Right Wing “Pro-Family” Rhetoric is Based on a Fundamental Misunderstanding of What is Natural for Our Species
Guys, I just finished the Write-To-Change-The-World seminar by the OpEd Project and I cannot recommend it enough for anyone who wants to see their ideas published in reputable journal. I Just finished drafting an OpEd I am planning to pitch and I thought I would share it with you all as this week’s newsletter post. Let me know what you think!
Ever since JD Vance accepted the nomination for Vice President he has been running almost exclusively on a platform of being “pro-family.” At the same time, both he and Donald Trump have consistently side-stepped answering questions regarding the rising cost of daycare in America, instead offering up insulting platitudes to the tune of, “maybe Grandma and Grandpa want to help out a little bit more.”
It’s tempting to see this debate as part of the age-old battle of Democrats advocating for more public services while Republicans advocate for smaller government and less spending, but I think there’s something deeper going on here. JD Vance is no idiot. By eschewing public funding for childcare, he is pandering to a large swathe of voters on both sides of the political spectrum who believe that putting children in daycare is harmful and unnatural, that children under five belong home with their mothers, and that subsidizing child care will increase their taxes for a service they never wanted to use in the first place.
I am writing this piece to correct the myth that young children belong with their mother at all times, based on what anthropologists know about our deep evolutionary past.
Humans lived as hunter-gatherers for at least 95% of our existence as a species. Homo Sapiens have been around for about 300,000 years and the genus Homo dates back to about 2.8 million years. Agriculture, on the other hand, was first invented about 12,000 years ago. In order to understand how humans lived before agriculture, anthropologists rely on the fossil record but also on studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. While extrapolating from modern hunter-gatherers to our shared evolutionary past is a somewhat controversial practice, there is at least one thing we have learned that most anthropologists agree on: humans evolved to raise children communally.
Take the !Kung, for instance, a very well-studied group who lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari desert up until about 1980. Melvin Konner, an anthropologist who studied !Kung child development, found that for nearly half of the recorded incidences of infant crying, someone other than the mother responded. Many anthropologists who have specialized in other hunter-gatherer societies have reported similar results. Among the Hadza of Tanzania, newborns were held by someone other than the mother 85% of the time in the first days after birth. Among the Efe, a hunter-gatherer group living in the Ituri Rainforest of the Democratic Republic of Congo, babies averaged 14 different caretakers in the first days of life and were suckled by multiple different women. The list goes on.
As children in hunter-gatherer societies grow older, they are integrated into multi-age playgroups. These groups typically consist of a band of six to eight children of all ages who play together in camp or at a nearby favorite play site, like the local watering hole. They are often out of sight but usually within shouting distance of an adult. Children begin spending time in these playgroups as early as infancy, usually in the arms of an older sibling or cousin, but only when the mother is nearby to nurse. When mothers leave camp to forage, they take young nurslings with them. After children are weaned, usually around age three, they spend the majority of their waking hours in these play groups, even when the mother leaves camp to forage. A 2021 study of Aka hunter-gatherers living in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Agta hunter-gatherers of the Philippines concluded that, in both societies, parents and grandparents accounted for less than 1% of playgroup participation. For children under six, the majority of their daytime interactions were with children ages six to eleven, followed by adolescents aged eleven to sixteen, followed by adults.
In other words, there is nothing natural about mothers raising young children alone in single-family homes; just as there is nothing unnatural about leaving children to play with peers while a mother goes off to work.
Daycare critics will undoubtedly argue that, even if shared care is the norm for our species, there is no evolutionary precedent for leaving children under three in daycare for forty-plus hours every week. They’re right. Even though mothers in hunter-gatherer societies have abundant help from the community starting on day one, children still spend the majority of their waking hours with mom until they are weaned at age three. To me, this is an argument in favor of having long, paid maternity leave and flexible return-to-work options for breastfeeding mothers who want to spend more time with their babies while keeping one foot in the workforce. It is not an argument in favor of scrapping subsidized childcare.
Childcare for two children in America now costs 40% more than rent across 100 of the largest metropolitan centers. The United States spends less money on childcare as a percent of GDP compared to any other OECD country (0.3% as opposed to the average 0.7%). We are also the only OECD country with no national maternity leave policy. When we consider that throughout our evolutionary history, mothers have always been supported by the community, it’s hard to justify this gap. We have created a society where it is impossible for many families to live without two incomes but we fail to pass legislation to support working mothers. What’s pro-family about that?