It’s weirdly encouraging to know that hunter-gatherer 3yos also throw temper tantrums 🥲. It’s not western culture or whatever random influencers say is holding you back from being unable to get the most perfectly behaved toddler. Really reassuring that I’m
not doing something horribly wrong. I hope this is understandable, it’s hard to have working brain cells on 5 hours of sleep after the baby just won’t go to bed 🫠
Yes!! This is one of my big battles. Tantrums are a totally normal part of toddler behavior in EVERY culture. People trying to make a buck off convincing you otherwise are disingenuous. There’s a big lie circulating (I think propagated largely by books like Continuum Concept) that HG children don’t have tantrums, but any serious study on the topic says otherwise.
I’m interested on your opinions about the continuum concept, or more specifically on your opinions about the way she describes the tribe (sorry I forgot their name).
Me too! This book partially contributed to me wanting to have children and how I raise them. Now that I’m a mama I’m learning that many of the things discussed in this book just aren’t true for my baby, even when I do things the “natural” way like them. Would love you to dissect the good and bad for the book, because there is both, and parents shouldn’t be under any illusions about it.
One thing I realized when I became a Mom is that the obsession with *never* leaving your child and making motherhood an all-consuming competitive sport is a deeply cultural practice that appears to have originated in Anglophone countries. In my experience, women who are able to achieve a balance between a close and nurturing relationship with their children while also having a distinct life of their own (including those who, like me, are SAHMs) have the happiest adult children.
I remember vividly reading a chapter in Bringing Up Bebe that said something like "a mother never leaving her child for the first three years of life would not be seen as a noble sacrifice in the part of Paris where I live. It would be taken as a sign that something is wildly out of balance in the family life, which is not beneficial for the child."
This. I have yet to meet a mom here in the Southwest of France who thinks I’m doing my daughter harm putting her in preschool. On the contrary, it’s illegal to keep your child home after age 3 and everyone seems perfectly fine with that. I will say that the schools here are very good and that gives me a lot of confidence. Handing my daughter off to a very experienced teacher with a degree in early child education feels very different from handing her to someone who started a daycare center in their backyard to earn some extra cash.
I guess I should add to this that my kids have also been extremely well cared for in backyard daycare centers, but the quality is variable from one to the next
I very much relate to your experiences with your three-year-old, Elena! Mine just finished his first year of preschool, and he cried probably 40 % of the mornings we dropped him off. It was HARD, but he never cried for more than a few minutes, made great friends, and was always happy at the end of the day. And because I was with him for the vast majority of his early years, I felt sure he was strong enough to endure the anxiety and that it was developmentally normal.
That said, I think there is a HUGE distinction between dropping off a 3-year-old at school or daycare and dropping off a 3-month-old or even a 13-month old at daycare for most of the working day, which is the target of Komisar’s alarm, at least as I understand it. And there’s also a huge difference between putting a baby in the care of someone they’ve known since the earliest days of their life, in an environment that is familiar and comfortable, and dropping them off at a “facility” with a high turnover rate where the providers are often stressed and in charge of many children at once.
As you say here, in hunter-gatherer societies (as well as all premodern societies) babies under weaning age (3) were with their mothers most of the time. Importantly, these babies were de-centered as the mothers simply carted them along as they went about their daily tasks (which offered both a sense of purpose and social connection). In other words, these women didn’t need to separate from their babies entirely in order to get something done or feel fulfilled. Obviously, this has changed as the structure of our society and the nature of work has changed, but CRITICALLY the needs of babies have not!
It is categorically true that babies (again kids under 3) who spend the majority of their time away from their intended primary caregivers struggle to develop secure attachment, as well as a general sense of safety and wellbeing, and the issues that arise from this are with them for life. I was one such child… and it took having my own kids and lots of therapy and prayer to fully heal from those early wounds. I don’t blame my mother or father… and I don’t think that any woman who has had her child in daycare since very young should feel guilty or like she’s a bad mother, especially if she had no choice for financial reasons. We’re all victims of our nurture-averse culture, but it’s also our responsibility to break the cycle and give our children what they both need and deserve, and importantly, demand that society support parents, so that we CAN do this.
This isn’t an easy choice, of course. Staying home with my babies when young definitely doesn’t come naturally to me and choosing to do so meant turning down a promotion, but my husband and I decided if we could swing it financially, it was the right thing to do, and it certainly came with many sacrifices, but critically, they were my husband and I’s sacrifices and not our children’s.
The hardest part of it all was untangling my sense of self-worth from professional accomplishment… this was a long and arduous process, but having completed it, I’m freer than I’ve ever been and all the more ambitious frankly, because I honestly don’t give a F about what others think or expect, so I can pursue my dreams with abandon, slowly while my babies are young, and more quickly as they grow.
I guess the point that I really want to make is that prolonged separation anxiety in early life (whether at night or in the day) is deeply damaging and wires babies brains for lower stress resilience (see Greer Kirshenbaum’s work in this area), and the evidence of low stress resilience is now everywhere in our kids. Separation anxiety after those early years, on the other hand, is a very different beast and even a sign of healthy development. So nuance is important here! Which isn’t easy as our meme culture is anti nuance.
The best book I’ve ever read about this is the “Continuum Connection” by Jean Liedloff, which I’m sure you’ve read, but I encourage others to read it as well!
Yes, it sounds like everything from HG traditions to neurobiology to normal weaning ages to daycare and preschool studies agrees that 3 or 4 is the magic age below which it's harmful to separate babies from their mothers for much of the day, and above which it's fine (if protested by some 3yos) to separate preschoolers from their mothers for half the day or so.
Academic full-time preschools are still harmful for 3-4yos according to lottery studies, but play-based part-time preschools seem fine for most kids.
I always find your articles interesting, but I struggle a bit with what lessons to glean for my own life, given that I live about as far from hunter gatherer society as possible (living a pretty atomized SAHM life in the middle of Los Angeles). My older child will turn three in August and is signed up to start preschool in September. I feel like there's a 50% chance I'll end up backing out and keeping him home. I tried to find a program that I could feel comfortable with. It's an in-home Montessori with 2 teachers and 8 kids. Tuesday and Wednesday are drop-off days, and Thursday is a group outing with all the children, teachers, and parents. Anyway, all that is to say, I'm hoping the benefit of this type of program will be developing a sense of community with the other families and children. Because that's something that's strikingly different between the playgroups you describe and what's generally available in modern life. While the hunter gatherer children are left with people they know well (and are probably related to) in their own village, many western children are taken to an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar people. I don't see any way around the fact that that would be more upsetting for the children and more stressful for the parents.
I hear this criticism a lot and I would just like to gently challenge you on two points. First, the caregivers in hunter-gatherer societies are not always relatives - actually most are unrelated - and not always super familiar. Groups shift and change over time. They are fluid. People join and leave. Sometimes a young child will find themselves with a group of entirely new people. And also, in the modern context, caregivers are not strangers. Sure, they are at first, but give it some time and the child will likely develop a bond with the other children and caregivers. So I really don’t think it’s all that different!
I remember being struck dumb the first time I took my first child to daycare (a few weeks in, I guess) and the carers greeted him like an old friend. Meanwhile - in part because I wasn't doing all the drop-offs - I barely recognised any of them. In that moment I realised the kids and carers were more like (at least) co-workers than strangers to each other, and both groups were well on the way to a much deeper bond. It was very comforting.
I take your point, and again I appreciate your work and always find it interesting. But I feel like on the one hand, there's this exploration of the interconnectedness and supportive social structures of hunter gatherer society, which for so many of us is lacking in modern life. And on the other hand, the sort of tacit suggestion that we can/should just do what hunter gatherers do, often without reckoning with why, given the first point, our social context is very different.
I share your frustration, Alice. Understanding better all the ways in which our modern societies are deficient sometimes just makes me more depressed. All any of us has the power to do is tinker at the edges of our social structures; try to make them a little bit better (a little bit more hunter-gatherer-ish) for ourselves and other people.
Also to add, I'm not necessarily just talking about your work. I really enjoyed the book Hunt Gather Parent, but unlike the author, I didn't end up coming to the conclusion that it was appropriate to let my toddler run errands alone in a major metropolis. Like, the lesson that children can benefit from autonomy is valuable, but the context of your actual life has an impact on what's advisable.
Alice, I think I understand how you feel. The data and stories can be interesting all day, but at the end of the day, I have to come back home to my life in contemporary America. It was for this reason that I never read “bringing up Bebe” when it was popular; because I don’t live in France. That said, I have a five, seven, and nine-year-old. I have definitely enjoyed learning about parenthood around the world, my entire tenure as a mother. For me it can simply be grounding that there are MANY ways to be a good parent. It’s encouraging that the ways my kids and family struggle may be temporary or normal or fixable. It all goes in the big pot of ideas which helps ground me and keep the longterm perspective in mind. I have absolutely not moved my family to live in a hunter, gatherer society; nor have I started homeschooling despite the myriad books I read on it lol. But I’m definitely edified by encountering a broader picture of parenting across my own time and space. 🧡 I’m sure you’re doing your very best, as any of us can.
PS: your Montessori preschool sounds awesome. In my experience and humble opinion, your confidence as a parent in whatever school you choose is more/less the defining factor in your kids having a successful time.
Yes! I think “there are lots of ways to parent” is a good central thesis to all of this. And it's all helpful to consider. I think what I feel like I don't see enough of (not that any one writer is obliged to cover this particular topic) are suggestions or policy proposals for how to adapt modern life to be more conducive to more traditional/supportive child rearing practices. I was thinking yesterday that senior communities are very common (especially where I grew up in Florida) and there are communities for singles, but there aren't official communities (apartment buildings, gated communities, condos) that are explicitly for families raising children. I feel like a lot of the struggles of contemporary western parenting are downstream of wider social problems (loss of third spaces, general isolation, screen addiction, bowling alone, etc) and it's hard to tackle any of these issues as an individual parent.
For what it's worth, my church has become my hunter gatherer experience, with as much support and childcare as we can muster for each other in modern times. I think a lot of religious communities do this well. It has required letting go of some of my own preferences in order to be open to the help and influence of a broader community. And it's been worth it. I know not every family has a religious community. It seems some on-line groups have meet ups in person and homeschool co-ops sort of get there, but not quite. Best friends sharing weekly routines and child care is along the same lines.
Great post, thank you! My only comment, as a parent of older kids (11 and 15), is that eventually you’ll have to navigate the fact that seeing friends and social events = giving them a phone and internet connection. My kids have very limited screen time at home and zero free access to the internet. It is when going to “social” activities that screens become the issue. At 3 and 5 their time with other kids may be the ideal we imagine of creativity and play and imagination, but the older they get the harder it’s going to be (at least in my experience) to find other kids who want to do that over staring at their phones. By the time my younger son was prob 7-8 we were already dealing with him encountering kids who were already “over” playing because of screens.
That’s so sad. Yeah screen time is a whole other enchilada. And I certainly don’t strive for perfection when it comes to limiting screens either. But I do think that given the choice between letting my kids do something a bit “risky” or emotionally challenging in the real world, versus keeping them home and letting them watch TV, I opt for the former. Because the truth is that if my daughter DOESNT go to school, she’s gonna spend more time on a screen so I can work.
I predict that studies on whether kids do better with a more structured environment in preschool/school/aftercare/sports, vs with less structure and more opportunity for free play at home or a friend's house, are going to get increasingly confounded by poor screen discipline at home.
If 80% of homemaking or WFH parents start letting their kids mainline unsupervised YouTube all day, they're going to have increasingly worse outcomes, compared to kids stuck in institutions for 10 hours a day that are mostly screen-free or that ensure only kid-appropriate screen content.
It doesn't make the latter good for kids, but at least it's not as bad as the former can get.
Heck, I sent my 2yo to part-time daycare because I had a difficult pregnancy and couldn't parent well from the couch. When I saw how much I was turning to (kid-appropriate) screen time in order to survive, I figured daycare would better for him. He ended up hating it, but I maintain it was the best decision I could have made with the info I had at the time, so I'm very sympathetic to such situations.
But none of that means that extended hours in structured institutions are *actually* better for kids than free play at home or a friend's house. It's sad that future studies will probably fail to distinguish that and will make it look like they are. We'll have to rely on the older studies before childhood tablet use became so prevalent, if we want to know a base rate for how good things at home could be without it.
I was able to mostly keep my daughter with family or myself till 3 due to a flexible job and obviously a helpful family. But family schedules changed and my work got busier. At three we started sending her to a neighbor who does in home care. It’s been such a blessing, my daughter loves it and she gets to play with kids all day. And honestly, I’m a better more patient and more fun mom having some time without her. I agree that there is a difference between discomfort and actual trauma. And the two really shouldn’t be confused if a kid is a little upset when you drop them off at preschool!
My daughter started Montessori school when she was 2.5 (and my mother in law watched her for a year before that when I went back to work). My son started with a sitter I adore when he was 8 months old. It always felt, in my bones, to be the right choice. Thank you for sharing your experience and research on the topic! The MAHA/trad wife messaging is a lot these days 🤪
The comparison between modern American childcare practices and tribal societies like the !Kung is fundamentally flawed. It’s not an apples-to-apples situation. For one, these tribes build their entire child-rearing philosophy on a radically different foundation. Take the !Kung: they practice extended bedsharing, with nearly constant skin-to-skin contact during the first year. That level of physical and emotional attunement sets a secure attachment baseline that most Western children simply don’t get.
In those societies, caregiving is communal—but it’s not impersonal. Daily contact time between the child and caregivers (not just the mother) far exceeds what’s typical in the West. And while some might claim these caregivers are “strangers,” that’s misleading. These are members of tight-knit, interdependent groups where everyone knows everyone. That’s not equivalent to a rotation of daycare workers in a commercial setting. Familiarity, trust, and cultural continuity are baked into the system.
Also worth noting: once tribal children are older, they’re often reintegrated with their mothers. There’s a fluidity and constancy in attachment relationships that our hyper-scheduled, fragmented system can’t replicate.
So no, we can’t flatten this into “they use group care, so daycare is fine.” Our society is deeply atomized. Children often experience disconnection from birth—starting with impersonal hospital births, then sleep training, then daycare, then school, then screens. Pretending that doesn’t have long-term psychological consequences is a comforting illusion.
I’m not saying daycare is categorically bad. But reducing it to “other cultures do communal care too” glosses over a massive structural and relational gap. The comparison obscures more than it reveals.
I'm not sure if none of you were in daycare yourselves, or you were and you just don't remember it?? But I was, and I remember, and these kids are playing you. This carrying on crying thing is an act they drop literally about 90 seconds after mom/dad drops them off and then they're smiling and laughing and have a grand old time. It's not unusual for them to repeat the same act upon pick up.
And when I say "act" I don't mean it's thought out or purposeful faking or anything like that (obviously) I just mean it's not reflective of any enduring emotion, it's done bc it's what elicits sympathetic comforting actions from parents like hugs and kisses and they like that. But as soon as they realize the parent is gone and that the tears have no purpose, they disappear. Perhaps you have to see it to understand what a quick shift it is. It's one of my clearest memories from daycare is watching kids who were squealing with joyful laughter and enthusiasm all day suddenly flip like a light switch into crying/get hugs and kisses sympathy mode as soon as they spotted mom (or the opposite upon drop off). It's not much different from a toddler pitching a fit because they don't want to go to bed and then 30 seconds later they're sound asleep...they don't like the change and then a minute later they're fine.
I feel like you've made a valid point (separation anxiety has always been a thing) and then linked it to an equally valid point (daycare isn't necessarily traumatic, just like any stressful event if you've got a solid relationship). But daycare is a far cry from what you're describing in the hunter gatherer cultures. There is no mixed age play, the carers are completely unfamiliar (at first, obviously this changes quickly), there are no siblings or cousins around, and the carer - child ratio often isn't ideal.
In saying that, beyond completely re-working society, it's the best that's available for most people.
And even if we were to re-work society, finding the ideal solution would probably be impossible. What's best for the kids is unlikely to be what is best for the parents. We're facing that struggle now, as we've chosen homeschooling even though it's not the best choice financially. Sacrifices have to be made with any decision
Here’s my genuine question. (I’m not trying to be a troll I promise.) Aren’t (most) daycares *also* an example of evolutionary mismatch?
The difference from your example here is that when a hunter gatherer mom leaves her child in the camp that—noteworthy—they have lived in with the same people for *their entire life*, then yes, they may lightly cry or protest. (Because the person who has nursed the most will always be the favorite). But they are being left with people THEY HAVE KNOWN SINCE BIRTH. Family members, alloparents, other children they know like siblings, familiar faces. Not total strangers. There is so obviously no trauma there.
But expecting a child to handle being abruptly left with strangers (modern daycares/preschools) would be like expecting a !Kung mother to be fine dropping her child off with the Hazda. These are people and an environment the child has never even *seen* before. Both child and mother would utterly FLIP! The child has never spoken to these people in their entire lives. (Just like daycare/preschool workers.) They would be terrified. And rightly so. There’s a reason for that type of response in evolution. If this were to happen to a child throughout evolution, it would be because they are either being kidnapped or abandoned. There is a reason—an evolutionary, neurobiological reason—why the level of distress, crying, clinging, and more happens to a child in this modern setting. There is a reason leaving our children in such a state of stress, fear, and sadness is so physiologically gutting for the mom/parent. This is not a normal thing to do to a child, and did not happen during our shared evolutionary past the way we’re doing it today.
I’m not anti-preschool, or even anti-daycare. I think this whole thing could be solved if the mothers were allowed to stay until the child knows the care workers WELL, is comfortable with them, and chooses *on their own* to leave the mom and go play. Whether that takes a week, a month, or half a year, so be it. The child needs to not be left in a state of overwhelming distress. But mothers are expected to leave abruptly—and often, for up to 9 hours a day.
One dad from Germany I spoke to who had been at home with their daughter for 0-3, had put her in preschool (just a couple hours) but was allowed to remain at the care center with his daughter—getting to know the caregivers together for SIX MONTHS if that’s what it took. She took a while to like it, but now, does not utterly break down in sheer distress and overwhelm when he leaves.
I’ve spoken to moms with awful experiences but who were gaslighted by the center workers: one was told “crying is good” and that “this is normal.” But the degree of fear some have is not normal. (It may be *common* because in our fucked up society that’s forced on a lot of women to have to do, but it most certainly is not normal.)
One mom I spoke to said her child didn’t eat for the whole first month of preschool and would cry if she even moved an inch from her (previously having been very independent). Another said her potty trained girl peed her pants 4 times in two hours and woke up with screaming nightmares for weeks. Another was suddenly pulling his hair out. Another turned into a zombie for months not wanting to be anywhere but home while not in daycare, and would “nap” at 10 am during “playtime” (he had been done with naps a year before). Ours cried so hard for two full hours until she was gagging; none of the workers could soothe her—she would yell at them to “get away from me!”
Trauma is when a child’s physiological distress (hormones and neuropeptides coursing through the blood/brain) is more than they have the cognitive resources to cope with (whereby the prefrontal cortex would still be “online”, so they’re just feeling sad—not utterly terrified out of their minds.) When a child is abruptly left with entire strangers, that level of stress is there for a reason. It is not evolutionarily normal to force that on a child.
So I’m all for a daycare system that allows mothers to remain until the child chooses, on their own, to leave the mom to go play. Not the other way around. Then, a normal level of sadness upon departure is expected and normal. Because the distress we experienced is so clearly to me, an example of evolutionary mismatch. It doesn’t happen in HG societies.
At daycare, when the mother finally returns, a sense of overwhelming relief rushes over the child, but then they are brought back there again and again. That sense of abandonment is certainly something to pay attention to. Many times, the child is pulled out of the arms of the mother. And the mom has to just … walk away. If this wasn’t harmful, the physiological response wouldn’t utterly gut a mom. And: This is not a socialized feeling either. I spoke to an ultra feminist, career-first, no-nonsense, bootstrapping, 1970s mom who had never, ever, “bothered herself” with reading any “fluffy” psychology in her day. She wasn’t even familiar with Jung or Freud. Everything SHE read supported and pushed her into this choice. She was an engineer and she was cognitively confident as can be about it. But even she was shocked how much it felt like a punch in the stomach when her child cried every time she left him. This is an evolutionary process to keep baby with mom.
This misogynist “ugh moms are so hover-y, anxious, fussy,” etc sentiment is rampant. Mothers know their children. The workers want to treat every child the same when they are all genetically different on the sensitive-to-negative-stimuli scale.
Here’s my last rant about the line, “yeah it was difficult at first, but NOW THEY LOVE IT!” Sure, they may love it. They latched onto the other kids and care workers, out of necessity. They formed new attachment figures. But how do they feel about *mom* now?
My guess is: misunderstood, less trusting, abandoned, not listened to. Hurt and spiteful. That decimates a child’s confidence and security.
When we grow up to be adults, a big insult we like to throw around is “insecure” … For example, girls talking about guys they’re set up with: “Ew he was sooo insecure.” Or dudes calling a girl “clingy.”
But why do we think people are insecure? Maybe because, their limbic and brainstem architecture was “fired and wired” to respond to the relational, environmental stimuli they had—which, by very definition, was insecure.
When you said this, “I’m not exactly sure how or when it happened, but at some point over the course of the last ten thousand years, motherhood went from being a thing that was primarily about survival to being a thing that was about creating perfection,” I thought about how at some point, human culture stopped being about (basic) survival too.
I saw a video once of a group of baboons dropping their tasks to run to a cliff and watch a storm come in. And I think all the time, who decided our way of life was better than *that*? But maybe that’s just because I’m tired. lol
It’s weirdly encouraging to know that hunter-gatherer 3yos also throw temper tantrums 🥲. It’s not western culture or whatever random influencers say is holding you back from being unable to get the most perfectly behaved toddler. Really reassuring that I’m
not doing something horribly wrong. I hope this is understandable, it’s hard to have working brain cells on 5 hours of sleep after the baby just won’t go to bed 🫠
Yes!! This is one of my big battles. Tantrums are a totally normal part of toddler behavior in EVERY culture. People trying to make a buck off convincing you otherwise are disingenuous. There’s a big lie circulating (I think propagated largely by books like Continuum Concept) that HG children don’t have tantrums, but any serious study on the topic says otherwise.
I’m interested on your opinions about the continuum concept, or more specifically on your opinions about the way she describes the tribe (sorry I forgot their name).
Have you ever written about it?
Oh I'd be interested in that too!
Me too! This book partially contributed to me wanting to have children and how I raise them. Now that I’m a mama I’m learning that many of the things discussed in this book just aren’t true for my baby, even when I do things the “natural” way like them. Would love you to dissect the good and bad for the book, because there is both, and parents shouldn’t be under any illusions about it.
I’m so sorry I don’t know why this comment posted like 5 times 😭
One thing I realized when I became a Mom is that the obsession with *never* leaving your child and making motherhood an all-consuming competitive sport is a deeply cultural practice that appears to have originated in Anglophone countries. In my experience, women who are able to achieve a balance between a close and nurturing relationship with their children while also having a distinct life of their own (including those who, like me, are SAHMs) have the happiest adult children.
I remember vividly reading a chapter in Bringing Up Bebe that said something like "a mother never leaving her child for the first three years of life would not be seen as a noble sacrifice in the part of Paris where I live. It would be taken as a sign that something is wildly out of balance in the family life, which is not beneficial for the child."
This. I have yet to meet a mom here in the Southwest of France who thinks I’m doing my daughter harm putting her in preschool. On the contrary, it’s illegal to keep your child home after age 3 and everyone seems perfectly fine with that. I will say that the schools here are very good and that gives me a lot of confidence. Handing my daughter off to a very experienced teacher with a degree in early child education feels very different from handing her to someone who started a daycare center in their backyard to earn some extra cash.
I guess I should add to this that my kids have also been extremely well cared for in backyard daycare centers, but the quality is variable from one to the next
I hear the French preschools offer super healthy and varied meals to the little ones. No packed lunches! Is this true in your recent experience?
I guess the only way to do that is with formula though. No one is going to wetnurse my baby for me unfortunately :/
I very much relate to your experiences with your three-year-old, Elena! Mine just finished his first year of preschool, and he cried probably 40 % of the mornings we dropped him off. It was HARD, but he never cried for more than a few minutes, made great friends, and was always happy at the end of the day. And because I was with him for the vast majority of his early years, I felt sure he was strong enough to endure the anxiety and that it was developmentally normal.
That said, I think there is a HUGE distinction between dropping off a 3-year-old at school or daycare and dropping off a 3-month-old or even a 13-month old at daycare for most of the working day, which is the target of Komisar’s alarm, at least as I understand it. And there’s also a huge difference between putting a baby in the care of someone they’ve known since the earliest days of their life, in an environment that is familiar and comfortable, and dropping them off at a “facility” with a high turnover rate where the providers are often stressed and in charge of many children at once.
As you say here, in hunter-gatherer societies (as well as all premodern societies) babies under weaning age (3) were with their mothers most of the time. Importantly, these babies were de-centered as the mothers simply carted them along as they went about their daily tasks (which offered both a sense of purpose and social connection). In other words, these women didn’t need to separate from their babies entirely in order to get something done or feel fulfilled. Obviously, this has changed as the structure of our society and the nature of work has changed, but CRITICALLY the needs of babies have not!
It is categorically true that babies (again kids under 3) who spend the majority of their time away from their intended primary caregivers struggle to develop secure attachment, as well as a general sense of safety and wellbeing, and the issues that arise from this are with them for life. I was one such child… and it took having my own kids and lots of therapy and prayer to fully heal from those early wounds. I don’t blame my mother or father… and I don’t think that any woman who has had her child in daycare since very young should feel guilty or like she’s a bad mother, especially if she had no choice for financial reasons. We’re all victims of our nurture-averse culture, but it’s also our responsibility to break the cycle and give our children what they both need and deserve, and importantly, demand that society support parents, so that we CAN do this.
This isn’t an easy choice, of course. Staying home with my babies when young definitely doesn’t come naturally to me and choosing to do so meant turning down a promotion, but my husband and I decided if we could swing it financially, it was the right thing to do, and it certainly came with many sacrifices, but critically, they were my husband and I’s sacrifices and not our children’s.
The hardest part of it all was untangling my sense of self-worth from professional accomplishment… this was a long and arduous process, but having completed it, I’m freer than I’ve ever been and all the more ambitious frankly, because I honestly don’t give a F about what others think or expect, so I can pursue my dreams with abandon, slowly while my babies are young, and more quickly as they grow.
I guess the point that I really want to make is that prolonged separation anxiety in early life (whether at night or in the day) is deeply damaging and wires babies brains for lower stress resilience (see Greer Kirshenbaum’s work in this area), and the evidence of low stress resilience is now everywhere in our kids. Separation anxiety after those early years, on the other hand, is a very different beast and even a sign of healthy development. So nuance is important here! Which isn’t easy as our meme culture is anti nuance.
The best book I’ve ever read about this is the “Continuum Connection” by Jean Liedloff, which I’m sure you’ve read, but I encourage others to read it as well!
Yes, it sounds like everything from HG traditions to neurobiology to normal weaning ages to daycare and preschool studies agrees that 3 or 4 is the magic age below which it's harmful to separate babies from their mothers for much of the day, and above which it's fine (if protested by some 3yos) to separate preschoolers from their mothers for half the day or so.
Academic full-time preschools are still harmful for 3-4yos according to lottery studies, but play-based part-time preschools seem fine for most kids.
I always find your articles interesting, but I struggle a bit with what lessons to glean for my own life, given that I live about as far from hunter gatherer society as possible (living a pretty atomized SAHM life in the middle of Los Angeles). My older child will turn three in August and is signed up to start preschool in September. I feel like there's a 50% chance I'll end up backing out and keeping him home. I tried to find a program that I could feel comfortable with. It's an in-home Montessori with 2 teachers and 8 kids. Tuesday and Wednesday are drop-off days, and Thursday is a group outing with all the children, teachers, and parents. Anyway, all that is to say, I'm hoping the benefit of this type of program will be developing a sense of community with the other families and children. Because that's something that's strikingly different between the playgroups you describe and what's generally available in modern life. While the hunter gatherer children are left with people they know well (and are probably related to) in their own village, many western children are taken to an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar people. I don't see any way around the fact that that would be more upsetting for the children and more stressful for the parents.
I hear this criticism a lot and I would just like to gently challenge you on two points. First, the caregivers in hunter-gatherer societies are not always relatives - actually most are unrelated - and not always super familiar. Groups shift and change over time. They are fluid. People join and leave. Sometimes a young child will find themselves with a group of entirely new people. And also, in the modern context, caregivers are not strangers. Sure, they are at first, but give it some time and the child will likely develop a bond with the other children and caregivers. So I really don’t think it’s all that different!
I remember being struck dumb the first time I took my first child to daycare (a few weeks in, I guess) and the carers greeted him like an old friend. Meanwhile - in part because I wasn't doing all the drop-offs - I barely recognised any of them. In that moment I realised the kids and carers were more like (at least) co-workers than strangers to each other, and both groups were well on the way to a much deeper bond. It was very comforting.
I take your point, and again I appreciate your work and always find it interesting. But I feel like on the one hand, there's this exploration of the interconnectedness and supportive social structures of hunter gatherer society, which for so many of us is lacking in modern life. And on the other hand, the sort of tacit suggestion that we can/should just do what hunter gatherers do, often without reckoning with why, given the first point, our social context is very different.
I share your frustration, Alice. Understanding better all the ways in which our modern societies are deficient sometimes just makes me more depressed. All any of us has the power to do is tinker at the edges of our social structures; try to make them a little bit better (a little bit more hunter-gatherer-ish) for ourselves and other people.
Also to add, I'm not necessarily just talking about your work. I really enjoyed the book Hunt Gather Parent, but unlike the author, I didn't end up coming to the conclusion that it was appropriate to let my toddler run errands alone in a major metropolis. Like, the lesson that children can benefit from autonomy is valuable, but the context of your actual life has an impact on what's advisable.
Alice, I think I understand how you feel. The data and stories can be interesting all day, but at the end of the day, I have to come back home to my life in contemporary America. It was for this reason that I never read “bringing up Bebe” when it was popular; because I don’t live in France. That said, I have a five, seven, and nine-year-old. I have definitely enjoyed learning about parenthood around the world, my entire tenure as a mother. For me it can simply be grounding that there are MANY ways to be a good parent. It’s encouraging that the ways my kids and family struggle may be temporary or normal or fixable. It all goes in the big pot of ideas which helps ground me and keep the longterm perspective in mind. I have absolutely not moved my family to live in a hunter, gatherer society; nor have I started homeschooling despite the myriad books I read on it lol. But I’m definitely edified by encountering a broader picture of parenting across my own time and space. 🧡 I’m sure you’re doing your very best, as any of us can.
PS: your Montessori preschool sounds awesome. In my experience and humble opinion, your confidence as a parent in whatever school you choose is more/less the defining factor in your kids having a successful time.
Yes! I think “there are lots of ways to parent” is a good central thesis to all of this. And it's all helpful to consider. I think what I feel like I don't see enough of (not that any one writer is obliged to cover this particular topic) are suggestions or policy proposals for how to adapt modern life to be more conducive to more traditional/supportive child rearing practices. I was thinking yesterday that senior communities are very common (especially where I grew up in Florida) and there are communities for singles, but there aren't official communities (apartment buildings, gated communities, condos) that are explicitly for families raising children. I feel like a lot of the struggles of contemporary western parenting are downstream of wider social problems (loss of third spaces, general isolation, screen addiction, bowling alone, etc) and it's hard to tackle any of these issues as an individual parent.
For what it's worth, my church has become my hunter gatherer experience, with as much support and childcare as we can muster for each other in modern times. I think a lot of religious communities do this well. It has required letting go of some of my own preferences in order to be open to the help and influence of a broader community. And it's been worth it. I know not every family has a religious community. It seems some on-line groups have meet ups in person and homeschool co-ops sort of get there, but not quite. Best friends sharing weekly routines and child care is along the same lines.
Great post, thank you! My only comment, as a parent of older kids (11 and 15), is that eventually you’ll have to navigate the fact that seeing friends and social events = giving them a phone and internet connection. My kids have very limited screen time at home and zero free access to the internet. It is when going to “social” activities that screens become the issue. At 3 and 5 their time with other kids may be the ideal we imagine of creativity and play and imagination, but the older they get the harder it’s going to be (at least in my experience) to find other kids who want to do that over staring at their phones. By the time my younger son was prob 7-8 we were already dealing with him encountering kids who were already “over” playing because of screens.
That’s so sad. Yeah screen time is a whole other enchilada. And I certainly don’t strive for perfection when it comes to limiting screens either. But I do think that given the choice between letting my kids do something a bit “risky” or emotionally challenging in the real world, versus keeping them home and letting them watch TV, I opt for the former. Because the truth is that if my daughter DOESNT go to school, she’s gonna spend more time on a screen so I can work.
I predict that studies on whether kids do better with a more structured environment in preschool/school/aftercare/sports, vs with less structure and more opportunity for free play at home or a friend's house, are going to get increasingly confounded by poor screen discipline at home.
If 80% of homemaking or WFH parents start letting their kids mainline unsupervised YouTube all day, they're going to have increasingly worse outcomes, compared to kids stuck in institutions for 10 hours a day that are mostly screen-free or that ensure only kid-appropriate screen content.
It doesn't make the latter good for kids, but at least it's not as bad as the former can get.
Heck, I sent my 2yo to part-time daycare because I had a difficult pregnancy and couldn't parent well from the couch. When I saw how much I was turning to (kid-appropriate) screen time in order to survive, I figured daycare would better for him. He ended up hating it, but I maintain it was the best decision I could have made with the info I had at the time, so I'm very sympathetic to such situations.
But none of that means that extended hours in structured institutions are *actually* better for kids than free play at home or a friend's house. It's sad that future studies will probably fail to distinguish that and will make it look like they are. We'll have to rely on the older studies before childhood tablet use became so prevalent, if we want to know a base rate for how good things at home could be without it.
I was able to mostly keep my daughter with family or myself till 3 due to a flexible job and obviously a helpful family. But family schedules changed and my work got busier. At three we started sending her to a neighbor who does in home care. It’s been such a blessing, my daughter loves it and she gets to play with kids all day. And honestly, I’m a better more patient and more fun mom having some time without her. I agree that there is a difference between discomfort and actual trauma. And the two really shouldn’t be confused if a kid is a little upset when you drop them off at preschool!
My daughter started Montessori school when she was 2.5 (and my mother in law watched her for a year before that when I went back to work). My son started with a sitter I adore when he was 8 months old. It always felt, in my bones, to be the right choice. Thank you for sharing your experience and research on the topic! The MAHA/trad wife messaging is a lot these days 🤪
This is so comforting. Thank you again for your profound research and writing!
This is such a helpful article!! Thank you 🙏 ❤️❤️❤️
I needed this so much! Thank you for sharing!
Damn, thanks for this one. Going to share it with some mom friends 🧡
The comparison between modern American childcare practices and tribal societies like the !Kung is fundamentally flawed. It’s not an apples-to-apples situation. For one, these tribes build their entire child-rearing philosophy on a radically different foundation. Take the !Kung: they practice extended bedsharing, with nearly constant skin-to-skin contact during the first year. That level of physical and emotional attunement sets a secure attachment baseline that most Western children simply don’t get.
In those societies, caregiving is communal—but it’s not impersonal. Daily contact time between the child and caregivers (not just the mother) far exceeds what’s typical in the West. And while some might claim these caregivers are “strangers,” that’s misleading. These are members of tight-knit, interdependent groups where everyone knows everyone. That’s not equivalent to a rotation of daycare workers in a commercial setting. Familiarity, trust, and cultural continuity are baked into the system.
Also worth noting: once tribal children are older, they’re often reintegrated with their mothers. There’s a fluidity and constancy in attachment relationships that our hyper-scheduled, fragmented system can’t replicate.
So no, we can’t flatten this into “they use group care, so daycare is fine.” Our society is deeply atomized. Children often experience disconnection from birth—starting with impersonal hospital births, then sleep training, then daycare, then school, then screens. Pretending that doesn’t have long-term psychological consequences is a comforting illusion.
I’m not saying daycare is categorically bad. But reducing it to “other cultures do communal care too” glosses over a massive structural and relational gap. The comparison obscures more than it reveals.
I'm not sure if none of you were in daycare yourselves, or you were and you just don't remember it?? But I was, and I remember, and these kids are playing you. This carrying on crying thing is an act they drop literally about 90 seconds after mom/dad drops them off and then they're smiling and laughing and have a grand old time. It's not unusual for them to repeat the same act upon pick up.
And when I say "act" I don't mean it's thought out or purposeful faking or anything like that (obviously) I just mean it's not reflective of any enduring emotion, it's done bc it's what elicits sympathetic comforting actions from parents like hugs and kisses and they like that. But as soon as they realize the parent is gone and that the tears have no purpose, they disappear. Perhaps you have to see it to understand what a quick shift it is. It's one of my clearest memories from daycare is watching kids who were squealing with joyful laughter and enthusiasm all day suddenly flip like a light switch into crying/get hugs and kisses sympathy mode as soon as they spotted mom (or the opposite upon drop off). It's not much different from a toddler pitching a fit because they don't want to go to bed and then 30 seconds later they're sound asleep...they don't like the change and then a minute later they're fine.
FWIW, I *loved* daycare. It was so much fun.
I feel like you've made a valid point (separation anxiety has always been a thing) and then linked it to an equally valid point (daycare isn't necessarily traumatic, just like any stressful event if you've got a solid relationship). But daycare is a far cry from what you're describing in the hunter gatherer cultures. There is no mixed age play, the carers are completely unfamiliar (at first, obviously this changes quickly), there are no siblings or cousins around, and the carer - child ratio often isn't ideal.
In saying that, beyond completely re-working society, it's the best that's available for most people.
And even if we were to re-work society, finding the ideal solution would probably be impossible. What's best for the kids is unlikely to be what is best for the parents. We're facing that struggle now, as we've chosen homeschooling even though it's not the best choice financially. Sacrifices have to be made with any decision
Here’s my genuine question. (I’m not trying to be a troll I promise.) Aren’t (most) daycares *also* an example of evolutionary mismatch?
The difference from your example here is that when a hunter gatherer mom leaves her child in the camp that—noteworthy—they have lived in with the same people for *their entire life*, then yes, they may lightly cry or protest. (Because the person who has nursed the most will always be the favorite). But they are being left with people THEY HAVE KNOWN SINCE BIRTH. Family members, alloparents, other children they know like siblings, familiar faces. Not total strangers. There is so obviously no trauma there.
But expecting a child to handle being abruptly left with strangers (modern daycares/preschools) would be like expecting a !Kung mother to be fine dropping her child off with the Hazda. These are people and an environment the child has never even *seen* before. Both child and mother would utterly FLIP! The child has never spoken to these people in their entire lives. (Just like daycare/preschool workers.) They would be terrified. And rightly so. There’s a reason for that type of response in evolution. If this were to happen to a child throughout evolution, it would be because they are either being kidnapped or abandoned. There is a reason—an evolutionary, neurobiological reason—why the level of distress, crying, clinging, and more happens to a child in this modern setting. There is a reason leaving our children in such a state of stress, fear, and sadness is so physiologically gutting for the mom/parent. This is not a normal thing to do to a child, and did not happen during our shared evolutionary past the way we’re doing it today.
I’m not anti-preschool, or even anti-daycare. I think this whole thing could be solved if the mothers were allowed to stay until the child knows the care workers WELL, is comfortable with them, and chooses *on their own* to leave the mom and go play. Whether that takes a week, a month, or half a year, so be it. The child needs to not be left in a state of overwhelming distress. But mothers are expected to leave abruptly—and often, for up to 9 hours a day.
One dad from Germany I spoke to who had been at home with their daughter for 0-3, had put her in preschool (just a couple hours) but was allowed to remain at the care center with his daughter—getting to know the caregivers together for SIX MONTHS if that’s what it took. She took a while to like it, but now, does not utterly break down in sheer distress and overwhelm when he leaves.
I’ve spoken to moms with awful experiences but who were gaslighted by the center workers: one was told “crying is good” and that “this is normal.” But the degree of fear some have is not normal. (It may be *common* because in our fucked up society that’s forced on a lot of women to have to do, but it most certainly is not normal.)
One mom I spoke to said her child didn’t eat for the whole first month of preschool and would cry if she even moved an inch from her (previously having been very independent). Another said her potty trained girl peed her pants 4 times in two hours and woke up with screaming nightmares for weeks. Another was suddenly pulling his hair out. Another turned into a zombie for months not wanting to be anywhere but home while not in daycare, and would “nap” at 10 am during “playtime” (he had been done with naps a year before). Ours cried so hard for two full hours until she was gagging; none of the workers could soothe her—she would yell at them to “get away from me!”
Trauma is when a child’s physiological distress (hormones and neuropeptides coursing through the blood/brain) is more than they have the cognitive resources to cope with (whereby the prefrontal cortex would still be “online”, so they’re just feeling sad—not utterly terrified out of their minds.) When a child is abruptly left with entire strangers, that level of stress is there for a reason. It is not evolutionarily normal to force that on a child.
So I’m all for a daycare system that allows mothers to remain until the child chooses, on their own, to leave the mom to go play. Not the other way around. Then, a normal level of sadness upon departure is expected and normal. Because the distress we experienced is so clearly to me, an example of evolutionary mismatch. It doesn’t happen in HG societies.
At daycare, when the mother finally returns, a sense of overwhelming relief rushes over the child, but then they are brought back there again and again. That sense of abandonment is certainly something to pay attention to. Many times, the child is pulled out of the arms of the mother. And the mom has to just … walk away. If this wasn’t harmful, the physiological response wouldn’t utterly gut a mom. And: This is not a socialized feeling either. I spoke to an ultra feminist, career-first, no-nonsense, bootstrapping, 1970s mom who had never, ever, “bothered herself” with reading any “fluffy” psychology in her day. She wasn’t even familiar with Jung or Freud. Everything SHE read supported and pushed her into this choice. She was an engineer and she was cognitively confident as can be about it. But even she was shocked how much it felt like a punch in the stomach when her child cried every time she left him. This is an evolutionary process to keep baby with mom.
This misogynist “ugh moms are so hover-y, anxious, fussy,” etc sentiment is rampant. Mothers know their children. The workers want to treat every child the same when they are all genetically different on the sensitive-to-negative-stimuli scale.
Here’s my last rant about the line, “yeah it was difficult at first, but NOW THEY LOVE IT!” Sure, they may love it. They latched onto the other kids and care workers, out of necessity. They formed new attachment figures. But how do they feel about *mom* now?
My guess is: misunderstood, less trusting, abandoned, not listened to. Hurt and spiteful. That decimates a child’s confidence and security.
When we grow up to be adults, a big insult we like to throw around is “insecure” … For example, girls talking about guys they’re set up with: “Ew he was sooo insecure.” Or dudes calling a girl “clingy.”
But why do we think people are insecure? Maybe because, their limbic and brainstem architecture was “fired and wired” to respond to the relational, environmental stimuli they had—which, by very definition, was insecure.
Really appreciate your perspective.
When you said this, “I’m not exactly sure how or when it happened, but at some point over the course of the last ten thousand years, motherhood went from being a thing that was primarily about survival to being a thing that was about creating perfection,” I thought about how at some point, human culture stopped being about (basic) survival too.
I saw a video once of a group of baboons dropping their tasks to run to a cliff and watch a storm come in. And I think all the time, who decided our way of life was better than *that*? But maybe that’s just because I’m tired. lol