a whole lot of “don’t” rules, like we do, in order to try and protect their children from themselves, because they believe in the power of experiential learning, in taking risks, and in a child’s innate capabilities and need for autonomy. But that doesn’t mean they never tell children what to do, because they clearly do! Autonomy can coexist alongside responsibility. Young children in hunter-gatherer societies tend to have a lot more real-world responsibilities, from quite an early age, than our children do, and one of the ways adults get them to take on said responsibilities is by barking short orders at them.

I think another reason why there is so much confusion about hunter-gatherer parenting is that anthropologists, like Hewlett, are often doing comparative studies between hunter-gatherer cultures in relation to their agricultural neighbors, whose parenting style is often very authoritarian, and includes lots of corporal punishment, enforced physical labor, and deference to elders. So compared with their agricultural neighbors, hunter-gatherer parenting comes across as pretty gentle. But when you compare hunter-gatherer parenting to some of the more absurd versions of Western “gentle parenting,” the truth is that it can be harsh!

I love this quote from who says, “Children in [hunter-gatherer] societies are rarely coerced but given ample time to play…[and] success is not defined by the absence of antisocial behaviors but by the presence of prosocial, cooperative actions and contributing, active membership within a group.”

So the autonomy comes from the fact that they are given plenty of time to play, they have the right of refusal (which they should not abuse), and they are rarely “punished.” But they are absolutely expected to contribute, to work, and to share, and they are judged on what they do, more than on what they don’t do. A child who helps the group, who cares for younger siblings, and who does his chores, but who also misbehaves on occasion, is successful, from the hunter-gatherer standpoint.

In line with these new revelations, I experimented this week with transforming myself from a weak, wheedling, whiny parent into a real fucking Alpha Mom. I stopped asking my children to pleeeeeeease pick up their toys and started barking orders at them like a naval officer on the quarterdeck. “Pick up your toys!” “Get dressed!” “Set the table!” “Get shoes!”

At first, I kinda felt like a bitch. This does not come naturally to me. After all, I wouldn’t do this to my husband (or any other adult). And the whole Western gentle parenting thing rests on the assumption that kids are basically little adults, and need to be treated as such.

But they are not. They are different. And as I have argued many times before (to a highly skeptical audience): in hunter-gatherer societies it is possible for people to be equal AND different. Children are full people, with real needs, deserving of real respect and empathy, but they are also neurologically half-baked and highly dependent, and they need to know you’re in charge, because it makes them feel safe.

Imagine if you were four, utterly dependent on your parents for care and protection, and those parents lacked the authority to even get you to put on your own shoes in the morning. Would that make you feel safe? Nope! You’d be like, “Wow, the management around here sucks. I hope we never run into any real difficulties with our marauding neighbors or carnivorous wildlife.”

Once I got over my own insecurities about treating my children like small dogs who need to fetch things and do tricks, things in our house took a real positive turn. This morning, for instance, my son (who is normally very difficult to get out the door in the morning for school), woke up, got dressed on his own, found his school bag and packed it, found his own shoes, put them on, and was ready to go on time. I swear it on my signed Jane Goodall photo. Some of these things required me barking orders at him, and others he did on his own, presumably because I have barked at him to do the same things over and over this past week and he finally got the memo.

At the same time, ordering my kids around keeps them busy when things start sliding into dangerous territory (toy kerfuffles, etc) and gives me a reason to genuinely feel proud of them. Over the last month or so, my son and I have fallen into this really bad pattern where I basically ignore him most of the time (because I am busy and he’s a pretty good independent player) and then when he inevitably does something bad, I yell at him. So the only time he is getting any attention from me is when he is being bad, but this just trains him to repeat bad behaviors!

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: attention is every kid’s favorite currency. And angry attention/corrections still count as attention. This is also why the highly scripted versions of millennial gentle parenting are a scam: if the only time you get down on your hands and knees and look your toddler in the eye is when they start acting out, you are just reinforcing the tantrums.

On the other hand, when I started demanding that my son help out more, and he listened, I suddenly had plenty of genuine reasons to lavish him with praise. “What a good helper you are, Buddy!” “I appreciate it so much when you get yourself dressed in the morning.” “It really helps me out when you set the table.”

This latter part I ended up doing intuitively. There’s nothing I’ve seen in the hunter-gatherer literature to indicate that parents lavish this kind of praise on children. In fact, Michaleen Doucleff makes a strong argument in Hunt, Gather, Parent that the lack of praise parents give children in hunter-gatherer societies is actually one of the key differences between their parenting strategies and ours. In fact, she argues that too much praise from parents can get in the way of kids developing self-esteem and intrinsic motivation. But then, in an almost complete 180-degree-turn, she makes the case in her latest book, Dopamine Kids, that praise is an essential tool for reinforcing kids’ good behavior, and that we need to leverage it early and often! So I guess I am not the only one who reserves the right to change my mind in light of new evidence.

What’s really interesting to me here is that, although I am obviously pretty committed to untangling hunter-gatherer parenting, I have also been doing a lot of reading on Western parenting strategies for managing ADHD children (because it is increasingly clear that my son has ADHD), and it turns out that one of the big themes in the ADHD parenting literature is: short, authoritative commands, followed by praise and positive reinforcement. Huh!

So this article is going to be about mapping similarities and differences between hunter-gatherer parenting strategies and Western ADHD parenting strategies (both of which, I suspect, are actually good for all kids). I’ll give some theories for why I think we see certain overlaps and also certain discrepancies, and then share my personal plan for how I am merging them into a comprehensive action plan that I will be consistently deploying in my own home.

Honestly, if you are having a hard time parenting your kids, I cannot recommend using this strategy enough. As a long-time “parenting interventions don’t really work” kind of writer, I am telling you right now, this works. It’s been a night and day difference in my family. A breakthrough. A fucking revelation. I’ve honestly never felt so empowered and competent as a parent. Why do they keep this gold from us?? Why did it take me so long to sort through all the noise and figure this out? Not only do I no longer feel like I need to get my kid in to see the next available psychiatrist, I almost feel like I could handle a third baby.

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But lately I’ve had an itch to go deeper on parenting, specifically. Part of this is because I was genuinely inspired by reading Dopamine Kids and chatting with Michaleen Doucleff (you can catch that conversation here). Getting my kids off screens really has made a big positive difference in our family life. But we still have work to do on healthy eating, and I need to cut down my screen time (stay tuned for more on this).

I am also feeling more motivated to write about parenting lately because my son is genuinely a very difficult kid to parent — infinitely more so than my daughter — and we have been going through a rough phase. I hope he won’t hold it against me if he reads this some day. I love him to death, but every day is a challenge. Gentle Parenting just does not work for him, but neither does the classic Authoritative Parenting style. What seems to help him most is lots of time outside, lots of physical exercise, and lots of one-on-one attention, more than any specific disciplinary tactics or rewards systems. But we do need a game plan as a family for dealing with misbehavior, and at this point, I am willing to try anything!

But mostly, I feel like writing about parenting because I just found the most amazing source on hunter-gatherer parenting that I have ever read, and I am desperate to share it with you!

So far, most of my hunter-gatherer parenting content has been based on snippets that I have read here and there from various ethnographers and anthropologists. Not many people have systematically studied parenting in hunter-gatherer societies (meaning the strategies deployed to teach and discipline children), which is a problem, because it’s one thing to make a sweeping claim about, say, how the Aka parent, and another to rigorously measure it. Often, anthropologists project their own biases onto the research, and I’ve come to be a bit skeptical of some of their statements.

For instance, Barry Hewlett has famously said of the Aka that in their society, “One does not coerce or tell others what to do, including children.” But all you have to do is watch about ten minutes of A Caterpillar Moon (an excellent documentary about the life of the Aka) and you’ll see grandmothers barking orders at toddlers to bring them things, do tasks, or help with a chore. Does that not count as telling children what to do?

Similarly, we have Melvin Konner claiming that the !Kung rarely, if ever, hit their children. He didn’t count this or quantify it, so we just have to take him at his word. But in Marjorie Shostack’s biography of Nisa, a !Kung woman, she recalls being hit by her father many times.

In other words, I have come to suspect that we’re not being given the full story. Perhaps these observations are directionally correct, but they are lacking in rigor and detail. They leave me hungry. Which is why I was beyond excited when, a couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across this new source.

It’s a PHD dissertation for a 2018 doctoral thesis at University College London, by a woman named Daša Bombjaková, supervised by Jerome Lewis (a famous anthropologist in his own right). Bombjaková shipped off to live with the Mbendjele BaYaka in the Likouala Region of the Republic of Congo between 2013 and 2015, learning their language, eating their food, adopting their customs, and gathering as much information as she could on their lifeways. The primary goal of the research was to study how the BaYaka educate their children and transmit cultural practices and values (i.e. parenting!). She nearly died of severe malaria during her stay, but emerged with one of the most complete and interesting accounts of parenting in a hunter-gatherer society that I have ever read.

You can read the full dissertation at the link I provided above if you are so inclined (it’s long), but in this essay I am going to break down what I think are some of the most interesting elements. Many of them do seem common across other hunter-gatherer societies, but others are probably very much unique to the BaYaka. Although I’ve made the claim before that we should pay attention to hunter-gatherer parenting practices because research indicates that hunter-gatherers grow up to be very mentally healthy, it’s hard to know how much of this is due to parenting versus other factors, and it’s particularly difficult to know whether BaYaka parenting, specifically, is optimal in this regard.

A BaYaka camp (from Nikhil Chaudhary’s website).

I present this research to you not because I think we should all be copying it verbatim, or because it’s the best way to parent, or because it produces any kind of desired outcome, but simply because it’s so different from the way we tend to parent our children, and for me — because I am always looking for new strategies to try in my home — it’s been a source of inspiration. It’s also quite a beautiful philosophy (not just for parenting, but for life) from a very ancient and successful culture.

In the first section, I will explain some of the core elements of the BaYaka parenting philosophy and in the second section, I will explore some of the ways in which I plan to actually deploy these tactics in our home. I have no idea if this will work! But I am excited to try, and I’ll be sure to give you an update at some point. If you feel similarly inspired, join me, and let me know how it goes!

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In this episode, we are going to bust some major myths about how dopamine works in the brain and why screens and junk food are so addictive. Hint: it has nothing to do with pleasure!

Then we will talk about why we both believe that strictly curating your home environment is the only real viable solution. People have limited will power, and constantly enforcing boundaries is exhausting. Children evolved to expect a lot of autonomy, and constant power struggles degrade our relationships. But that doesn’t mean you should capitulate to capitalism’s worst products and let them eat Pringles and watch Paw Patrol all day.

This episode will kick off a longer series I will be writing on PARENTING. Yes, I know, this newsletter is technically the #3 parenting newsletter on Substack, but the truth is that I am at least as interested in explaining the social context that motherhood evolved in. But there is a lot we can learn from hunter-gatherer societies about how the parent-child relationship evolved to work, why parents and kids struggle today, and how to tip the balance back in our favor. Make sure to sign up below (if you haven’t already) to get those in your inbox.

And enjoy the episode!

And I have been for as long as I can remember. I was the kid who, although I went to a super crunchy outdoor school with no homework and no class rankings, was always determined to find a way to be the best. When the teacher told us that we had no assignment, but we were welcome to take our school books home and decorate them, I’d think, “Is that a challenge?” Then I’d come back to class the next day with my little laminated notebook looking like something that was roughly on par with medieval history’s best illuminated manuscripts.

Being ambitious served me well throughout my school years and into young adulthood. Although I had never typed an essay in my life during 10 years of forest school, I somehow managed to gain acceptance to a very prestigious private high school. There, I proceeded to do what I had always done, which was out-write, out-math, and out-reason anyone I could. I was the kid whose essay gets photocopied and passed around class as an example (and who everyone invariably hates). I finished in the top five for my year and gained early acceptance to Stanford University.

Professionally, things were harder for me, because although I knew how to focus my energy and get good results, I had a hard time figuring out what to focus all of that ambition on. For a while, I did the classic thing that ambitious kids who graduate from good schools do, which was go into management consulting. I hated it. But I was good at it, and I made good money.

Then, at 30, I became a mother for the first time, and everything changed.

At the time, I was working for a big corporation, doing management consulting type stuff (crunching data in excel, making slides, presenting those slides to executives who never did anything with our recommendations), but I wanted out. I wanted to start my own business, be my own boss, do something creative or intellectually stimulating, something that made the world a little bit better. I was scared to leave my stable, high-paying job, so I was experimenting with various ventures on the side, trying to get one to the point where it felt promising enough that I could safely make the leap.

After my son was born, I quickly realized that I could not be a mother, and work a full-time job, and have a side hustle. So the side hustle died. After I had my daughter, less than two years later, I realized that I could not even manage a full-time job without the side hustle, and I hated it anyway, so I quit.

I spent the next year and a half desperately trying to make a terrible business idea come to life, investing money I did not really have to invest, freaking out every time childcare fell through, and resenting both my children and my husband, who I felt were obstacles to my empire-building machinations.

Everything worked out in the end. My crummy business venture eventually hit the wall, I had a very low period, and then somehow stumbled into a career that I love as a science writer (one that I never dreamed would actually allow me to support myself). But my ambition almost ruined my marriage, hurt my friendships, and was objectively not good for my children. When I look back at how I approached early motherhood, I cannot help but think, Man, I really had my values backward.

It’s not that I was wrong to be ambitious, or to have life goals outside of home-making and childcare, but it was the way in which I pitted my so-called dreams against my family life, as if “achievement,” in the classic sense, was all that mattered. At the time, I felt that the most important relationships in my life were obstacles to my happiness, when in fact, I can see now, they are my reason for living.

In 1955, C.S. Lewis wrote a letter to a woman named Mrs. Johnson, a regular correspondent of Lewis’s, saying “I think I can understand that feeling about a housewife’s work being like that of Sisyphus… But it is surely in reality the most important work in the world. What do ships, railways, miners, cars, government etc. exist for except that people may be fed, warmed, and safe in their own homes?”

(Lewis was writing six years after the publication of The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir’s groundbreaking feminist work, in which she wrote, “Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition,” which is probably what Mrs. Johnson was referring to).

If we put things in evolutionary terms, Lewis is right. From the standpoint of natural selection, the whole point of existence is to survive and reproduce oneself. Everything else is in service of those goals. Have we completely lost the thread in modern society? Or have we, as my husband sometimes puts it, simply woken up from the matrix?

This essay is about ambition, what it means to be an ambitious mother in contemporary, Western society, and why it’s so hard.

First, we are going to define ambition, from a biological and neurochemical perspective, and discuss what ambition looks like in the brain. As it turns out, ambition and drive often cluster with other personality traits that are generally viewed as being quite positive, and occur more often in people who had positive childhoods and good mental health. In other words, there’s nothing pathological about a good dose of ambition.

There are, however, certain kinds of ambition that appear to be more driven by negative motivations, and ambition can certainly tip into becoming pathological under certain circumstances.

And then there’s this question of status-seeking, and what we attach our ambition to, and that’s where I think things get really interesting. How did women’s ambition manifest itself in our evolutionary past (and how does it manifest itself in today’s hunter-gatherer societies)? How does what we value as a culture effect where we direct our ambition? And if ambition and status-seeking are natural and healthy behaviors in primates, then doesn’t it matter that much more what we decide to collectively value as a society?

This piece is meant to be more exploratory than definitive. The neurobiological literature on this topic is vast and endlessly complex (and outside my core area of expertise), but I know how to find my way around a good literature review, and I enjoyed digging into this. And the anthropological research is sparse, so much of my thinking on the cross-cultural elements is speculative and grounded in anecdotes from various ethnographies I have read.

I hope you enjoy it anyway, and that it helps you make sense of why you are the way you are, in all your messy glory.

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And if you read those pieces, then you know that I am neither in the “just let nature do its job” camp nor the “shut up and follow your doctor’s orders” camp.

Human childbirth is risky. It always has been, for reasons that are both biological and physiological, and not just the result of modern lifestyles, liability culture, and patriarchy (the ultimate catch-all for anything feminists don’t like). On the other hand, it’s undeniably true that we have an overly-interventionist, overly-medicalized culture around childbirth that leaves many women feeling traumatized. I don’t think this means everyone should hop on the Free Birth bandwagon (please, please have a qualified midwife present if you choose to birth outside the hospital), but the data show that home births are a very legitimate choice for women with low-risk pregnancies (I went deep on that here).

So you would think, given my bias towards low-intervention births for low-risk women, that I would generally be against inductions unless there is a complication or a clear reason to induce, but since my greatest talent lies in disappointing everyone equally, now that I have won the trust of the low-intervention birth crowd, I am going to piss you all off by saying that I think induction is not always a bad idea, even for uncomplicated, run-of-the-mill pregnancies, for reasons that might surprise you.

In this installment we are going to review the findings from the controversial ARRIVE Trial — a large randomized controlled trial of 6,106 low-risk, nulliparous (first-time) women across 41 US hospitals — which found that the induction group had a lower cesarean rate (18.6% versus 22.2%), lower rates of gestational hypertension and preeclampsia, and no significant difference in the primary neonatal composite outcomes (source).

The results of this study were published in 2018, one year before I was due with my first baby, and man oh man did I ever face pressure from my OBGYN to get induced at 39 weeks. I was hell-bent on having a low-intervention birth, so I declined, but it was honestly exhausting having to insist every time, especially as my due date got closer and closer.

The primary reason that I wanted to avoid induction was because I wanted to avoid the infamous “cascade of interventions,” which starts with an epidural and/or Pitocin (artificial oxytocin) and tends to result in high rates of C-section delivery (source). But the ARRIVE study suggests that, by being induced, we actually lower our chances of ending up with a C-section. What’s going on there? How can we reconcile this apparently conflicting data? Does it mean you should opt for an induction? And of course (it wouldn’t be an Elena article without this), what’s the evolutionary angle?

I hope you appreciate this one, guys, because I am shirking my book-writing responsibilities to bring you this, I am probably going to miss my deadline, and my editor (who reads this newsletter) is probably going to be mad at me (although she’s pretty chill), but hey, a promise is a promise (except the ones I make to publishers, I guess).

The usual disclaimer applies: I'm a science writer, not your doctor. Nothing in this piece should replace a conversation with a qualified medical professional who actually knows your situation.

Anyway, let’s dive in…

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In the first essay in this series, I shared my personal experience of giving birth in a hospital and then in a birth center, and why I preferred the latter (even though it was objectively more painful). Then, in the second essay, we discussed why human childbirth is so dangerous and so painful, from an evolutionary perspective, and why this risk is a baked-in biological phenomenon that we cannot just wish away with essential oils and affirmations. We also discussed why many hunter-gatherer societies have taboos against intervention in birth and generally trust a woman’s body to do the job.

But what does all of this mean for you? Assuming you are reading this series because you are interested in making an informed decision about your next birth (or helping someone you know make an informed decision)? Should you opt for a home birth or a hospital birth? Or something in between like my birth-center birth? What are the pros and cons of each, based on the best peer-reviewed research?

Photo via Pinterest

Obviously, I am not here to make this decision for you. You should listen to your midwife, your mother, your OBGYN, and your own intuition. What I can do, however, is give you a complete rundown of what the best data say on outcomes in various settings, so that you have the best possible information and you are armed against the fear-mongering, the horror stories, and the scams.

That said, I’m a science writer, not your doctor. Nothing in this piece should replace a conversation with a qualified medical professional who actually knows your situation.

So let’s get straight to it shall we? You’re busy. I’m busy. What’s the verdict?

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In my last newsletter, the first installment of this series, I gave you all of the gory details about my two births—one in a hospital and one in a birth center—and explained why I felt the second experience was so much better. In this installment, the second of three, we are going to explore the evolution and anthropology of human childbirth, with the intention of answering a single, highly-consequential question:

How risky, really, is human childbirth, from a scientific and evolutionary perspective?

This is a hot academic debate, with strong arguments being made on both sides, and the reason that researchers have such strong feelings about this topic is the same reason that people have such strong feelings about the free birth movement or the hospital versus home birth debate: because birth intervention has historically been justified in evolutionary terms.

In high school biology class, I learned about something called the “Obstetric Dilemma,” often referred to as the “OD,” which has been the dominant theory for thinking about childbirth since the 1960s. The idea is that the human female pelvis is an evolutionary compromise. A narrower pelvis is more efficient for upright bipedal locomotion while a wider pelvis makes giving birth to our big-brained babies easier. So there were simultaneous selective pressures on humans to have a narrow enough pelvis to walk and run efficiently, thereby conserving valuable calories, while also having a wide enough pelvis to, well, not die from obstructed labor.

The theory was first proposed by anthropologist Sherwood Washburn in 1960, in a paper that was elegant, intuitive, and enormously influential — and that the medical establishment seized on with considerable enthusiasm. If the human birth canal is a structural compromise baked into our evolutionary architecture, the logic goes, then obstetric intervention is not an intrusion on a natural process but a brilliant correction to an evolutionary design flaw. The OD became, in other words, a justification — for inductions, for C-sections, for the entire apparatus of managed, medicalized birth.

Then came the wave of backlash. In 2015, anthropologist Anna Warrener and colleagues at Harvard published a study that directly tested one of the OD’s core assumptions — that wider hips in women come at a cost to walking efficiency. Their results showed that pelvic width does not predict hip abductor mechanics or locomotor cost in either women or men, and that women and men are equally efficient at both walking and running (source). In other words, the supposed trade-off between wide hips and efficient bipedal locomotion — the entire mechanical foundation of the obstetric dilemma — did not hold up when actually tested. Oops.

That opened the floodgates. People started asking good questions like, if human childbirth is so dangerous, why would evolution not have selected more strongly against it? If we don’t need narrow hips for more efficient walking, why would selective pressures favor such a narrow human pelvis, given that death in childbirth hangs in the balance?

Then a whole bunch of ideologically-motivated folks started shouting “patriarchy!” and “medical-industrial complex!” and publishing papers arguing that the OD theory did not just need tweaking, it was totally bunk, and that birth difficulty is not primarily an anatomical problem at all, but a consequence of modern lifestyles, obstetric culture, and social inequality.

More fuel for the rebel camp came in 2012, when anthropologist Holly Dunsworth proposed a rival hypothesis to the OD: what limits gestation length for human babies is not the size of the baby’s head relative to the mother’s pelvis, but metabolic constraints — the mother’s body simply running out of the energy required to sustain a larger, more developed fetus (source).

The natural birth camp ate it up. If there is no Obstetric Dilemma, then there is no need for medical intervention, or any intervention, really, during birth. If the limitation is metabolic, not physiological, then maybe we should just let women’s bodies do what they do best. Just get out of the way and watch the magic happen. If a woman wants to birth alone in the woods, well, that’s how things were always done, and that’s her prerogative.

And as always, the truth actually lies somewhere in between. Anna Warrener and colleagues were right: pelvic width doesn’t seem to be the primary determinant of walking efficiency, which was a core flaw of the OD as originally framed. But we don’t have to throw out the big-brained baby with the bathwater.

In 2023, a team of eleven researchers, including some pretty crunchy pro-midwife types, published a paper in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology with a title that left no room for ambiguity: “There Is an Obstetrical Dilemma” (source).

Their argument was direct: there has been a growing tendency among some anthropologists to question the difficulty of human childbirth and its evolutionary origin, partly stemming from the motivation to combat the over-medicalization of birth in industrialized countries. But the failure of some studies to identify biomechanical constraints on pelvic dimensions does not mean those constraints don’t exist — it means we haven’t yet nailed down the details.

Re-analysis of Warrener’s data has actually shown that hip width does correlate with energy expenditure, weakly, meaning this could still be a real factor. (As an aside, I find it fascinating how different scientists, looking at the same fucking data routinely come to opposite conclusions. Science is more ideologically motivated than we like to admit. It’s the worst system we have for getting to the truth, except for all the others).

But perhaps more importantly, medical and biomechanical studies indicate that a wider or more spacious birth canal increases the risk of pelvic floor disorders, which are very annoying today, but could have been fatal in our evolutionary past. In other words, the OD was directionally right, but its proponents were barking up the wrong tree.

The human pelvis is indeed an evolutionary compromise, but perhaps not between walking efficiency and easier birth, but between organ prolapse and easier birth. Wider birth canals are consistently associated with higher risk of incontinence and organ prolapse, which may have been the real limitation. A narrower birth canal makes childbirth riskier but is necessary to support heavy abdominal contents and a large fetus during long gestations in a species that walks upright. In other words, it’s not so much about walking efficiency as it is about keeping our innards in the right place (source).

There’s another hypothesis that’s been floated which is bound to ignite the ire of my feminist readers, but biology is biology, and I personally find this theory highly entertaining. Some researchers have suggested that human females may suffer through extremely painful childbirths, in part, to support erectile function in men. I kid you not. Basically, a narrow pelvic floor support better erectile function (for reasons I won’t get into here) so there may have been selective pressure on men for narrower pelvises, and since men and women share much of their skeletal architecture, selection for pelvic narrowness in males may have indirectly constrained the birth canal in females. (This was a 2020 paper in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and the lead author, Pavlicev, is a woman, so I doubt this was ideologically motivated—source).

Talk about a raw fucking deal. I’ve said it before and I will surely say it again: evolution does not care about gender equality. It cares about survival and reproduction.

(As a side note: we are constantly telling women to do their pelvic floor exercises, but maybe it’s time we start telling men to do the same. A study of 55 men showed large improvement of erectile function after 6 months of exercise of the pelvic floor musculature, with 40% regaining normal erectile function and a further 35.5% improving. Guys, do your kegels!)

BUT ANYWAY, regardless of which evolutionary pressures most strongly constrained female pelvic width (my money is on the pelvic floor theory), the tight human birth canal is almost certainly a compromise between two opposing forces, which explains why obstructed labor was not more strongly selected against.

In mathematical models, when we put opposing forces in tension, we end up with something called the “cliff-edge model” of childbirth. So, for instance, we know that bigger babies generally survive better in the wild, and narrower pelvises are better for pelvic floor support (and possibly locomotion). So evolution is simultaneously pulling toward larger babies and narrower pelvises — right up until the point where the baby simply cannot get out. At that point, the “cliff edge”, fitness drops to zero. Mother and baby die. But pushing right up to that edge is optimal for everyone else, so as long as the rate of maternal death in childbirth is not too high, it persists. As for the pain? Again, nature does not give a fuck.

So where does that leave us? The academic consensus seems to be that, although we don’t fully understand why human childbirth is so risky and painful, some version of the OD is probably real, in the sense that the human female pelvis really is an evolutionary compromise between opposing selection pressures, and our births really are structurally, physiologically more dangerous than for any other primate.

But how dangerous are we talking here? Enough to justify a 30% C-section rate? Probably not, but let’s get into it.

Agriculture Was The Worst Thing To Happen to Birthing Women

Another thing I like to harp on about in this newsletter is how agriculture was the worst thing that even happened to humans, but especially women.

Early agriculture sucked. Jared Diamond made a strong argument for that — first in a 1987 essay in Discover Magazine titled “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” and later in Guns, Germs, and Steel — and to my knowledge, research since then has largely proven him right.

Agriculture fucked with human nutrition. Hunter-gatherers ate a wide variety of plants, animals, nuts, tubers, and fruits — a diet that was calorically variable but nutritionally rich. Early farmers ate whatever they could grow, which was usually one or two staple crops. This dietary change is linked to various health problems including malnutrition and disease — and the archaeological record confirms it. Human remains from Greece and Turkey show that after the adoption of agriculture, average height dropped by five to six inches — a direct marker of nutritional stress and malnutrition across populations.

It also brought with it a variety of fun diseases. As communities became larger and more densely populated, transmission of diseases both among humans and from animals became easier. Livestock farming increased the chance of zoonotic diseases — diseases that transfer from animals to humans — contributing to more frequent outbreaks of illness. Hunter-gatherers lived in small mobile bands. They did not accumulate waste in fixed locations, did not keep large numbers of animals in close proximity, and did not stay in one place long enough for infectious disease to get a foothold the way it could in a settled farming village.

But the thing that Diamond never really got into, at least from what I can remember, is how these changes disproportionately affected women, especially mothers. Reliance on monocrops led to malnutrition, while crop failures increased the risk of periodic starvation. The result was that women were of much shorter stature (on average) than their hunting and gathering ancestors and often had underdeveloped pelvises. And there was a catastrophic increase in death by childbirth. Archeological evidence from exhumed female skeletons of hunter-gatherer populations and agricultural populations indicates that the risk for death in childbirth increased 30-fold following the transition to agriculture (from about 1% to 30%) (source).

That’s a 3000% risk increase. Whose idea was it to start planting shit anyway?? They have a lot of blood on their hands (although I guess we can forgive them if we take the long view).

Other factors like increased sedentism and use of chairs may also have contributed to higher rates of obstructed labor. A recent paper in the journal of Evolutionary Medicine and Public Health has suggested that habitual squatting, combined with taller stature and better nutrition, of our Paleolithic ancestors could explain the lower rates of death in childbirth. Routine squatting (as would have been the norm for our ancestors) can enlarge the pelvic outlet diameter by nearly 2.5 centimeters and possibly much more in the later stages of pregnancy, since hormonal changes enable additional stretching of the ligaments (source).

Apart from dying in droves, women in early agricultural societies also lost status in society and access to rest and leisure, as I’ve written about before. For instance, Mark Dyble and colleagues have documented that, among the Agta, groups that did more agricultural work and less foraging work had less leisure overall, but while men’s leisure remained mostly constant across groups, it was the women who lost out on leisure time when the group spent more time on agriculture (source).

So basically, agriculture fucked women over, and we are still recovering from that, in my opinion, but the fact remains that, even in hunter-gatherer societies, even before inevitable march of history messed with the finely-tuned mechanism of female sexual maturation and birth, most estimates of maternal mortality in hunter-gatherer societies hover around 1/150. Women in our Paleolithic past were roughly 20 times more likely to die in childbirth than a woman giving birth in the US today — and more than 100 times more likely than a woman giving birth in the UK. So yeah, medical intervention is clearly justified in many cases.

That said, many doctors would do well to take a leaf out of the hunter-gatherer playbook and keep their paws off birthing women, unless intervention is absolutely necessary.

Hunter-Gatherers Were the Original Free-Birthers (Mostly Because They Had No Choice)

If you read my last article in this series, then you know I have a bone to pick with anyone who tries to tell women that birth can be pleasurable or even “orgasmic.” I mean, yes, technically you can have an orgasm, but most women would not choose to repeat the experience.

So one thing I appreciate about the ethnographic literature on hunter-gatherer birth philosophies is that they apparently make no effort to sugar-coat it. In Marjorie Shostak’s Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, a !Kung mother explains to her daughter, “Nisa, when you grow up, one day you will be pregnant and give birth to a child. Childbirth is something that is very painful and the pain feels like it is killing you. But don’t be afraid. If you fear, your insides may tear and you may die. If you are afraid and cry out, if you throw yourself down in the sand again and again, it will hurt the baby…but if you don’t fear and sit quietly, sit just the right way, the child will come out from your vagina and live; and you will too.”

I think the !Kung may have been suffering from a bit of correlation-causation confusion here, but there is some wisdom to this ancient advice.

For one thing, women in !Kung society believe that a woman should give birth alone, and some anthropologists believe this is an adaptive strategy, since it minimizes the risk of infection (a leading cause of maternal death in early post-industrial societies before good hygiene practices became the norm).

For another thing, fear really does slow labor (adrenaline directly inhibits uterine contractions), so the !Kung advice—”don’t fear—is backed by modern endocrinology.

The Inuit have a similar stoical attitude towards childbirth. In Hunt, Gather, Parent, Michaeleen Doucleff describes how “As impossible as it may sound, many Inuit women do not scream, or really make any sort of fuss, during childbirth.” She describes an anthropological account in which a woman gave birth in the igloo and no one heard a thing until the baby started crying.

Personally, I was screaming like a banshee when I gave birth to my daughter without pain medications, but my very-experienced doula did tell me that I should try to keep it in a low register (more of a moan than a scream) because screaming actually signals panic to your brain and can slow labor (again, via adrenaline). In general, I think stoicism is underrated these days, but that’s a topic for another time.

It’s worth mentioning that perhaps !Kung and Inuit women did not feel as much pain as the average Westerner does today. Birthing is an Olympic sport and, objectively, we Westerners are just not in nearly as good of shape as our hunter gatherer counterparts. Regular physical activity, a varied diet, routine squatting and other factors likely contributed to their relatively fast and painless labors.

But not all hunter-gatherer societies believe giving birth alone is the ideal.

Among the Agta of the Philippines, for instance, birth is a spectator sport. As soon as labour begins, a crowd of adults and children gathers around the mother, shouting encouragement and instructions. The husband is usually the primary assistant, but the most experienced person present, usually a grandmother, will ultimately help deliver the child.

What is striking, however, is that despite the noise and the crowd, the default remains the same as among the !Kung: don’t intervene unless absolutely necessary. The job of the community is to watch, encourage, and wait, and then trust the mother’s body to do its job.

Even among the Efe, who have a reputation for extreme communal child-rearing and allomaternal nursing, and where birth is similarly a very public event, anthropologist Allan Holmberg observed, “not a move was made by onlookers to assist the parturient women, except in the case when twins were born.”

Based on the available evidence, it seems to me like the ideal in hunter-gatherer societies was not to intervene, unless the situation was dire.

I actually differ somewhat from other evolutionary biology writers on this topic, like Cat Bohannon, who argues in Eve that gynecology was one of the earliest human inventions. Perhaps, but I suspect that while birthing women were probably always supported by the community in one way or another, intervention in our evolutionary past was probably rare, and there may even have been taboos against it in some cultures for good reasons.

In my own personal experience, having moral support from an experienced doula and mother of three was a critical aspect of my ability to give birth without pain medication. She knew what to expect, told me the extreme pain and shaking of transitional labor was normal, and reminded me that the intensification of the contractions meant I was getting close. Her most important role was as a cheerleader and (as an experienced, older three-time mother) arbitrator of what was normal and what was not. My body did the rest.

That said, we would consider a 1/150 maternal mortality rate unacceptable these days, and there are probably very good reasons for why mothers need more interventions today than they did in the hunter-gatherer context. Excessive calorie intake during pregnancy means that babies are often born much larger than would have been the norm throughout most of human history, and this increases the likelihood they will get stuck in the birth canal. Maternal physical fitness is generally lower today as well. Research shows that exercise during pregnancy tends to shorten the first stage of labour and is associated with better birth outcomes (source). Women have their first birth much later today than would have been the norm in our evolutionary past, and risks of complications generally increase with age. Maternal complications in say, a fifth pregnancy, would have been less strongly selected against by evolution than death in a first pregnancy.

There’s also interesting evidence suggesting that, because of modern medical interventions, we are actually removing the selection pressures that keep fetal head size relative to pelvic width intact. Before C-sections became routine, women with very narrow pelvises relative to their babies’ head size were significantly more likely to die in obstructed labour — meaning their genes were less likely to be passed on. C-sections have substantially relaxed that selection pressure, and the result is a predicted evolutionary increase in fetopelvic disproportion rates of 10 to 20% over recent decades (source)!

Obviously, this is not a reason to stop performing C-sections, which save lives every day, but it is an interesting illustration of how cultural interventions interact with biology and evolution and create the need for even more interventions. Evolution is usually slow, which is why evolutionary mismatch is a real issue in so many areas of modern life, but under the right circumstances, change can happen faster than we expect. In the case of something like C-sections, we are suddenly removing something that was previously a very strong selective pressure, thereby allowing the trait it was culling against to accumulate relatively quickly in the population.

Still, I don’t think this justifies the current C-section rate of 30% that is the norm today in American hospitals (more on that in the next installment). I think women’s bodies are far more capable, and less in need of interventions, than the modern medical establishment is willing to admit. But that doesn’t negate the fact that human childbirth is undeniably risky, for reasons that are physiological and long-standing. Unless we are willing to accept relatively high maternal and child mortality rates, then we should be very thankful for modern medicine.

On Sunday, we will be diving into the contemporary evidence on home versus hospital births: What are the pros and cons of each, based on the best peer-reviewed research?

See you then.

Oh, and one more thing! This week I am trying something new, which is a cross-promotion with another publication I admire: The Persistent is an independent media organization that puts women at the center of the story—on topics ranging from why pockets are so rare in women’s clothing to the day 90% of Icelandic women went on strike. Every week they bring you smart storytelling and perspectives you won’t find anywhere else. Sign up to get The Persistent’s newsletter for free.

The New York Times just published yet another highly critical piece about the free birth movement, titled, She Wanted a Free Birth. It Put Her and Her Baby in Grave Danger. The article is exactly what you would expect it to be from one glance at the title: woman who does not like hospitals (understandably) decides to give birth at home without help, there’s a complication, she and her baby almost die but manage to make it to the hospital at the last minute and are saved by modern medicine. The article is peppered with scary statistics about risks and complications, and finishes by returning to the protagonist, now repentant and grateful to the hospital team who saved her life.

From what I can tell, this seems to be part of a broader series that The New York Times is publishing, all aimed at taking a giant shit on anyone who rejects traditional, hospital births (and all of the medical interventions that go with it). In 2024 they published a piece called The Problem With the Natural Childbirth Movement. In 2015 they published another called Home Birth is Not Safe. All you have to do is google “birth” and “NYT” and you will get a slew of such articles, and not once have I seen them publish anything from the other angle, giving serious consideration to why women choose to give birth in a non-hospital setting in the first place.

I have given birth to two babies: one in a hospital and one in a birth center. Each setting has its advantages and disadvantages, and neither one is as risky as “free birth” (unassisted birth with no medical professional present), or even home birth (which can happen far from a hospital, but usually with a qualified midwife present), but I can tell you with absolute certainty that if I have a third, it will not be in a hospital if I can help it.

On the other hand, I am not a fan of the super woo-woo doula crowd, who tell women that birth can be "orgasmic" and pleasurable, provided we release our attachment to the patriarchal concept of pain and simply trust our bodies. (This is also the crowd most likely to advocate for free birth, and they tend to approach risk statistics the way my four-year-old approaches vegetables: acknowledging their existence in theory while refusing any direct engagement).

Birth fucking hurts. And it’s risky. There’s no way around it. But a woman’s birth experience can be more or less empowering, more or less safe, and probably not optimized for both at the same time.

In this piece, I am going to give you all the gory details of both of my birth experiences and why I come down in favor of midwife-led, non-hospital births for women with low-risk pregnancies. This is going to be the first in a three-part series, which will start with my own experience, then explore the evolutionary biology and anthropology of birth (why it’s so hard in our species, and why interventions are more or less justified) and then we will get into what the evidence says about safety, risks, and the benefits of “natural” versus medicalized births in the modern, Western context.

But before we get into it, I’m a science writer, not your doctor. Nothing in this piece should replace a conversation with a qualified medical professional who actually knows your situation.

Let me start off by being clear about where I agree with the New York Times: human childbirth is no joke. Yes, our bodies are designed for this, but from what I’ve been able to glean, even in hunter-gatherer societies where the conditions for natural birth are relatively optimal, 1 in 150 women still died in the process. Before Western medicine, infant mortality was around 30% in the first year of life, though I have not been able to find numbers on how many of these deaths resulted directly from birth complications.

By contrast, maternal mortality in the US today is around 17 per 100,000, which is by no means the best in the world, and the CDC calls it “concerning,” but that’s still a 97.5% reduction in maternal mortality versus hunter-gatherer conditions. In other words, you are 97.5% less likely to die from childbirth in the contemporary US versus just about any other time period in history. We’ll get into some of the science behind why childbirth is so risky for humans in the next installment, but for now, just keep in mind that our species got the short end of the stick when it comes to birth—it’s harder than for any other animal species—and so “natural” and “optimal” are uncomfortable companions when it comes to pushing out a baby.

That said, we have an extremely interventionist and medicalized approach to birth in most modern hospital settings. More than 30% of births in the US result in Cesarean deliveries—a major abdominal surgery that takes a whole lot longer to recover from than a vaginal birth in most cases. Nearly 35% of all births are induced.

Most importantly, however, 1 in 3 women who give birth in a hospital recall their experience as being “traumatic,” compared with only 5% for home births. In peer-reviewed studies of women’s hospital birth experiences, participants recall mistreatment, loss of autonomy, being shouted at or threatened, or being ignored (source).

And a woman’s experience of birth matters. In our culture, we tend to look only at outcomes: healthy baby, mother alive, all good. Meanwhile, there’s a huge number of mothers out there quietly reliving the trauma of the mistreatment they endured while they nurse their newborns and cry at three in the morning. I think we can do better. And any article that rails against the home birth, natural birth, or even the free birth movement while failing to acknowledge this is just junky rage bait optimized for clicks.

Birth 1: In Which I Got Fentanyl Without Consenting To It

I would not say that my hospital birth was traumatic, but neither can I say that it was great. I gave birth in a relatively progressive and extremely well-resourced hospital in northern California, and although my baby and I were both healthy and happy, I never want to go through that experience again.

My plan was always to have a natural birth. Emily Oster’s Expecting Better was my bible at the time and if Oster, who is no crunchy mama, came down on the side of natural childbirth, given the evidence, then who was I to argue?

I definitely did not want a Cesarean if I could avoid it. But I was also scared. My sister-in-law suffered a pretty extreme hemorrhage following the birth of her first child and probably would have bled to death had she not given birth in the safety of a hospital. Throughout my prenatal visits, I got lecture after lecture from my OBGYN about the risks of childbirth and the importance of following procedure. So my plan was to give birth “naturally,” but in the hospital, in case anything went wrong.

Everyone told me that if I wanted to give birth without pain medication, I would need a doula, so I hired the crunchiest one I could find — a woman who I genuinely believed could neutralize the institutional energy of the hospital through the strategic deployment of lavender oil and affirmations. She promised all kinds of “woo” pain management techniques, none of which have any real support in the scientific literature, but I desperately wanted to believe that they would work. Together with my husband, the three of us drafted my “birth plan,” a carefully researched document detailing how I hoped things would proceed, that no one ever actually read.

Right on my due date, the contractions started around dinner time. I wasn’t sure they were the real deal, so I didn’t say anything to my husband until later that evening, when the pain really started to kick in and there was an undeniable rhythm to them. We watched a couple of episodes of our favorite TV show and then I told my husband to go to bed, since he probably wasn’t going to get much sleep that night. At 2 AM I woke him up because the pain was so intense that I needed support. We called my doula, who had me time my contractions, and then said, with the wisdom of someone who had done this many times before (had she?), that I should wait a bit longer before going to the hospital. I remember thinking, Are you kidding me? This is just the beginning?

By sunrise I was convinced we needed to get going and I didn’t care what my doula said. I tried to eat a bowl of oatmeal and then threw it up all over my poor husband. He changed his shirt and then drove me to the hospital, an excruciating trip where every bump in the road felt like torture.

When we arrived, the hospital had a bunch of forms they wanted me to fill out. I could hardly breathe at that point. They handed me a pen and I looked at them like, Do you actually think I can write anything right now? The attendant started asking me a bunch of questions as I stood there panting and sweating, but I swear to you, she may as well have been speaking Chinese. I was utterly incapable of understanding a single word she said, much less responding coherently. My body had clearly diverted all resources away from my brain and into the other parts of my body, which needed all the help they could get. So I just stood there like an idiot until my husband snapped to and started filling the out forms on my behalf.

Once the forms were done, they ushered me into a tiny waiting room where a nurse instructed me to lie down so she could check my dilation. She happily announced that I was already at 7 centimeters, hooked me up to some stuff, told me to lie down and stay still, and then disappeared.

I’m not sure if the people who assist birthing women in hospitals actually know what birth feels like, because lying down and staying still, without pain medication, at 7 centimeters dilated, is physically impossible. I felt like tearing all of the cords and tubes off of me like in Avatar when Jake Sully first wakes up in his alien body and starts running around like a mad man. They left me like that for what felt like hours, and I remember begging my husband to go find someone, anyone, because I could not stay in this position anymore. Eventually, the nurse came back and informed me that my room was ready.

By now, I was definitely in “transition,” the hardest part of labor, but I didn’t know what transition was or what it felt like because, well, I had never given birth to a baby before. My doula finally arrived, looking annoyed like I had messed up her beauty sleep or something, and then proceeded to just kind of sit there and watch me do my thing. My body was shaking all over and I was starting to panic. The pain was so intense that I was convinced something must be wrong. Wasn’t I supposed to be having an orgasm or something about now?

To make matters worse, my doula chose this opportune moment to announce that, even though she had just arrived and this was a critical turning point in the birth process, she had not yet had breakfast and was going to get something to eat. So she peaced, just like that, and didn’t come back for an hour.

That’s when I started begging for the epidural. “Fuck the birth plan!” I told my husband, “I cannot do this!”

The nurse didn’t ask me to say it twice. She seemed pretty convinced that I needed one too, but she wasn’t sure whether she’d be able to give it to me this late in labor. She called someone else in, and there was a muffled discussion, in which I was not included. They told me they had a solution and messed around with the IV drip I was already attached to.

Half an hour later, I was fast asleep. I have zero memory of consenting to it, but they gave me fentanyl, supposedly because I was too far progressed to sit still for an epidural without it. Once I was asleep, they also gave me the epidural, even though I could not feel anything at all anymore, so there was really no point. Once I was down, like a wild beast finally feeling the effects of the tranquilizing dart, the medical team proceeded to simply forget about me.

I was awakened, who knows how long after (my husband told me it was hours) by slightly panicky shouts from the OBGYN, who was back, and who was just now realizing that I was 10 centimeters dilated and should have been pushing, but since I could not feel anything, my body was not reacting the way it was supposed to. The nurse had to stand by my body and watch for signs of contractions and then tell me when to push, because I could not feel them, at all. The doctor was low-level freaking out because I wasn’t pushing hard enough and the baby was, in her words, “getting tired.” I may have been drugged, but I was not stupid, and by the way she said it, I could tell this was a kind of medical euphemism intended to soften the reality: which was that my baby was slowly asphyxiating in the birth canal. But what could I do? I gave it my all, pushed when they told me to, and eventually, my little boy was born.

He was healthy and happy, and I was healthy and happy, so all was well in the end, but I also didn’t exactly feel like giving them five out of five stars. The only reason I even found out about the fentanyl was because it was written on the whiteboard, which I had not been able to read in the intensity of labor. I had been ignored, talked down to, drugged, forgotten, and shouted at by a panicky doctor who had failed to check in on me in a timely manner. As for my doula—don’t even get me started.

Which is why, when I was pregnant with my next child, my daughter, I decided to take a different approach.

Birth 2: In Which I Discovered the Miracle of Bathtubs

One of the ways in which I felt extremely misled by my sub-par doula in preparing for my son’s birth was that she sold me the notion that if I just breathed right and let go of my need for control, I could have a painless and even “orgasmic” childbirth. She sent me lots of youtube videos of women in inflatable bathtubs, moaning through contractions, looking oh-so-peaceful, as if they might actually be enjoying the experience. It’s worth noting that this doula had never birthed a child herself.

Later, when I was shaking with pain and screaming through transition, I thought there must be something wrong with my body, and wrong with my birth, because I felt nothing like those mothers in their inflatable bathtubs.

As it turns out, there was nothing wrong with my body, and human childbirth just happens to be extremely painful. I believe we do women a great disservice by telling them otherwise, because it prevents us from preparing ourselves psychologically for the pain.

So when I was pregnant with my second child, I prepared, not by watching orgasmic birth videos, but by reading Alex Hutchinson’s book Endure, an amazing, deeply-researched and scientific book about the frontiers of athletic endurance, and how the physical barriers we encounter are set as much by the brain as by the body. If I was going to give birth naturally, I needed to prepare for it, psychologically and physically, the way an Olympic athlete prepares for a record-breaking marathon run.

I was also much more thoughtful about the doula I hired. I spoke with friends, I got personal recommendations, and above all, I looked for someone who had given birth to multiple children without pain medication, and who wasn’t trying to sugarcoat the experience. I found an amazing doula this time: one who made all the difference in helping me achieve the birth I wanted.

I also decided that I would not be giving birth in a hospital again. I was about as low-risk as they come: 32 years old, healthy, no complications, with a previous vaginal delivery. Still, I did not want to take unnecessary risks, and since our new home was about half an hour from the nearest hospital, I looked for a birth center that was hospital-adjacent. The one I found was literally two minutes away from the hospital next-door, and was staffed by a team of experienced midwives with plenty of training in emergency procedures, had the equipment needed to stabilize just about any situation in time to get me to the hospital if that was necessary, and it was covered by my insurance. Still, my lovely OBGYN gave me lecture after lecture about all of the unnecessary risks I was taking by choosing a birth center over a hospital.

This time, when the contractions started, I knew what to expect and I felt well-prepared. I labored at home until one particularly earth-shaking contraction hit me, and then my husband drove me to the birth center. This time I was only 3 centimeters dilated on arrival, but I was happy to be there and have the drive behind me. I had heard from friends that second births can go quickly, and I didn’t want to give birth on the side of the road (this actually happened to someone I know).

The midwives welcomed me and showed me straight to the birthing room, which looked more like a bedroom in someone’s home than a hospital. There was a big king bed on a wood frame, a chest of drawers in one corner, a birth ball, a birthing stool, a ladder attached to the wall to help with various standing and leaning positions, and a giant, deep, beautiful bathtub in one corner. We put on my birth playlist (there was a bluetooth speaker all ready to go for this exact purpose). We dimmed the lights. They asked me if I wanted anything to drink and I opted for some ice-cold coconut water. There was no waiting around on a bed strapped to things that had no apparent purpose. There were no forms to be filled out. I was treated like every woman in labor should be treated: as someone going through one of the hardest and most transformative experiences a person can go through, in need of support and encouragement.

Not long after, my doula arrived. Contractions were starting to get intense, and she coached me through various positions to help with the pain. She was extremely hands-on, pressing on my hips, massaging my back, but most importantly, she was an incredible cheer-leader. She kept telling me that I was doing great, that everything was progressing as planned, that I just needed to keep taking deep breaths.

When I hit transition, the midwives asked if I would like to try the bathtub, which they had already filled and brought to an optimal temperature. At first I said no, because I wasn’t even sure that I could walk the distance across the room, but they convinced me it was worth a try and helped me get there.

Friends, the bathtub was a fucking miracle. I had tried laboring in my home bathtub before coming, but it was so shallow that it didn’t give me much relief. But sitting in this deep, warm bath, I just felt so much of the pain melt away. It wasn’t like with the fentanyl, where I felt nothing. I definitely still felt the contractions, but for some reason they felt manageable now. There was something about the warmth but also the buoyancy of my heavy body in the water that just took the edge off of everything.

I gave birth to my daughter in the tub. The midwives scooped her up expertly, dried her off, checked her and then handed her to me. She was perfect. I remember saying out loud, “I did it,” and also thinking, Thank God it’s fucking over, because even though the whole thing was really as good as it gets, when it comes to human childbirth, I would be lying if I told you that it was in any way pleasant. It was just as excruciating as it had been with my son—actually more so, because I felt everything this time—but the major difference was that I had been so well supported throughout that I did not feel psychologically beaten down like I had in the hospital. Quite the contrary: I felt empowered and a little bit thrilled.

Afterwards we were left to cuddle and bond in the big bed. We ordered Thai food from a nearby restaurant and I ate like a pig. Three hours later, we were back home.

My son was extremely jealous of my daughter, which made my postpartum experience hard this time, but my daughter was undeniably a more calm baby, a better sleeper, and a happier infant. I will never know whether this was just because she has a different temperament from my son, or whether the birth experience had something to do with it, but I do suspect that birth experiences impact babies as well as mothers, and my daughter definitely had a smoother entry into the world.

Sometimes I wonder whether, with the right doula, and maybe with a birth plan that opted for an epidural earlier in the process, I might have had a better hospital birth, but my general feeling is that the hospital environment is not conducive to having an empowering birth experience, because the institutional structure works against autonomy. Hospitals are designed around liability management, efficiency, and medical emergencies — not around the normal physiological process of birth. Protocols, shift changes, and institutional routines mean the laboring woman adapts to the hospital’s rhythm rather than her own body’s. Consent in hospital births is frequently rushed, incomplete, or coercive, and the asymmetry of knowledge between provider and patient makes it hard for women to push back in the moment, especially during active labor, which is what happened to me with the fentanyl decision.

And it must be said that the physical environment of the average hospital sucks. Bright lights, unfamiliar surroundings, noise, lack of privacy, and inability to move freely all activate the stress response — which directly opposes the hormonal environment needed for labor to progress well. I did not feel at ease in the hospital, which probably slowed my labor and made the process more painful than it had to be. In the birth center, I was instantly at ease, and my labor progressed quickly.

This piece is not intended to tell you how you should birth your baby. That’s your choice, and I wish healthcare providers respected women’s choices more than they do. For high-risk pregnancies, giving birth at home (or even in a birth center) is probably not a great idea. Even for low-risk pregnancies, if minimizing risk is your primary concern, then the hospital is the best place to be. Some research suggests that births in freestanding birth centers are associated with a 4-fold increase in neonatal deaths: 3.64 vs 0.95 per 10,000 births, still very low, but enough to make you think twice. This may have as much to do with variability in the quality of these centers as anything else, but the risk is there.

If, however, you care about your birth experience, then I think it’s hard to come down in favor of hospitals. And a mother’s experience of her birth matters. Childbirth trauma correlates strongly with postpartum depression, which is now the most common postpartum complication (source).

We have become, as a society, pathologically risk-averse when it comes to anything involving children or birth. And I understand why — when death is even theoretically on the table, the calculus feels obvious. But risk-aversion has costs too, and we rarely talk about them. The mother who gives birth in a hospital to avoid a 0.03% increase in neonatal mortality and ends up traumatized, depressed, and disconnected from her baby has also paid a price. We just don’t put that in the headline.

This same dynamic plays out across modern parenting. We tell mothers not to bed-share, even though for a healthy full-term baby whose parents don’t smoke or drink, the increased SIDS risk is roughly equivalent to the risk of being struck by lightning — and the benefits for breastfeeding and bonding are well-documented and largely ignored. We tell parents their children must be supervised at all times, treating stranger abduction as a lurking inevitability when it is in fact one of the rarest harms that can befall a child — and in doing so, we deprive them of the unsupervised outdoor play that is how humans have always developed independence, resilience, and social competence. In each case, we have decided that eliminating a small, quantifiable risk is worth any number of unquantifiable costs — to mothers, to babies, to children’s development.

Right now, most mothers make the decision about where to birth the way most people make most decisions — emotionally, based on what happened to their sister, what their doula told them, and what they read on Instagram at 2am. I don't blame them. When the medical establishment responds to every question with liability-driven stonewalling and the natural birth movement responds with orgasm videos, you work with what you've got. But you deserve better. And that's what the next two installments are for.

In Part 2, in the next installment, I’m going to dig into the evolution and anthropology of birth, and do what I do best: disappoint everyone equally. The woo crowd is wrong about natural birth. The hospital establishment is wrong about natural birth. And the actual anthropology and evolutionary biology is so much more interesting than either of their versions.

In Part 3, the final installment: why we should be taking postpartum experience into consideration more when deciding where to birth, but also, why our 21st century Western bodies may genuinely need more support in birth than hunter-gatherer bodies did, and what all of this means for the decision you are actually going to have to make.

After clocking countless hours of field observations, I can tell you one thing with great certainty: Dr. Becky’s sphere of influence does not extend to France. Not once did I see a French parent trying to repeat and validate their children’s emotions. Mostly, the parents in Parisian playgrounds sit on the benches around the edges (there are always benches around the edges, which says something in and of itself) and read books and smoke electronic cigarettes while the children play. Then, when it’s time to go they stand up and shout “Jean-Pierre, on y va!” with an air of total authority, and their children follow them home, no fuss no muss.

Another time I witnessed a French family with four children, all of whom looked to be under the age of eight, squeeze themselves around a long table at a little corner bistro. The kids sat on one end, and the adults sat on the other, so as not to be disturbed. The parents ordered for the entire table, including the kids. I cannot say in all honesty that these children were exceptionally well-behaved—they were in and out of their chairs, under the table, poking each other and making lots of noise—but the parents did not give a fuck. They just sat there and chatted and enjoyed their lunch. And then when the food came all the kiddos tucked their napkins into their shirt collars and ate a variety of alarmingly strange foods that no American kid would touch with a six-foot pole.

Obviously there are many different styles of French parenting, just as there are many different styles of American parenting, but we’re in the business of painting broad stereotypes here, and my take is this: French parents are both less involved and more authoritative than American parents.

And it seems to work. French kids are just as whiny and annoying and capable of throwing tantrums as American kids, but they also seem to follow rules and social codes better from a younger age, they don’t solicit their parents as often and seem to be better at solving their own problems, and they are more likely to respect their parents’ authority. As the mother of two children who solicit me constantly and who do what they’re told about 1% of the time, I find this enviable. But is it good for kids?

People have endlessly annoying opinions about what optimal parenting looks like, mostly grounded in very limited evidence. As I’ve written about before, I don’t actually think that parenting style matters that much when it comes to long-term outcomes—which is not to say that it doesn’t matter at all, but people consistently overestimate its importance. Kids are anything but blank slates, and at least half of any given life outcome that parents are desperately trying to mold through optimized parenting techniques was predetermined the moment that sperm met egg and the genetic blueprint was established.

But if we want to escape the realm of opinions, where do we turn? There are plenty of supposedly “objective” scientific studies on parenting, but I tend to take this research with a grain of salt. As Michaeleen Doucleff writes in her best-selling book Hunt, Gather, Parent, quoting psychologist Brian Nosek, “‘Parenting questions are some of the hardest problems out there for science. Shooting a rocket to Mars is super easy compared to these questions.’”

Both Doucleff and I have a keen interest in studying how parents in ancient cultures raise children. Doucleff studied the Maya, the Inuit and the Hadza. I am more focused specifically on immediate-return hunter-gatherer cultures, whose lifestyles are thought to closely resemble those of humanity’s deep evolutionary past: the Hadza, the !Kung, the Aka, the Agta and others. The advantage of studying these societies is that child-rearing is a central part of their daily lives and the techniques they deploy have been honed, generation after generation, for tens of thousands of years, without the pendulum-swing influence of ever-changing expert advice. I believe that studying these cultures can give us insights into how the parent-child relationship evolved to work, and can help us understand why parenting in the modern context feels so impossible, but I am also the first to admit that hunter-gatherer parenting tactics do not always work as well in 2026 America (or equivalent industrialized countries), because the context in which we are operating is so radically different.

Interestingly, some elements of French parenting — less hovering, less centering, children expected to manage themselves — looks a lot like what anthropologists have observed in hunter-gatherer societies for decades (sometimes referred to as “benign neglect”). On the other hand, there is a very authoritarian element to French parenting that is decidedly different from hunter-gatherer tactics, and at odds with what some anthropologists believe is healthy for children. But is this simply a necessary element of successful parenting in industrialized societies? What does the best research say?

In this article, we are going to examine parenting through an evolutionary and anthropological lens and discuss the advantages of some of the universal elements of hunter-gatherer parenting strategies, observed across multiple societies. There are elements of this strategy that I find highly appealing, because it eliminates so many points of friction which can make contemporary, Western parenting downright miserable. It also seems to produce mentally healthy adults.

Then I will parse the research literature carried out in the Western context and examine which parenting styles, in our cultures, tend to produce the best outcomes. Where there are discrepancies (which there are) between this research and hunter-gatherer parenting styles, I will dig into why they exist, and how the contemporary Western environment obliges us to parent differently in many cases.

Rest assured, at no point will I be advocating for the use of Gentle Parenting scripts, yes-no-yes sandwiches, or serving brownies alongside the main course at dinner. If you’ve been a reader here for a while, then you know that I am not a fan of American Millennial parenting strategies. In fact, don’t expect any concrete advice from me whatsoever. There is no perfect playbook for handling toddler meltdowns, because they are a feature of childhood in every culture, and there is nothing you can do to “fix” them.

Instead, we’ll be speaking much more broadly about what kinds of parenting styles produce the best long-term outcomes, and work, functionally, for families. The good news here is that the details don’t really matter. Or at least, we have absolutely no evidence to suggest that they do. But there’s at least one big thing that matters a lot, across cultures and across all the research papers. You can probably already guess what that is.

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Most mothers these days work. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 66% of American mothers are in the workforce, and most of them work full-time. The rate is similar across all OECD countries. Women’s reasons for paid labor force participation vary according to circumstance: many work simply because one salary isn’t enough to make ends meet; others because they are single or wary of being too reliant on a partner; others because the family business requires everyone’s involvement; and others because they find fulfillment in their professional lives. Whatever the reason, a growing number of women are beginning to ask: Why should I have to choose between my baby and my work? Why have we made these things so incompatible?

As I have written about before, throughout most of our evolutionary history — back when we lived as hunter-gatherers — mothers seamlessly combined economic labor with childcare. In contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, which mimic the conditions of our shared evolutionary past, gathering (women’s work) brings in as many calories as hunting, which is typically, though not always, reserved for men. This relative economic independence makes it easier for women to leave bad marriages, lobby for political power within the group, and maintain control over important family decisions.

Women have always worked “outside the home,” but for at least 95% of our existence as a species, the work of provisioning was baby-friendly. Mothers wore their babies on their bodies when they went out foraging, stopping regularly to soothe and breastfeed them. This hampered productivity slightly, but not dramatically, and babies were kept calm by the motion and warmth of being carried.

Whenever I write about this, the immediate reaction is always: "But things were so different back then." I don't deny it! Certain modern professions are clearly not compatible with baby-wearing and breastfeeding in the same way that foraging was, but many still are. Having interviewed many mothers who found ways of bringing their babies to work, I am more convinced than ever that it is actually possible across a wide range of professions — as long as employers and workplaces are accommodating. Most of the time, they are not, and so it's no accident that the mothers who manage are often self-employed or work for family businesses. But the primary limitation is not that mothers cannot work while baby-wearing, or that they do not want to keep their babies with them (although some clearly do not) — it's that we simply do not let them.

Baby-wearing is also more compatible with embodied, physical work that keeps the mother moving — which we may all find ourselves doing more of in the age of AI. Babies evolved to be soothed by rocking motions, especially at frequencies above 60 cycles per minute, which happens to be the natural walking pace of an adult human. Contemporary parenting "experts" tell us that babies must nap in a crib — but what did mothers do before cribs were invented? Most babies will happily nap skin-to-skin on a mobile mother. Even if you have to be stationary and work at a computer, a standing desk and a gentle rock back and forth can often be enough to keep a baby calm and drowsy.

And mothers are right to prioritize physical contact with their infants when possible. Skin-to-skin contact carries real benefits for both mother and baby — probably because this is what our bodies evolved to expect. High-quality studies have shown that mothers who baby-wear regularly report meaningfully fewer symptoms of depression at six weeks postpartum (source). The mechanism is not mysterious: skin-to-skin contact triggers oxytocin release, a feel-good hormone, and dampens cortisol, a stress hormone. For the infant, skin-to-skin contact helps with sleep organization, temperature and heart rate regulation, excessive crying and colic, and socio-emotional development (source).

And of course, close physical contact between mothers and babies promotes breastfeeding success, which carries many health benefits for both—as I wrote about in detail here.

Sadly, the kinds of businesses that are most conducive to combining work and childcare have declined across the developed world over the past several decades. The US self-employment rate is dramatically lower than what it was in the early 20th century. Small family-owned businesses, farms, and sole proprietorships — historically the most baby-compatible work environments — have fallen sharply as a share of employment across the developed world. Remote work, on the other hand, is up, and some early research suggests that mothers with access to remote work are more likely to remain the workforce. This is no panacea, however, since if we learned anything from the pandemic, it’s that caring for kids who are at home without childcare, while working remotely for demanding bosses, can be a nightmare.

Still, where there's a will there's a way. I am thrilled to share four inspiring stories from mothers who figured out how to combine baby-care and paid work — and who found it rewarding and enjoyable. None of them sugar-coated the hard parts, and at least one had to give up her business entirely after her third was born, but they all felt the trade-offs were worth it. I was personally quite impressed at the kinds of work these mothers were able to do while breastfeeding and baby-wearing — they pushed my understanding of what's possible and reinforced my conviction that babies do not need to be the center of attention; they just need milk and a warm body. I am incredibly grateful to each of them for sharing their stories, and I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed hearing them.

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When I first started researching hunter-gatherer societies, one of the more shocking things I discovered was this: girls in these societies do not start menstruating until they are about 17 years old, and do not become fertile until they are 19. Despite a total absence of reliable birth control, and few taboos around teen sex, the average age of first pregnancy in these societies is twenty.

Meanwhile, in the Western world, the average age of a girl’s first period has been steadily declining so that in the US today, it’s down to 11.9 years old—and 16% of girls are starting their periods before age 11 (source). The decline is happening across the developed world and the trend appears to be fairly linear going back as far as 1840, at which point the average age of menses was closer to what we see in hunter-gatherer societies, suggesting that this is mostly a post-industrial phenomenon (see graph below).

This is not a good thing. Apart from the fact that getting your period too early is psychologically and socially weird for girls (I distinctly remember when I got mine at twelve, which is average, and I did not feel ready), it is also a health risk. Girls who start their periods earlier have a higher risk of certain kinds of reproductive cancers, more painful and irregular periods, higher rates of miscarriage later in life, and higher rates of depression and anxiety (especially before age 11). It also means that girls are at higher risk for teen pregnancy, before their bodies are physiologically mature enough to carry a baby, and before they are mentally and emotionally ready for the experience.

There’s also a lot of misinformation circulating about this issue, often from people trying to capitalize on mothers’ fears in order to make a buck, so I thought I would do a deep dive on what the scientific literature really has to say about why this is happening, starting with the evolutionary explanation.

Is early-onset menarche a case of evolutionary mismatch?

Evolution wants everyone to produce as many healthy, viable offspring as possible. We might have different goals these days, but our biology still just wants us to maximize our reproductive fitness. Seen from this vantage point, starting menarche earlier could be a good thing, from a strictly evolutionary standpoint, because it means you become fertile at a younger age and can potentially have more babies. In one study of the Kipsigis of Kenya, women who reached reproductive maturity at age 12 had almost three more children than women who reached menarche at age 16–and the women who matured earlier were the ones who came from wealthier households with better access to nutrition (see Ancient Bodies, Modern Lives by Wenda Trevathan). That’s a win, as far as evolution is concerned.

The problem is that the human female’s reproductive system was designed in a context where calories were scarce. For the vast majority of human history, and even into the 1800s, women’s bodies usually did not have enough energy to grow, which requires a lot of calories, and maintain a pregnancy (also a calorically expensive endeavor). Carrying a baby at too young an age would have compromised a girl’s growth, which would probably have lowered her lifetime reproductive fitness. Giving birth before your pelvis has reached adult proportions is extremely risky, and was especially so before the advent of modern medicine. In order to avoid this catastrophic outcome, the body evolved to wait for a signal that the girl was done growing before kicking off reproduction.

That signal was fat, or specifically, leptin. The average BMI of a woman in !Kung society, for instance, is 18.5, which is quite low. For adolescents, it can be even lower, because the body is investing so much in growth. So when we all still lived as hunter-gatherers (during which time the majority of human evolution took place), excess fat and leptin were a pretty good indicator that a girl’s growth was complete.

Leptin is actually a hormone produced primarily by fat cells and plays a central role in regulating energy balance, appetite, and body weight, and not all kinds of fat have the same amount of leptin. Fat on the hips and butt tends to produce more leptin relative to other types, and this kind of fat, it turns out, is especially important for reproduction since it is the primary store of long-chain polyunsaturdated fatty acids (PUFAs). PUFAs are critical for fetal brain development. After birth, babies continue to guzzle these essential fatty acids from the mother’s body via breastmilk, allowing them to grow their brains from 25% to 75% of its full size within the first couple of years after birth (this is one reason why breastfeeding mothers often end up depleted in essential fatty acids, as I wrote about here). In fact, there is some evidence to suggest that a mother’s waist-to-hip ratio is predictive of children’s future cognitive performance, though I am not sure these findings have been replicated.

This evidence supports the notion that increases in BMI and circulating leptin will cause premature onset of menarche, an argument we will return to later.

But now, just to complicate this, more recent research has challenged the notion that earlier menarche improves total fertility in subsistence populations. This review paper of 22 traditional subsistence-based societies found no link between the age of onset of puberty and total fertility. They found that the average age at menarche correlated with the first reproduction (these women had babies earlier), but did not correlate with the total fertility rate or reproductive fitness (they did not have more children). The authors say, “we reject the working hypotheses that reproductive fitness is enhanced in societies with early puberty.”

To these and other researchers, it’s not that women’s bodies read higher circulating leptin levels as an opportunity for kicking reproduction off earlier and having more babies (because times are good) but instead they are responding to stress cues and kicking off early reproduction in anticipation of the fact that times are bad and they might not get another chance. Indeed, a branch of evolutionary science known as Life History Theory suggests that chronic psychosocial stress (e.g., harsh parenting, family conflict, father absence) can cue a “faster” reproductive strategy: earlier menarche and earlier sexual behavior (source). This is the “times are uncertain, lets make a baby ASAP before its too late” response (largely subconscious, of course). Maternal distress in pregnancy and adverse fetal conditions can also calibrate offspring toward earlier social or sexual maturation. In other words, if your mom has a stressful pregnancy, this could make you get your period earlier (source).

There doesn’t seem to be any clear consensus among evolutionary biologists as to the primary driving factor at this stage, but what’s clear is that girls’ reproductive systems are highly sensitive to physical cues—like nutrition and disease load—as well as social cures—like family stability, socioeconomic status, and stress. This should not surprise us, because human reproduction is extremely costly and has always been dangerous for women, so evolution likely favored a flexible mechanism whereby puberty and sexual maturity aligned with one’s survival and reproductive prospects in that specific environment. Today, these same evolved sensitivities operate in very different environments (abundant calories, novel chemicals, chronic psychosocial stress), producing earlier menarche and a widening gap between biological puberty and social readiness.

What factors best predict early menarche today?

In the modern industrialized societies, the single strongest predictor that a girl will have early-onset menarche is obesity. Higher body mass index (BMI) in early childhood predicts earlier menarche in the US, Australia, Norway and many other countries (source, source, source, and others). In Norway, obesity at 6 years predicted menarche 9.5 months earlier. In large US cohorts, rising BMI explains nearly half of the birth‑cohort trend toward earlier menarche. This is a major driving factor.

As discussed above, there is good evidence to suggest that this is not simply correlational—it’s causal–and it involves leptin. Leptin levels are an even better predictor of age of menarche than BMI, and even after adjusting for BMI, the higher a girl’s serum leptin levels, the more likely she is to experience early menarche. Unfortunately, too much leptin exposure from too young an age can also desensitize neural pathways and ultimately lead to infertility, which is probably why girls who get their periods early are also at a higher risk of miscarriage and infertility later in life (source).

All of this supports evolutionary theory number one, outlined above, that a girl’s body simply waits for an indication that her body has the energy needed to maintain a pregnancy before kicking off reproductive functioning, and our modern high-calorie diets have tricked girls’ bodies into thinking they are ready before they actually are.

That said, we cannot rule out childhood stress as a major driving factor. Low socioeconomic status also predicts early onset of menarche, even after adjusting for BMI in some studies (source). It’s also more common among racial/ethnic minorities, who face particular forms of discrimination and stress.

Some research suggests that mother-child attachment influences the age of menarche, but not directly. Instead, it works through BMI. More securely attached girls tend to have lower pre-puberty BMIs and start puberty later. What’s going on there? Can insecure attachment to one’s mother directly lead to higher BMI? (source). That’s a lot to unpack and I am not even going to try, but it’s interesting. I suspect stress hormones play a role. Weight is so much more complicated than calories in, calories out.

Now, if you operate in MAHA-adjacent circles then you already know that there is a lot of hype about all of this being due to endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), but it does not show up in the literature as being a primary driver. It also doesn’t really explain the trend lines in the graph at the start of the paper. If endocrine disruptors were the main driver, we wouldn’t expect the trends to be so linear and so universally downward across so many countries. The big industrial surge in mass production of plastics, pesticide use, PCBs and synthetic chemicals in household products and foods did not really begin until the 1950s, but the age of menarche was already in free-fall by then.

But fears around EDCs are not completely unwarranted. Many EDCs act like weak estrogens or anti‑androgens, or alter the hypothalamic–pituitary–gonadal (HPG) axis, potentially advancing breast development and menarche. Some EDCs promote fat gain and metabolic changes, which influence BMI and indirectly affect the age of menarche by the mechanisms discussed above. And it’s worth noting that exposure during critical windows can be particularly harmful: Fetal, neonatal, and early‑childhood exposures have the biggest impact (source).

Some research indicates that exposure to certain kinds of EDCs, like phthalates (often found in plasticizers used in food wrappers and personal care products) and organohalogenated compounds (found in some pesticides), are linked to earlier breast development in young girls if they are exposed in utero or during childhood (source). There is no research linking these chemicals directly to an earlier age of menarche, but the theory is that if they are strong enough to cause early breast development, they are also likely to have some effect on the age of menarche. However, many other large-cohort studies have failed to find any association whatsoever between early onset of menarche and chemical exposure in utero or during childhood (source).

What can we do as girl moms?

It’s really quite simple. All you have to do is provide a super healthy, nourishing environment for your child in which they feel your constant love and support, eat only organic vegetables straight from the farm, use only zinc sunscreen and avoid all other personal care products, never watch TV, get lots of outdoor exercise, and never encounter any serious stressors.

Got it? Good.

Obviously, we are all already doing our best to make sure our children feel loved, eat healthy and get outside, but man, it ain’t easy. There are also many elements that are simply out of our control. For instance, research suggests that the timing of a girl’s first period is anywhere from 50-80% genetically determined (source). There’s nothing you can do about your genes. (Still, if it were entirely genetic, we would not expect the averages to show such a steady, decreasing trend over the last decades). Similarly, if you had a stressful pregnancy and an unsupportive partner, that’s certainly not your fault, but it can influence the age of menarche for your child if she’s a girl.

Meanwhile, trying to avoid endocrine disruptors in contemporary society is a bit like trying to dodge raindrops without an umbrella. Unfortunately, endocrine disrupting chemicals are in just about everything, from personal care products like shampoo, lotions and cosmetics, to drinking water, canned foods, conventionally grown produce, kitchen cookware, cleaning products, and cash register receipts. Unless you give up plastic entirely, grow your own vegetables, drink water from a well, and only use olive oil for moisturizer, you are bound to get some exposure.

I will say that the research on EDCs freaks me out and that I personally try to limit my family’s exposure as much as possible, not just because of its association with early-onset menarche but because of general health risks. For instance, I paid a fortune for chemical-free mattresses for our family and I was obsessed with finding second-hand organic baby stuff because they douse so much of it with flame retardants. We use zinc and mineral sunscreens and avoid most other care products (olive oil really does work fine as moisturizer or for curing diaper rash in my experience). But we still eat a lot of plastic-packaged food because honestly that’s just how they sell it these days!

As for BMI, getting my kids to eat healthy and stay off screens has been an epic struggle in my home, but I’ll give a shoutout here to Michaeleen Doucleff’s latest book, Dopamine Kids, as being a great resource for how to manage both. We decided to get rid of our TV streaming services last Christmas, and replaced it with a DVD player and a small selection of physical DVDs (as I wrote about here) and that has been highly effective. We also put up some swings and climbing equipment on the big tree in our yard to make outdoor time more exciting. That has also worked.

Getting my kids to eat good food has been the hardest part, but I’ve been deploying the Dopamine Kids strategy, which is simply to get all sugar and junk out of the house. It’s hard but I do think it’s the only way. We’ve replaced desert with fruit compotes (these little french apple-sauce things that come in different fruit flavors and have no added sugar), afternoon cookie snacks with smoothies, and have eliminated the default pasta option from most meals (honestly, the gentle parenting playbook on this is terrible and totally unsupported by scientific evidence, something Doucleff talks about and that I wrote about here).

It also really helps that school lunches in France are super healthy. In the US, I honestly felt like there was nothing I could do to stop my son from having both breakfast and lunch at school with his friends, which meant he was eating plastic-packaged cinnamon buns for breakfast and corn dogs for lunch. And that was in California!

Everyone already knows that being overweight is unhealthy for children. No one wants their child to be overweight, and yet here we are: Moms against capitalism. Junk food, cartoons and video games are becoming more ubiquitous and more addictive, and then we dare to judge busy mothers who can’t fight the onslaught.

At the end of the day, I am not convinced that trying to actively delay your daughter’s age of menarche is a good goal. There’s enough stigma already around all things period. If your daughter does end up getting her first period at a young age, then the only appropriate response, in my opinion, is to celebrate it and manage it together. On the other hand, all of the things that you could potentially do to delay it are already parenting best-practices: Limit screen time, feed her healthy foods, avoid toxins when possible, show her love and support.

Framing this as a parenting problem to be solved by individual mothers is, frankly, a bit of a cop-out. The trend toward earlier menarche tracks almost perfectly with industrialization, food system changes, and rising childhood obesity rates — none of which any individual mother created or can dismantle alone. The real levers are policy ones: regulating EDCs, fixing school lunch programs, making organic fruits and vegetables affordable and accessible, taxing junk food and soda, countering deceptive marketing with clearly-labeled nutritional scores, reducing childhood poverty and the chronic stress that comes with it. Until we pull those levers, telling mothers to grow their own vegetables and feed their kids good food is unlikely to make much impact (Michelle Obama tried).

What sucks is that, as always, girls and women seem to pay a heavier price for the failures of our current food system. Fixing food, it turns out, is a feminist issue (RFK can borrow that line from me if he agrees to reference my Substack).

In the meantime, you can and should try your best to create a healthy environment for your child, not just because it might delay her period, but because you love her.

Post-publication note: I should have been more clear in the original article that the goal is not to return to hunter-gatherer standards wherein girls get their first period at 17. In the research literature, under 10 years is considered “very early,” under 12 is “early” and typical is 12-14 years. Over 15 is usually considered “late.” Some studies show a fairly linear relationship between age of menarche and adverse health risks (source) but for some health outcomes the risks are more U-shaped, so risks go up slightly for each one-year decrease in age of menarche but they are also higher for girls who reach menarche after age 15 (source). Some research suggests a jump in risk factors for very early menarche, meaning risks don’t follow a totally linear pattern but accelerate when age is very early (source). About half the variation in age at menarche is genetic, as mentioned below, and there is little that can be done about this. Finally, lack of physical activity, high-fat or high-sugar diets, and higher body fat ratios can all influence age of onset independent of BMI (source).

I loved it. Sure, it was more work than living in a standard dorm, but even that was fun. I learned how to bake bread from scratch, cook dinner for sixty people, and make a bathroom sparkle. Because the chores were carried out in teams, they were a bonding experience, and because there were so many of us and we were well-organized, it never took more than a couple of hours each week. People who lived in The Enchanted Broccoli Forest had a sense of shared identity and community that you didn’t find anywhere else on campus. We all knew each other and cared about one another. There was no one I would feel awkward sitting down next to for the duration of a meal.

There were also downsides. It was dirtier, more chaotic, and more socially demanding than other kinds of student housing. But at twenty-one I cannot honestly say this bothered me much. When I needed calm I could escape to the library. When I wanted to be alone I could shut my door or go for a long walk in the hills behind campus. I don’t remember any serious drama or conflict, except maybe the time the guy on dinner duty baked weed into the brownies and forgot to tell everyone. I had paper due the next day. It was a weird one.

So by the time I started seriously researching communal living hunter-gatherer societies–by then in my mid-thirties with two children, comfortably established in a single-family home—I kept coming back to the thought: maybe we would be better off living in an Enchanted Broccoli Forest for grownups.

The beauty of co-housing is that you live in a community where the barrier to frequent, informal social contact is low and your children have constant playmates, which was the norm throughout most of human prehistory. Research on co-housing is still limited and often qualitative, but available studies suggest the benefits for families with young children are real, and include greater social support and better overall wellbeing (source, source). ( has written about this beautifully on his Substack “Evolution and Psychiatry”, here).

But co-housing remains relatively rare. It can be hard to find, even if you are actively seeking it. We had the opportunity to look for a co-housing community when my family moved from the US back to France last year (where my husband is from). I looked everywhere for co-housing projects in the region where we wanted to settle, or at least condos organized around a shared, car-free space. The closest approximation we could find was a traditional single-family home on a dead-end street, in a small town, with lots of other families on the block. I have come to love our community here, and we have put real effort into getting to know our neighbors, but I’ve never stopped wondering what it would be like to raise kids in an arrangement that was more intentionally communal.

I wanted to talk to people who were living in these kinds of intentional communities, and who were willing to be honest with me about the benefits but also the drawbacks, and I found quite a lot of them. It turns out, many people are actively trying this: not just co-housing but intergenerational living with kin.

The contrast between these two kinds of communal housing is interesting to me. Whereas co-housing usually brings together non-kin, intergenerational living is usually kin-based. In our evolutionary past, typically half the group would have been related and the other half unrelated, so both situations replicate different aspects of the kind of co-living humans evolved for.

As I have written about before, grandmothers are some of the most important non-maternal caregivers in hunter-gatherer societies, and their presence is consistently associated with improved child survival and relief for the mother. Even in Western societies, research suggests that support from a woman’s own mother is one of the greatest protective factors against postpartum depression (source). Other research finds that any kind of meaningful family support is what counts, but that this can be, in some cases, even more important than partner support (source). Intergenerational addresses that need, but often without the rambunctious multi-age playgroups that are more likely to occur in co-housing arrangements.

One of the things that struck me most about the stories I heard from moms in these alternative living arrangements is that bringing back the community support element also meaningfully improved her marriage dynamic, even without them consciously trying. These things are all interconnected, and if we care about the well-being of mothers, fathers, and children, then we should care about community. If we believe that marriage is good, then we also need to start acknowledging that marriage is not enough.

I loved hearing these stories: they were funny, wholesome and real. At a time when our role models as women are increasingly the craziest, most extreme versions of any given lifestyle trend (as I wrote about on Thursday), it was incredibly grounding to hear from moms who are not in the limelight. It occurred to me multiple times, while listening to their stories, that there are a whole lot of people out there who we never hear from and never think about, who are quietly living out the good life every day. Not a perfect life, but a good one, centered on family and togetherness and meaningful relationships. They are the real winners.

And so, without further ado, here are three stories from three moms who have said “fuck it” to nuclear family living.

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And now here I am, less than a week later, before the servers that powered our zoom call have had time to fully cool, writing about Lindy West and Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm. It’s stronger than I am—like the overpowering itch of a mosquito bite that you know you are better off ignoring.

To borrow a wonderful phrase from , who recently had a similar reckoning while comparing her not-always-serious content to that of the ever-measured, ever-data-driven , some people are “extremely well-informed about the academic origins [of things], whereas I am a little dirty piggie living in the slop trough and mainlining slop from my slop-hogging snout all day.” Sometimes the urge to drink sloppity-slop from the slop trough is too much for my executive function to override and there is nothing anyone can do to stop me.

So let’s cut to the chase, because I know you are all dying to know, after reading that killer headline, what do Lindy West and Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm have in common? They are so different! Lindy is a liberal feminist who has been torn to shreds by every conservative thinker with a keyboard, and Hannah is a conservative Mormon with nine children who has been eaten alive online by every lefty with an Instagram account.

But here’s what they share: they are both profoundly, earth-shakingly happy. Really.

Left: West and hubbie. Right: Neeleman and hubbie and 1 of 9 children.

I didn’t even read Lindy West’s memoir, Adult Braces, and so I am not at all qualified to weigh in on any debates about whether it was good or believable, but I did read roughly 800 Substack articles about her memoir. (I could have, in the same amount of time, just read the damn memoir, but I did not, because I didn’t want to). My basic understanding of her situation is this: she’s an ambitious, talented writer in her early forties who is overweight and has a lot of self-esteem issues (I feel for her on this). Then she married a musician, said she was happy, but then later wrote that she wasn’t all that happy, then he wanted an open marriage, so she said Okay, and now they live as a throuple with another woman. She’s fine with this, she says, because the second wife is really good at sending calendar invites and watering plants (which Lindy is not good at because she has ADHD). So it all worked out! Yay!

Many people, mostly conservatives (but not only), did point out that there seems to be a bit of a discrepancy between her claim that she is really happy and the fact that, on the cover of the book, she is forcing a smile while huge streaks of mascara-blackened tears run down her face. She also apparently mentions in the memoir–no big deal–that she and her husband regularly take turns “vomiting anxiety” onto one another and having panic attacks. I mean, it all sounds very healthy and happy.

Above: Lindy West’s book cover.

Then, on the other end of the spectrum, we have Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, who gave up a promising career as a ballet star (she went to Juilliard!) in order to happily bake sourdough bread for her family of eleven. She looks really pretty while she does this, and she has like ten million followers on Instagram, so she’s obviously doing well for herself. Meanwhile, her husband’s father founded something like five or six commercial airlines and they have more money than God, and being that rich has to have a few perks. Still, some people seem to feel that being ultra rich and drop-dead gorgeous and having nine children is not enough. Women need more. She should be starring in Swan Lake. Beauty pageants don’t count.

Above: Neeleman enjoys making fancy food from scratch and competing in beauty pageants.

Despite the criticism, Hannah claims—just like Lindy—that she is really very happy, and when you look at her ultra-wholesome Instagram account, it’s easy to believe, but then some asshole reporter from The Times went and blew the whole thing up by uncovering the fact that she sometimes cannot get out of bed for weeks due to overwhelming exhaustion. Personally, I sometimes cannot get out of bed for days at a time due to overwhelming exhaustion and I only have two children and never bake sourdough or make anything from scratch (unless you count blending up smoothies using supermarket fruits), so I find this believable.

Still, it’s totally possible to be happy and be tired. I mean, I don’t personally know anyone who has stayed in bed for two weeks at a time and who wasn’t chronically ill, clinically depressed, or addicted to online gambling. Even my alcoholic cousin-once-removed gets out of bed in the afternoon to pour himself a half bottle of whiskey. But then again I don’t personally know that many people. Hannah could be the outlier. Maybe her life is just so full of goodness that it’s worth being bedridden for weeks from the crushing wholesomeness of it all. Who are we to judge? If she says she’s happy, she’s happy.

Ultimately, I am willing to believe both of them. After all, didn’t you dummies learn anything from the MeToo movement? We need to #BelieveWomen (in all seriousness though, we should, in the vast majority of cases).

The problem, as I see it, is not that these women cannot possibly be happy; it’s that they are each selling a lifestyle that is, for different reasons, almost guaranteed to make most people miserable. Unless you have more money than God and the constitution of an ox (or you are secretly a tardigrade from outer space), then raising nine children in a single-family home while making all of the family’s meals from scratch (including the butter from the cows that you milked that morning) is one hell of an undertaking.

I know some people here are going to come at me saying “That’s just how it was done back in the day. Today’s women are pussies,” and if what you mean by that is that modern women do not enjoy being chronically exhausted and some of us would like to stop normalizing intense hardship, burnout, postpartum depression, anemia, pelvic injuries, sleep deprivation and the like, then yes, we are for sure pussies. I wonder how many of you have had an honest conversation with your great grandmother about what raising that many children was actually like. Mine had thirteen children and it’s not clear to me that she was thriving, even though parenting standards back in the day were like: pop it out, nurse it a bit, then see how it does on its own. Last time I looked at the data, subjective well-being and marital satisfaction decline with each subsequent child, so by the time most people make it to nine they are miserable, divorced, broke, or all three. And to tie it all back to my actual area of expertise (in a shoddy attempt to redeem at least some of my credibility) human mothers really did not evolve to have this many children spaced this close together in age.

As for the Lindy West liberal fantasy of living harmoniously in a childless throuple, it seems to me like she just backed herself into a polygamous marriage with, in the words of Helen Lewis, “a harem-patrolling patriarch,” and then rebranded it as progressive. Most of the people I know in open marriages don’t live as a throuple with two women and a man: there’s a core couple and then they both have occasional extramarital affairs. Even then, the people I know who are pulling it off have exceptional communication skills, high emotional intelligence, and better-than-average executive function. They don’t “vomit their anxiety” onto one another and then decide to take on a second wife in order to solve their marital dysfunction.

As for polygamy, which is what this really is—I think we should call a spade a spade—it characterizes only about 5% of marriages in hunter-gatherer societies and about 2% of marriages worldwide, and it is a notoriously unstable arrangement. In the societies I research, these marriages disintegrate much more quickly than monogamous pair-bonds, usually because the second wife wants out. Humans, as I have written about before, really are among the most monogamous mammals on earth. Long-term pair-bonds make both men and women happier, and stable marriages also benefit children. So progressive polygamy is fine for Lindy, but it’s probably not good for you.

Both Lindy West and Hannah Neeleman are, first and foremost, savvy entrepreneurs. They are no dummies. They are both selling you something, and they are almost certainly aware that controversy drives sales. Lindy is selling books (and her book is selling) and Hannah is mostly selling protein powder, from what I gather. In order to sell you these things, they first need to sell you on their lifestyle. You buy into the lifestyle, you buy into the brand, you buy their products. But in both cases, you have to ask, what’s the truth about the woman underneath, and what’s just branding? Where does the business venture end and the person begin? Personally, I don’t need to read another memoir, I can hardly handle one romantic relationship, I don’t want any cow collagen protein powder, and I definitely don’t want nine kids, so no, no, no, and no, thank you.

But I am really glad that they are both so happy!

And now that I have destroyed my reputation as a serious intellectual who is above culture wars and gossip, let the riot in the comments begin!

Folks, that is not my intention! Yes, we’ve lost a lot in last ten or twelve thousand years but we have gained a lot as well. Most of us don’t have to worry about whether we are going to have enough food to survive the winter. Few of us know what it’s like to lose a child, but one out of three died in their first year of life for the vast majority of human history.

I focus on the things that were better in our evolutionary past—back when we lived as hunter-gatherers—because those are the things we can learn from. They point the way to a better future: one that aligns with our evolved biology and deepest psychological needs.

But I suppose if people find my messaging “hopeless” it’s probably because I have not done a very good job of explaining how I think we can actually incorporate “the best of the Paleolithic” back into our lives in 2026 American (or Europe, or Canada, or Australia, or wherever you live).

In general, I shy away from prescriptive advice, or from weighing in too heavily on policy, because there’s no such thing as a perfect solution. Criticism is cheap and easy. Pointing out the gaps is safe because we can all agree on the problems. Finding viable solutions that actually work, right now, is much, much harder.

Still, I’m going to give it a try. But first, some disclaimers:

Disclaimer 1: I am interested in making motherhood better. What I mean by that is healthier, saner, more harmonious, and more in line with our evolved physiological needs. It does not necessarily mean easier or more fun. It does not mean we feel happy all of the time. It does not mean always getting what we want. Often, what we want and what makes us feel happy (in the moment) turn out to be very bad for us.

Disclaimer 2: Most of the problems mothers are up against today are structural. Therefore, they are not things we are going to fix with Elena’s Ten Step Miracle Solution (now for a limited time only!). They have been many, many generations in the making, and it will take many more generations to undo.

But there are projects happening around the world that I think are worth paying attention to, and there are things you can change today without waiting for a societal overhaul that can make your life as a mother a little bit better.

This is not a comprehensive list. It’s not a perfect list. It’s a list I’ll probably change as I learn more. But it’s a start.

Naming What We’ve Lost

First of all, I think it’s worth naming the biggest problem we’re actually solving for. I write about a lot of things on here, but the biggest take-away from the hundred-odd newsletters I have published by now is this: we evolved to raise children collectively.

People like to pay lip service to the phrase “it takes a village,” but it’s become so cliche that it’s practically lost all meaning. It also misses the deeper point, which is that this is not just about nostalgia for a different historical period, when neighbors knew each other better and people still went to church on Sundays. The overwhelm that contemporary mothers feel when parenting alone cannot be solved by arranging more playdates or organizing meal trains for the first week postpartum (although small gestures do help).

Academics love to debate the technicalities of whether humans should be classified as “cooperative breeders” or “communal breeders” or something entirely different, but the point is that we can name the intimate and highly-integrated social system that human mothers evolved to thrive in and situate it within the broader animal world. You would not take a wolf mother out of the wolf pack and expect her to thrive. You would not take the queen ant out of her colony and expect her to live on as if nothing had happened. You would not remove six of an octopus’s eight arms and expect her not to notice. That last example is a bit extreme, but I genuinely do wish I had six more arms, and if I lived with my grandmother, my aunt, and my best friend, I kind of would.

My point is, cooperative child-rearing in hunter-gatherer societies is distinct in its intimacy and proximity—more than just a better village–and it is the human biological norm. It dates back hundreds of thousands of years and probably characterized at least 95% of human history. It shaped our psychology and behavior. It made us who we are as a species.

How do we bring some of it back? That’s the biggest problem we are trying to solve.

All Current Options Suck

When you read enough about the intimacy of collective childcare in hunter-gatherer societies, it becomes immediately obvious that the options on the menu for contemporary mothers are all bad, and they all suffer from the same underlying shitty assumption: that the work of caring for human babies is not that hard, not that important, and therefore can be handled either by a lone isolated mother (no help needed) or scaled up cheaply and efficiently in institutional settings, the way we might scale a manufacturing process.

I am not going to belabor the point here because I have already written about it extensively in other newsletter installments, but “affordable” universal childcare as a policy solution is not the panacea that many progressives believe it is. We have good data from multiple countries indicating that too much institutional childcare from too young an age is generally not great for babies: it is associated with higher rates of hyperactivity, aggression, and anxiety—classic signs of chronic stress—and worse health and lower life satisfaction in adulthood. Where exceptions exist it’s usually because the affordable care in question is preceded by generous parental leave policies (something we still lack in the US) and because the country in question shelled out enough cash to ensure a high enough ratio of qualified caregivers to babies (Finland apparently did it right). Because that’s what “quality” actually means here: it means more hands, not more enrichment activities, and hiring more hands is the fastest way to take a program from “affordable” to “not-so-affordable.”

On the other end of the spectrum, if you spend enough time consuming certain kinds of motherhood content on social media, it’s easy to walk away with the impression that raising a large family with little outside support—while managing a farm and baking fresh bread from scratch—is no big deal. That’s not what the data show. In the US, having a third child increases a mother’s risk for depression and substance use (source). Parenting stress, defined in the literature as a mismatch between the demands of parenting and the help available to manage them, consistently predicts an elevated risk for postpartum depression and maternal mental health issues (source).

You could just opt out of having children entirely, and that seems to be the conclusion most people are reaching (if plummeting international birth rates are any indication), but that options also sucks because children are great. I love being a mom; I just don’t like being a mom without help.

Policies I Actually Support

There’s no such thing as a perfect policy, and I am not a policy expert. I do, however, think that applying the lessons of evolutionary mismatch points in the direction of certain policy solutions that are not getting enough attention, especially not in the US. Below I will outline three general kinds of policy that I would like to see more of. All of them have costs and downsides, because that’s the nature of things, but these are policies whose upsides, I believe, outweigh the downsides.

1. Any policy that reduces the total workload for parents of young children

Economic work in our evolutionary past left plenty of time for intimate childcare. Richard Lee estimated that the !Kung spent less than twelve hours per week, on average, procuring food, and spent the rest on childcare, domestic labor and rest. In a comprehensive analysis of over 15 immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies in his book The Foraging Spectrum, Robert Kelly does not document a single society in which the daily foraging time is even close to eight hours, the average American workday today.

The forty-hour workweek is built around the assumption that the people doing it do not have children to care for. Dual-income families, especially mothers, feel the strain when children are small. Surveys of American mothers indicate the vast majority feel that part–time work is optimal when children are young—despite rampant claims that part-time work for mothers is a “trap” that we’ve been socialized into accepting when we could be girl-bossing our way to the top (source). The data is clear: most mothers want part-time work but few are able to access it. Ideally, fathers would scale back too and a good policy would incentivize both to spend more time with their children when they are small.

This is not a crazy pipe dream. Many other countries offer parents the legal right to reduce their working hours after the birth of a baby without giving up their job. Some provide home care allowances designed to compensate for temporary loss of income.

Of all the levers available to us, this one may be the most powerful, because it solves so many problems simultaneously, regardless of the nature of a person’s work: it minimizes the amount of time that babies and mothers must spend apart, which mitigates the negative effects of sub-standard care, and it reduces the crushing total workload faced by dual-income earning parents, which is, as it turns out, one of the primary drivers of marital conflict and dissatisfaction (source). And marriage, as I have written about before, is good for people.

2. Any policy that helps keep babies and caregivers physically close

In hunter-gatherer societies, mothers were often the primary breadwinners, bringing home the majority of the family’s calories, but they brought their babies with them when they worked.

This model is still alive and well today in other, semi-industrialized parts of the globe. I lived for a year in Burkina Faso—a country where labor markets are still mostly informal and businesses are usually family-owned and run—and seeing babies at work was simply the norm. Mothers sold crafts and crops at the market with babies on their backs. The salon where I went to get my hair cut always had small children milling about. My tailor took my measurements and cut fabric while her baby slept against her skin, tied securely in place by a colorful strip of cloth. Nobody batted an eye.

Culturally, I’d like to see us bring some of that back, but as the number of physical family-owned businesses dwindles in developed countries, we need to imagine new models of blending work and childcare. Remote work offers one opportunity. As has written about, research generally finds that mothers with access to teleworking and flexible schedules are more likely to stay employed after childbirth and less likely to reduce their hours, and combining this with proximate childcare represents an interesting new model (source). Where I live in the southwest of France, there’s a co-working space with onsite childcare where mothers can bring babies and children up to age three and work while their children are cared for in an adjacent room, and it’s lovely. For jobs that are remote-capable, employers should be required to offer the option of fully remote work to parents of children under three. Commuting to an office so your boss can breathe down your neck is overrated, especially when your job involves entering numbers into an excel spreadsheet, which you could do from anywhere.

I’d also like to see companies with a large-enough labor force commit to offering on-site childcare. The outdoor gear company, Patagonia, has been doing this since the 1980s, but it hasn’t exactly caught on elsewhere. According to their website, one hundred percent of mothers return to work after maternity leave, and the company believes the program pays for itself by reducing turnover, lowering recruitment costs, and increasing employee engagement. What if we required companies over a certain size to allocate a certain portion of profits to subsidizing on-site childcare for working parents?

3. Any policy that incentivizes more kin-based care

In hunter-gatherer societies, maternal grandmothers played a particularly important role in child survival. Even in the modern context, the data suggest that absence of social support, from maternal kin in particular, is consistently associated with elevated risk for perinatal mood disorders. Modern life pulls families apart geographically: education, jobs, partner choice, and housing markets all reward mobility, urban concentration, and forming independent nuclear households rather than staying near parents, but it’s hard to replace the emotional support that close kin can offer.

It’s hard to imagine how policy, or urban planning, or anything except luck and personal conviction could combat this, but Sweden has an interesting solution. As of July 2024, Swedish parents can transfer a certain amount of the country’s very generous paid parental leave days, not just to each other, but to any insured adult — grandparents, close friends, trusted neighbors. By January 2025, early data showed that grandmothers were the most common recipients of transferred days, just as the evolutionary data would have predicted.

Grandparents, however, are not an infinite resource (and they never have been), but the beauty of this system is that even when grandparents are not available, the same leave can be passed to other family members or even qualified friends. It is a simple, elegant recognition that the village was never made up only of two parents, and that the people willing to help raise a child should be supported in doing so.

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None of these solutions are perfect. Policies that interfere in labor markets by forcing part-time work can hinder efficiency and competition, and create upstream hiring biases. Many mothers complain that part-time work just means part-time pay for the same job with the same workload. Remote work isn’t available to everyone. Sweden’s leave policy is expensive. But they all point in a similar direction that I think is the right one: parents need time for care work, and policy and cultural changes that help to collapse the distance between kin, work, and care are the ones worth fighting for.

Changes You Can Make Now

Policy changes are necessary to ensure the people with the fewest choices are still able to make the best ones, but for most of you reading this, there’s a lot we can do just by understanding what’s at stake and making informed choices. We live in an era where giving generalized advice is out of fashion, because inevitably someone will not be able to implement it, but this also leads to a lot of gatekeeping of valuable information and implicit endorsement of objectively bad choices.

I’m not going to sugar coat anything for you here. You know me. But that’s only because I believe knowledge is power.

1. Prioritize proximity where possible

The trade-off most modern mothers face is this: staying physically close to your baby has real and measurable benefits for both of you, but so does remaining connected to professional and social life. The world as currently constructed tends to force a choice between them. Wherever you can collapse that distance—even partially, even imperfectly—the evidence suggests it is worth doing.

Physically carrying your baby matters more than you might think. A randomized trial of low-income mothers in the United States found that those given an ergonomic carrier and shown how to use it carried their infants significantly more than those who weren’t—and reported meaningfully fewer symptoms of depression at six weeks postpartum (source). The mechanism is not mysterious: skin-to-skin contact triggers oxytocin release, dampens cortisol, and activates the same neurobiological systems that carrying evolved to activate. The same goes for breastfeeding, and breastfeeding also (obviously) requires some degree of proximity, but it’s worth emphasizing that even if you formula feed, skin-to-skin contact with your baby still has many independent benefits.

The practical implication is simpler than it sounds: bring the baby along wherever you can. Babies do not need to nap in cribs. They evolved to sleep on bodies in motion, and they can still do so. Hunter-gatherer mothers gossiped, feasted, foraged, and stayed up far too late by the fire, with babies on their backs and toddlers orbiting at the edges. Nobody stopped living. There is no reason, beyond convention, why we cannot reclaim some version of that.

2. Optimize for support, not control

The trade-off here is real: help is rarely perfect, and accepting it usually means ceding some control. Your mother-in-law may think time-outs are necessary while you do not. The teenage babysitter may let them watch more television than you would like. Your husband may let them have cookies before they finish their green beans.

Accept the help anyway. The evidence on social support and postpartum depression is among the most consistent in the literature: isolation is one of the strongest predictors of maternal mental illness, and support—even imperfect, informal, occasionally irritating support—is one of the strongest protective factors against it.

If you do not have family nearby and you can afford to hire help, this is one of the best investments you can make in your own well-being. Babies do not need to spend every waking hour with their mothers in order to grow up securely attached. Across large longitudinal studies, family factors—sensitivity, home environment, income—predict children’s cognitive and socio-emotional outcomes far more strongly than any aspect of non-maternal care. A nanny or trusted babysitter can give your baby one-on-one attention that a larger center cannot. Assuming you are not outsourcing 100% of your children’s care to paid helpers (and almost no mothers are today) the fact that money changes hands does not diminish the relationship. Strangers become known people. Known people can become beloved ones.

3. Choose childcare based on quality, not ideology

Not everyone has family around or the budget to hire a full-time nanny. Whether we like it or not, many mothers have no choice but to enroll their babies in daycare—and here’s the good news: not all daycare is bad, but it’s important to know what matters.

If you have to use daycare, choose a good one—and let’s be precise about what “good” actually means. We are not talking about curriculum philosophy, enrichment activities, or bilingual educators. None of that, it turns out, is what matters. What matters is something simpler and more specific: the warmth, attunement, familiarity, and stability of the people providing care.

An elegant study illustrates why quality matters at the physiological level. Researchers measured cortisol levels across the day in children who stayed home with their mothers and children who attended licensed home-based daycare. They also assessed the quality of each care setting—not in terms of toys or curriculum, but caregiver responsiveness, emotional sensitivity, and attunement. Children in high-quality care showed no change in their cortisol patterns between home and daycare. Children in lower-quality care showed a marked stress response. What mattered was whether an adult was paying warm, consistent, responsive attention to the child. Everything else was secondary if not irrelevant.

When evaluating a care setting for a baby or young toddler, the evidence points to a short and unglamorous checklist: low staff turnover, which signals that caregivers are well-supported and invested in their work; a favorable ratio of caregivers to infants—one to four is the recommended minimum, and lower is better; adults who seem genuinely interested in the specific children in their care; and consistency—the same faces, reliably, over time (this is related to turnover but not always; the worst daycare my son ever attended had such a large caste of rotating caregivers that even without turnover he rarely saw the same people two days in a row).

Less time in lower-quality care is generally better than more. Research suggests that children who spend thirty or more hours per week in institutional care from early infancy show increased risk for stress-related behavioral difficulties—and that risk rises with hours. If you can reduce time in institutional care by staggering schedules with your partner, involving family in some of those hours, or hiring a paid in-home caregiver to make up the difference, the evidence suggests it is worth the effort and cost.

One genuinely reassuring finding to close with: around the age of three, something shifts. Children become more interested in peers, more capable of collaborative play, more able to navigate the social demands of a group setting. The research on preschool for children over three is generally positive—more benefits than costs, across cognitive and social-emotional outcomes. Your baby’s need for high-touch, individualized care from familiar people is real and important—and it is also not permanent.

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So, is it hopeless? I don’t think so — but I want to be honest about what “not hopeless” actually means, because I think we’ve been sold a fake version of optimism for too long. I think we need a radically different political vision: one that neither camp is currently offering. The policies I described above offer glimmers of hope, and what has been done successfully once can be done again.

When it comes to family decisions — like carrying your baby, accepting the imperfect help, choosing the daycare with the low turnover and the warm caregivers — knowing what the human system was actually designed for can help us make more informed choices with important downstream effects. That’s not nothing.

You were not designed to do this alone. Nobody was. And knowing that clearly — not as a platitude but as an evolutionary fact with a hundred thousand years of evidence behind it — is, I promise, a much better place to start than not knowing at all.

One of the ideologies I sorely needed to let go of after becoming a mother was this hair-brained idea that mothers and fathers are essentially interchangeable—that gender differences are the product of socialization and can simply be ignored if we so choose.

That logic worked pretty well for me right up until I found myself staring at a pink plus sign on a pee-soaked plastic pregnancy test.

After our son was born, there was no more pretending that biology didn’t matter. During the pregnancy, my husband could not take over throwing up for me when I had an early morning meeting to get to. He could not birth the baby for me. He could not feed the baby for me. As comedian Janine Harouni puts it “I am a Goddess. My husband is an ingredient.”

Once our son arrived, there were basically two ways forward for my husband and I: fight our differences or accept them.

Initially, I chose fight. That’s what my cultural milieu told me to choose.

Folks, it was exhausting.

Above: a young Hadza couple

I distinctly remember one day when our beloved babysitter called in sick at the last minute. I had precious few hours of childcare as it was, and I had already meticulously planned how I would use that time, but my husband had to go to work, and his job was more important for our family’s financial stability, so I was forced to change my plans. I can’t remember whether I made a stink about this, but I was definitely pissed.

My son was in preschool, but my daughter was still too young to attend, so after I dropped him off, I started calculating how many hours of cartoons I could give her without exceeding the AAP guidelines and still get my tasks done for the day. I was already having premonitions of frustration and conflict: me trying to focus, her whining for attention.

What were my tasks? I can’t even remember. That’s how important they were.

And then I thought, You know what? Fuck it. I’m not even going to try.

I turned the car around and we drove to our favorite local coffee shop—a converted warehouse where the decor looked like it had come straight from a junk yard, but they made a mean macchiato to compensate. We ordered drinks and sweets, found an old National Geographic with pictures of prehistoric sea monsters, and settled into a torn leather couch on the terrace. Wedged between a tangle of crab traps and buoys, with an overturned surf board for a table, the warm California sun soaking into bodies, we flipped through the fantastic images of Plesiosaurs and Mososaurs, relishing our treats, feeding crumbs to the birds, and I thought, Wait, why am I mad about this again? I wouldn’t trade this day for my husband’s in a million years!

Cracks were forming in my pre-baby ideas of what constitutes a good life, what it meant to make valuable use of one’s time, and what equality was actually about, but the final blow to my crumbling internal model of marital equality would not come until later, when I started studying human prehistory and hunter-gatherer social organization.

We’ll get to that in a minute, but first, we need to briefly unpack where the hell my earlier ideas of gender equality came from. And I suspect it started with a woman you may have heard of, by the name of Simone de Beauvoir.

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Her book, Mothers and Others (along with Melvin Konner’s Evolution of Childhood) was one of the first I read about motherhood in hunter-gatherer societies, back when I had a new baby and a two-year-old and couldn’t understand why I was drowning. It forever changed the way I think about human motherhood.

Hrdy is a primatologist by trade. She received her PhD in primatology from Harvard back in 1975, at a time when there were not a whole lot of women getting PHDs from Harvard. While there, she studied under the famous anthropologist and evolutionary theorist Irven DeVore who, if you are a regular reader here or have an interest in hunter-gatherer research, you may know.

DeVore was the one who, along with Richard Lee, organized and led the Man the Hunter conference in 1966. This was THE conference on hunter-gatherer research that synthesized our understanding of foraging societies at the time and helped kick off subsequent waves of interest in the field. Without that conference, and the pioneering work of Lee and DeVore, I would not be doing the work I am doing, because we probably wouldn’t have the data. Irven DeVore has since passed, but my understanding is that Hrdy and Lee remain good friends to this day.

Hrdy never did hunter-gatherer field work, but she looked at the hunter-gatherer research with new eyes, and made links between what she knew about primate behavior, and what she knew about human motherhood, because she was actually herself a mother (an advantage that few of her peers at the time had).

Hrdy’s first baby was born in 1977, at a time when Bowlbian attachment theory was the hot new thing.

In Mothers and Others, she describes how she had a dog-eared, underlined, annotated copy of Bowlby’s book, Attachment, on her bedside table. She was determined to give her baby the best start in life, and she was convinced that Bowlby was right about how to do that. As soon as her daughter, Katrinka, was born, she spent as much time as possible holding her close, attending to her every need—mostly alone.

But what Hrdy struggled with, in her lived experience as a mother, was that caring for a baby alone all day felt constricting, oppressive, and exhausting. Years later, she would say of her experience caring for Katrinka this way that “it was fine for a while. [But then] my husband had to go back to work and I was alone in the house with this baby and my second book had just been published and I really wanted to go on writing. And I started to feel really ambivalent about [my situation] and the 24/7 demands of this little baby.” (That quote was pulled from this excellent interview she did for the On Humans podcast, which I highly recommend).

Despite her commitment to Bowlbian attachment principles, Hrdy began asking herself the exact same question I would ask myself when I became a mother: if being the solo caregiver of a human baby was the most natural thing for a mother, why did it feel so wrong? Like me, she was wondering, “do I belong on Freud’s couch? Is there something wrong with me that I don’t want to just turn my life over?”

By this time, Hrdy had already clocked plenty of hours in the field watching primate behavior. Her thesis was on langur monkeys, a species that seemed not to have gotten the memo on Bowlbian attachment. Although her focus was on understanding infanticidal behavior in males, she could not help but notice that, unlike chimps, langur mothers allow others in the troop to regularly hold, groom, carry, and babysit an infant. This was direct proof that shared care of offspring exists in the primate world.

Still, if chimpanzees—our closest living relatives—held their babies close for the first six years, then that was the closest human template anyone had at the time. It would be another decade at least before we had high-quality, empirical research on child-rearing in contemporary human hunter-gatherer societies.

But could it be, just maybe, that humans were actually more like langurs than the chimpanzees in this regard?

As it turns out, the answer is yes.

Mothers and Others

It wasn’t until 2009 that Hrdy finally connected the dots between her own research on langurs, the emerging research on childcare in hunter-gatherer societies, and her personal experience as a mother, and put forward the theory that humans are actually cooperative breeders, in her monumental book Mothers and Others.

And it wasn’t until I was a year into caring for my second child—more exhausted now than I had been caring for just my son—that I picked up a copy. From the moment I opened it, it forever changed the way I thought about human motherhood. Like Hrdy with her dog-eared copy of Bowlby on her nightstand, I took Mothers and Others everywhere I went—to the park, the coffee shop, the beach—until it was so beaten and torn and covered in spilled coffee and children’s juice boxes and sand and Crayola-crayon annotations that it was barely legible.

Hrdy’s basic thesis is that humans are the way we are—which is to say, incredibly empathetic, collaborative, and socially intelligent relative to other animals—because babies were raised by an entire group of individuals throughout most of our evolutionary history: “mothers and others.”

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Normally what we do in this situation is turn the TV on and leave it on until our family is somewhat functional again. Unfortunately, as I wrote about here, we made the strategic decision last month to cancel all of our streaming subscriptions in exchange for a dozen high-quality DVDs, in the hopes that this would reduce our screen time and shield our children from some of the worst, addictive content that the internet has to offer. This strategy has been so successful that we hardly watch TV anymore, which is probably good for my children’s development, but definitely more exhausting for me.

One of our chosen few films is Beauty and The Beast. Say what you like about Belle having Stockholm Syndrome*; this film is a masterpiece. It remains one of the only animated films in history to have been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, and it was a major box-office success upon release. It was made by some of the most talented creative geniuses in film animation history, and the songs were written by legendary composers and sung by some of Broadway’s best talent. And of course, every scene is hand drawn. At the risk of sounding like a real sentimental geezer, they just don’t make shit like this anymore.

But even the best films get boring once you have seen them dozens of times, so we decided to do something we hadn’t done before and actually explore the DVD bonus features. You see, our Beauty and the Beast DVD, which I acquired on the French craigslist equivalent for a whopping four euros, happens to be a special edition, and includes many earlier releases of the film: a longer, uncut version that’s mostly like the original but with extra scenes and songs, the pre-release version that was shown at a film festival before the final version was complete (including entire segments with only the original black and white drawings), and the original story-board version of the film with just a sequencing of still images.

We watched all four. That’s how sick and bored we were.

And guess what? Not only were they amazing, I feel like I learned more about the creative process, and did more (deep) reflecting on my own writing process, than I have since I started work on my book.

You see, at the risk of sounding hopelessly naive and inexperienced (which I am when it comes to book-writing), no one ever told me that writing is an iterative process. In high school and college, I did a lot of non-fiction essay writing—and I prided myself on being pretty good at it—but…I outlined once, drafted, then made a few edits and handed it in. I’d get it back with a grade and some comments and that was that. There was rarely (if ever) an opportunity to rewrite it and make it better.

Since I was a straight-A student, I kind of figured I’d just write my non-fiction book the same way I wrote my essays in high-school: first an outline, then a draft, then maybe a few polishing edits, et voila! Donezo.

My friends, this is not how you write a good book. It was my agent who had the hard job of telling me that I am no longer in high school, and that in today’s publishing world only the best of the best get a book deal. In other words, if I wanted to call myself a writer, I had to be not just good, but excellent, and excellence does not happen in one draft. I believe she told me to rewrite my sample chapter approximately twelve times before we took it to publishers, at which point I was very close to firing her out of sheer frustration (except that no one else would have signed me at that point). Fortunately, I happened to know a few other writers, who gently helped me to own up to the fact that, in the words of Taylor Swift, “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.”

My next move was to go out and pick up a second-hand copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird—which should be required reading for every student and certainly for every writer—and gasped with horror as she retold, with typical humor and flair, the story of her publisher refusing her first completed manuscript and rescinding the deal, after she had already spent the advance. But she insisted on another chance, tore her story apart and reconfigured it, overhauled entire chapters and sections, and birthed a phoenix from the ashes.

By the time I finished reading that, I was beginning to get it.

Now back to these four versions of Beauty and the Beast. By far the most interesting version was the first one, which was actually just the first twenty minutes or so of the film as it was originally conceived, in story-board form (kind of like watching a comic strip with music and narration), but apparently it took the entire creative team of 20+ people almost a year to create it. And it was…awful.

Okay, maybe awful is a bit of an extreme statement. It was just incredibly boring; and boring is worse than awful when you work in entertainment.

The original director had tried to stay too true to the original fairy tale. There was no music. The characters felt flat and un-relatable; stuck in the 18th century without a modern twist. The humor was slapstick and forced. The story-line meandered into irrelevant details. After almost a year of work and a third of the budget spent, the Disney executives decided to start over from scratch, with two new, far less experienced directors, and an entirely new creative vision.

On some level, this is a bit depressing, because it makes you wonder whether the film could ever have been what is was without the change in directors. Maybe the original guy just didn’t have what it takes. This is the feeling that will crush you as a creative: the fear that maybe you just don’t have what it takes—or not for this project, anyway.

The take-away from this story could be: some folks just have it, and some do not. But 90% of the team remained in tact for the second iteration, so what I choose to take away from it, instead, is that you shouldn’t be afraid to scrap a year’s worth of hard work, money, and investment if what you created is not excellent, because in competitive, creative fields like entertainment and publishing and media, excellence is the only way you survive. You can start out bad, scrap it, and still make a masterpiece out of the rubble.

Scrapping months or years worth of work is undeniably difficult, but worth it, because there is nothing quite like creative excellence. It’s hard to define, but you know it when you see it. In retrospect, this is perhaps why I felt so compelled to pull the plug on our TV subscriptions in exchange for a handful of vintage DVDs. I didn’t want my children to consume endless mediocrity. I want them to appreciate excellence. Because if you don’t know how to appreciate excellence, you cannot create excellence. And perhaps more importantly, even if you never produce anything excellent yourself, there is a real intrinsic pleasure that comes from recognizing and experiencing excellence. When people say that this or that work of art changed their lives, they are not lying. The best art has that power, but only the best.

After we finished watching the crappy, original story-board version of Beauty and the Beast, we moved on to the pre-release version (after all, we were not about to get off the couch). This was perhaps my favorite version to watch, because the story was fully in place, the songs were complete, the actors’ voices were there, but there were these entire segments that were just hand-drawn pencil sketches without any of the colors and refinement of the final film. I just loved watching these segments, the same way that I love watching creators on TikTok make sweaters from the wool of a sheep that they sheared themselves, or watching Paul Hollywood bake a loaf of bread from scratch. There’s a sort of ecstasy, I find, in watching an expert practice their craft; in seeing the process behind the final creation.

I don’t think people realize that, as few as thirty years ago, every animated film was hand-drawn, frame by frame, by people sitting at desks with pencils. The amount of effort that went into creating these movies was mind-blowing. Because of that, they couldn’t afford to fill in any more detail than was absolutely necessary until they were absolutely certain that the scene was right. The process was inherently collaborative and iterative. Only when the concept was fully validated did they start refining the sketches or adding color. That’s something every writer can learn from.

And I strongly suspect that there was something about the pain of creating that way—by hand, frame by frame, with pencil and paper—that brought out the best creative abilities in the team. When something is painfully effortful to make, you think hard and long about it. If you have to spend days carding and spinning the wool before you knit the sweater, you’re probably gonna do your best to make sure you nail the sweater design and the knitting. It’s got to be a damn good sweater. If, however, your sweater is going to be made by a machine from acrylic yarn that was spun by another machine, then you can slap together a crap design and hope it sells with the right influencer marketing campaign.

I think Beauty and the Beast was the pinnacle of animated film-making. Movies like Up, another, more recent animated film that also won a nomination for Best Picture, just don’t hold a candle, in my humble opinion. Sure, there are some good moments, but it’s not a creative work of genius. Maybe—just maybe—its because the creators don’t suffer the same way anymore.

Then again, what do I know? I don’t work in animation. I’m just a tweedy curmudgeon with a nostalgic itch for the Paleolithic.

Here’s what I do know, though, even though I am still a debutante in the writing world and have yet to publish my first book: writing is iterative, much like animation. You start with a storyboard, then shift to charcoal, then more refined black and white pencil-drawings, and finally to color. Critically, you never move to the next phase until you are happy with the previous one.

You’ll probably need the input of others along the way—many others. No genius operates in a vacuum.

And you have to suffer. There’s no good art without pain. In the age of AI, this is more important than ever. People will tell you that there’s nothing wrong with using AI, that it will eventually become as good as any human at writing books, that the purpose of writing—in nonfiction, anyway—is just to convey your ideas accurately and concisely, and AI is better at that than most humans already.

Then again, the people who tell me this are the ones who listen to audio books about productivity at 2X speed while working out. They are not the ones who buy hand-knit sweaters or cry over the Beast’s unlikely redemption.

I do want my ideas to come across clearly and concisely, I am not a creative genius, and I am not above using AI in a limited and strategic way, but the reason I write is as much for the love of process as it is for the result, and I am holding out hope that my struggles will produce something that reaches people in a way that the algorithms cannot. The only way to get there, for me, is through slow, painful iterations, trial and error, humility in the face of honest feedback, and what seems like an increasingly irrational hope that there are still people out there in the world who value craft and excellence.

…

*Footnote: in a documentary about the making of the film (that I also watched while recovering from the plague), one of the writers explained that the team had a major breakthrough when they realized that the film wasn’t really about Belle at all. It’s about the Beast. The film opens with his story. He is only a child (maybe a teen) when the enchantress, disguised as a haggard old woman, visits his castle and asks for shelter. When he turns her away, she transforms him into a hideous beast, and the only way to break the spell is by convincing another to love him before his twenty-first birthday. As the years wear on he loses hope and self-isolates in his enchanted castle until, against all odds, Belle shows up and somehow manages to see the best in him. He learns to love, sets her free, and in doing so, earns her love in return. This breaks the spell—a spell cast on him for a mistake he made when he was little more than a child. In other words, it’s a story of redemption. It’s a story about the transformative power of love and how, under the right circumstances, even the most beastly among us can transform into selfless, kind, and caring people.