How the hunter-gatherer model can inform current politics on childcare and family leave

We did things this way for 300,000 years so it must have worked!

!Kung children caring for one another

After years of side-stepping the issue, politicians are finally being forced to confront the rising cost of childcare in America. Reshma Saujani, CEO of Moms First, organized a petition collecting thousands of signatures from American families in order to push CNN to ask about childcare at the presidential debate. The moderator pointed out that childcare was now more costly than rent for a majority of working families in the US and asked Biden and Trump to respond. You can watch their utterly incompetent answers here. They insulated each other and talked about things as irrelevant as golf. As my high school math teacher used to say, ATFQ (answer the f*cking question)!

Interestingly, it’s the VP candidates who have picked up where the presidential candidates failed. JD Vance has taken a strong stance against childcare, calling “universal day care class war against normal people.” Tim Walz, on the other hand, has a strong history of supporting childcare in his home state of Minnesota. As governor he launched a $316 million grant program to boost wages for child care workers and in 2024 and an additional $6.2 million in new grants to expand and stabilize child care businesses across the state. He also expanded Minnesota’s child tax credit to $1,750 a year (still not nearly enough, but a step in the right direction). 

I’m a Democrat, and I support Harris and Walz, but I am not here to write a political take-down of Trump and Vance. Instead, I’d like to explore the issue from both sides: why Republicans oppose it and why Democrats support it and how we can all move forward on what I think is ultimately a bipartisan issue. I’d also like to tie it back to my favorite topic: hunter gatherer societies and our shared evolutionary past. On the surface, these two topics may seem unrelated, but the truth is, if we lived successfully as a species for hundreds of thousands of years (99% of our existence on this planet) using their model, perhaps we can learn something from it that informs modern policies. 

Let’s start with the Republican perspective. Vance is no idiot. In a recent Tweet he posted, “Universal child care is a massive subsidy to the lifestyle preferences of the affluent over the preferences of the middle and working class.” He followed it up with this graphic, from a conservative think tank:

According to this survey, twice as many college-educated parents support a model where both parents work and use paid childcare, as opposed to parents with no college degree. Less than half of working-age Americans hold a college degree and it makes sense to me that those families prefer the stay-at-home-mom model. If going back to work means long shifts at the cash register, you’d probably rather stay home with the kids. If, on the other hand, you have a college degree and higher earning potential, you’re more likely to be excited about your work and motivated to continue your career. It’s also worth noting that college graduates move further and more often, making it less likely that they will have family nearby available to help, which may be why more working class families prefer a model whereby family takes care of children. 

Finally, Republican family values mean that stay-at-home mothering is more valued than among many Democrat voters. That’s not a bad thing. A lot of parents on both sides of the political spectrum are wary of putting their children in daycare, especially in large institutional daycares with high rates of staff turnover and low staff-to-child ratios. In that same thread, Vance cites a study by 3 economists on the impacts of rolling out universal childcare in Quebec. The study has some methodological issues in my opinion, but the conclusion was that when children under 5 spent a full day in public daycare, there were significant impacts on behavior, anxiety and parent-child relationships. It’s worth noting that at least 60% of these publicly-funded daycares were independently assessed as being of “poor quality.” Another study (probably the best we have) on the effects of various childcare models in the US was published by the NICHD and concluded that non-parental care has no measurable negative effects on psychology, behavior or parent-child attachment provided young children (under 3) do not spend more than 30 hours a week in care, the caregivers are attentive and responsive to the child’s needs, here is a high staff to child ratio, and the parent-child relationship outside of care hours is healthy. Children need to form secure attachments with their caregivers, but until recently, we believed that maternal attachment was of primary importance. More recent research has indicated that children thrive most when they are able to form 3 or more secure attachments to various adults. This makes a lot of sense in light of our evolutionary past. I’ve talked a lot on my Instagram channel and in this newsletter about how children were raised communally in the hunter-gatherer model, which is how humans lived for most of our history as a species. It’s not uncommon for a child to feel more emotionally bonded to an aunt or grandparent than to its own mother, and there’s no indication that this is in any way psychologically harmful. In other words, Republicans and working-class Americans are right to value family care of children, but they overemphasize the importance of the traditional, nuclear family. 

Moreover, Republicans may believe that having one parent work and one stay home with the children is an aspirational ideal, but it doesn’t gel with reality. As of 2023, 75% of mothers with children under 18 were in the labor force and 70% of mothers with children under 5 worked. The reality is that the rising cost of living combined with stagnating wages has made it impossible for many families to survive on only one income. As a result, many families are forced to juggle childcare and work in ways that are stressful and suboptimal for everyone. Mothers may be forced to leave their children in the care of underfunded care centers where their children suffer or attempt to juggle working from home while also caring for their children. Others take on night shifts as nurses or care workers so that they can be home with their children during the day, thereby compromising their own health and well-being. Single mothers suffer the most, since they suffer from the motherhood wage penalty and are left trying to provide for their children without institutional support. 

Here’s where the Republican argument really falls apart: we are totally capable of offering quality, universal care for young children without raising taxes. Just look at European countries. Contrary to myth, working class Europeans don’t pay much more in taxes than Americans, but they have high-quality universal childcare and excellent paid leave policies. There are so many ways in which we could do this in the US: by raising taxes for the richest Americans, taxing corporations, or reallocating tax dollars from military expenditure, crop subsidies (goodby ethanol and high-fructose corn syrup), or other corrupt, pro-business expenditures. Having a system in place for the universal care of children would provide mothers with choice. Those that want to stay home could do so without paying higher taxes and those who want to work, or who have to work, could do so without forking over their entire salaries for the care of their children. 

Let’s imagine for a wonderful minute that we could drum up bipartisan support for more tax-free funding of childcare and paid leave, what would the new system look like? This is where I think we can learn from the hunter-gatherer model. 

In our evolutionary past, women did not have any “maternity leave” but they also returned to “work” gradually while also caring for their children. The mother would rest for a couple of weeks after birth, during which time the community provided for her, bringing her food and sustenance and helping to hold and care for the new baby (It’s worth noting that in our contemporary system, where some 30% of mothers give birth via C-section, a longer recovery time is absolutely essential). This is a strong argument in favor of federal policy for some minimal amount of full-time maternity leave: at least 2 months given the C-section rate. Since our traditional family and community networks have been radically disrupted by a capitalist system that requires us to move all over the country for work, it seems only fair that the government should step in to provide for the mother during this critical window. 

Here’s where I differ from most liberals. I don’t believe in advocating for extended maternity leave. Why? Because maternity leave is incredibly isolating and shoves the burden of care onto lone mothers. If we look to our evolutionary past as a model, maternity leave was short, but the return to work was flexible and child-friendly. Why can’t we do the same? I can imagine a future in which mothers are eligible for flexible part-time jobs that can be done remotely, or where they can bring their baby to their place of work. I am not advocating for a 9-to-5 model or even for ¾-time. In our evolutionary past, gathering work constituted only about 2/7 of a woman’s time, even for the childless, and may have been even less for new mothers. That amount of work was sufficient to provide for her and her children’s needs. If we used to be able to live off of the land, a public good, and provide for ourselves and our children by working 2 days a week, don’t you think that with all of our technology and “progress,” we should be able to offer the same thing to contemporary American mothers? When you look at things this way, you realize how much of the benefits of contemporary society have accrued to the wealthiest class following agriculture and industrialization.

Implementing something like this would require close collaboration between employers and the government. Almost every occupation has an administrative, remote, child-friendly component. If governments put pressure on corporations to carve out and reserve this work for new mothers, rather than requiring them to quit or return to work full time, we could build a system that supports mothers and children without the cost and isolation of extended maternity leave. Since the government would save money on this model as compared to funding extended maternity leave, the leftover money could be used to subsidize in-home support for mothers in the form of child care or assistance with domestic duties. Such a system would shift care of children and home away from being the exclusive responsibility of the mother, while also helping her maintain a foot in the workforce (and therefore a certain level of financial independence).

Another way of doing this would be to take a leaf out of Sweden’s playbook. Sweden grants 480 days of paid leave to parents, who can choose how the leave is split. Fathers must take a minimum of 90 days but may take the entire leave if they choose to. Recently, Sweden announced that parents can transfer up to 45 days (or 90 days in the case of single parents) to other caregivers. Under this model, grandparents can be paid the parent’s salary to care for their grandchildren. I think this is fantastic and the closest thing I’ve seen, at the national policy level, to what the shared care of children used to look like in our evolutionary past, but why not extend it to any available, local relative or allomother?

Ideally, such a model could be used to cover the first year or two years of childcare, with a shift towards a more social model of care after as the child grows. Among the !Kung, for instance, babies are in near constant-contact with their mother in the first few months (70% of waking hours). They accompany her on gathering trips in the sling. By 18 months, however, the amount of time spent in contact with the mother has already declined to just 30% of waking hours and they spend increasingly more time playing in multi-age playgroups where they are supervised by older children. The playgroups are small, typically 4-8 children, and range in age from 2 up to 12. The children play independently, but always within earshot of adults. Because mothers in these societies usually breastfeed until age 3, they typically do not roam far from their children and return to nourish them frequently. That said, if the mother is not nearby and the child is hungry, other lactating mothers may nurse the child in her absence. Fathers have even been observed to suckle children (not for nourishment but for comfort)! Since in the United States, formal schooling begins at 5, we could imagine a system in which small, mixed-age playgroups of children ages 1-5 could be organized and supervised by a responsible adult. Such groups could be offered on-site at a mother’s place of work or mothers could remote-work to be near their children if they choose (to facilitate extended breastfeeding). Hours could be capped at 30 hours a week until age 3, in line with the NICHD study (which showed no negative effects on behavior or development for children spending under 30 hours in non-maternal care under the age of 3). Work policies would similarly have to guarantee that mothers be allowed to work a 30-hour week while maintaining a livable salary. Since most kindergarten programs end early (12:30 PM here in California!) older children could join the program after school and provide informal care and entertainment for younger members. Studies have shown that independent play and informal care of younger children are psychologically healthy activities for children in this age range and they are fully capable of providing some level of supervision and care that is wholly compatible with their own play. 

I know a lot of full-time moms who will think my stance is too pro-childcare, but I hope that advocating for a policy that is fully in line with how children were raised for hundreds of thousands of years can calm some of the fears around harm to children. I also know a lot of kick-ass professional moms who will say that this kind of system will not support them enough in their professional ambitions. It’s true that we can’t compete with men working full-time in a 3-hour-workweek, but I think it’s up to the world of work to adapt to motherhood (and a more balanced version of fatherhood while we’re at it) and not vice versa. We need female doctors, politicians, lawyers, educators, scientists and writers. We need at least some of those women to be mothers! But the solution should not be to force mothers into an impossible position of choosing between a career and their child’s well-being. Instead, we should start questioning the grueling work ethic that has become so standard in our capitalist, patriarchal system so that mothers can more easily integrate work and childcare.

. What do YOU think? Leave me a reply in the comments. Opinions from all political leanings are welcome.