Separation Anxiety Is a Million-Year-Old Problem

And it probably isn’t going to traumatize your child

My daughter started in a new school this week and there have been a lot of tears. She is three, and I’ve been holding off as long as possible, in part because she is a clinger but also because she is chill, so getting some work done when she is home is actually possible. (My five-year-old son, on the other hand, never cries at school drop-off and when he is home there is zero chance of me getting anything done, so playgroups and school have always been a bit of a no-brainer with him). But, for a myriad of reasons I won’t get into here, I decided it was time for my daughter to start.

This morning, like the four before, I listened to a string of protests during the 5-minute drive to the school, and then carried her to her classroom, disentangled her from my body, kissed her crying face, and handed her to her teacher before making a swift and definitive exit.

Is this hard on me? Yes, it is. In the two minutes it takes for me to transfer her to her teacher and make a run for it, I feel like a monster. I want to turn around and go back and grab her and spend the rest of the day snuggling, work be damned. But that’s not how the world works. I’ve got shit to get done and I need time without my children to do it.

And the God-honest truth is, by the time I am back home and I’ve had a cup of tea and settled myself emotionally, I look around my peaceful, child-free home and I think FUCK YES! There is no feeling like the feeling of opening your laptop to do some writing, a hot cup of tea by your side, knowing that you will not be interrupted two minutes later by a little voice yelling, “Mom I need to poooooooop!!!”

My daughter, for her part, is always happy and chatty at pickup. The teacher assures me that she cries for ten minutes and then stops. She always has a project to show me and a story to tell me. Yesterday she told me that she got to make something out of PLAYDOUGH (apparently this is a big deal). The day before she told me that she learned a new word in French, “poupée” (pronounced poo-pay), and then collapsed in a fit of laughter. She doesn’t exactly seem traumatized.

Clearly, despite the tears, my daughter starting part-time preschool is a win for both of us, and yet SO many mothers doubt themselves. There’s a definite vibe these days that daycare is bad, school is bad, and basically any kind of maternal separation is bad. This isn’t just in my head. Erica Komisar has been spitting vitriol about the harms of daycare on major international podcasts and social media (a phenomenon I have written about here and here). According to recent surveys, right-wing Americans increasingly believe a woman’s place is in the home. Homeschooling is on the rise ever since the pandemic, and celebrities like Kourtney Kardashian as saying things like, “Why do kids fucking go to school? Truly, it’s so dated.” (Uhhhh, where do I even start?)

It’s hard to untangle the forces at play here, and my goal is not to get into a political debate over homeschooling or to unearth an anti-feminist conspiracy theory. Rather, I’d like to point out that separation anxiety is simply a million-year-old problem that mothers have been dealing with since the dawn of the species. There’s nothing new about it.

Mothers have always worked, and they have always faced a trade-off between working more efficiently versus working while caring for children. Given the opportunity, most human mothers “in the wild” will chose to leave their children behind, as long as it is reasonably safe to do so, in order to forage more efficiently. Kids don’t like this. They never have, and yet somehow they manage to grow into mentally healthy, capable adults (the research strongly suggests that hunter-gatherers are, in fact, MORE mentally healthy than most Westerners).

It's true that our kids aren’t doing so well these days. Depression and anxiety are on the rise, and everyone is looking for the smoking gun. But the smoking gun is not school. Too much time in a low-quality daycare setting before the age of three, maybe. But what about rising ACE scores, unregulated social media and smartphone use, increasing pressure to succeed in school, socioeconomic stress, and increasing social isolation? That’s where I’d put my money.

This piece is for all the moms struggling with difficult separations and wondering whether they are terrible parents. Maybe we are, but if so, we are in good company. Mothers have been handing off protesting children to be cared for by others around the world for probably at least a million years.

Hunter-gatherer preschool

First off, it’s worth mentioning that throughout human history, mothers have always worked outside the home. Nothing gets my goat more than people who call stay-at-home-moms “traditional.” Tradition, by definition, means long-standing, and the world’s oldest profession is neither prostitution (as the saying goes) nor childcare.

It’s hunting and gathering.

In hunter-gatherer societies, women spend most of their adult lives either pregnant or breastfeeding, but I have never heard of a stay-at-home hunter-gatherer mother. Of course, there is some variation across societies, but in most cases the mother goes off foraging every single day, unless she is ill or injured.

Up until the age of weaning, which is usually around age three, children accompany their mothers on most foraging trips. The reason for this is simple: there are no bottles or breast pumps in hunter-gatherer societies, so a nursing child must be near his mother. That said, mothers will sometimes arrange for older children to accompany them and to hold and care for the baby while they forage, since digging tubers with a baby on your back slows the work down considerably and limits returns.

Most babies nurse on demand and nursing bouts are short and frequent (as often as once every fifteen minutes in the first year of life), but as the child grows the interval between feeds will naturally lengthen, freeing up mothers to spend more time away. Once a child is two, he is probably already eating solids and nursing only once every couple of hours. In this case, if the foraging excursion is short enough to fit between feeding sessions, the mother will often opt to leave him behind.

Then, around age three, the child is weaned. At this point, he will systematically be left behind in a multi-age playgroup while the mother goes out to forage. The average foraging excursion typically lasts about four hours, and during this time the child will mainly be cared or by his peers (slightly older children between 6-11 years old). Research on the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania suggests that children’s interaction with other children begins to exceed interaction with mother and father by age three, “because by this age children played with other children most of the time” (See Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods page 178).

Adult intervention in playgroups is minimal, although there is usually at least one adult in camp within shouting distance (in case of an emergency that the children cannot handle alone). As Shostack puts it, “!Kung children are essentially left to their own devices. Far from leading to boredom, this freedom results in inventive and energetic play, which characterizes much of their day.”

Do mothers worry about leaving their three-year-olds behind, in the care of six-year-olds, with no one but a very old or ailing adult to intervene in case of emergencies? Yes, as a matter of fact, they do.

One !Kung woman describes it this way: “When I sit in the village and my children are playing around me, I don’t worry; I just watch what they do. When I leave them behind and go gathering, I worry that they won’t be well taken-care of, especially if the only person in camp is there because she isn’t feeling well” (See Nisa, by Marjorie Shostack, p. 97).

Nevertheless, the efficiency and freedom mothers gain by leaving children behind seems to outweigh this worry, since most mothers choose to go gathering with all but the youngest of children. According to Shostack, “Most !Kung mothers prefer to leave all but the youngest children in the camp while they gather: food collection is more efficient that way, and distances traveled can be greater.”

In other words, then as now, a mom’s gotta do what a mom’s gotta do. Gathering food for the family is more important than ensuring the absolute safety and comfort of children. No one in !Kung society would consider these women to be “bad moms” for leaving their children behind to go out foraging, even if they take some risk in doing so.

And what about the kiddos? How do they feel about being left behind? Just like our own reticent preschoolers, they are not always thrilled about it. As Frank Marlowe puts it, Hadza children “of either sex may be asked to hold a protesting toddler when the mother leaves camp to forage.”

To make matters worse, this transition into being left behind in multi-age playgroups typically occurs simultaneously with weaning from the breast and from being consistently carried and held, which hunter-gatherer children absolutely HATE. Among the Ache of Paraguay, anthropologists have observed that “weaning is an extremely unpleasant experience…with children screaming, hitting, throwing tantrums for several weeks.”

The same is apparently true of the !Kung. In Marjorie Shostack’s interviews with the !Kung woman Nisa, she vividly recalls the experience of being weaned:

“I remember when my mother was pregnant with Kumsa…She said, ‘You can’t nurse any longer. If you do, you’ll die.’ She took some paste made from the dch’a root and rubbed it on her nipples. When I tasted it, I told her it was bitter. When my mother was pregnant with Kumsa, I was always crying. I wanted to nurse!”

And if hunter-gatherer children resent being weaned and left behind in camp, they resent having to walk when they follow parents on outings almost as much:

“Children scream, cry, hit their parents, and try everything they can think of to get the adults to continue to carry them,” anthropologists say of the Ache. “Often, they simply sit and refuse to walk, prompting older band members to leave them behind. This tactic leads to a dangerous game of “chicken” in which parents and children both hope that the other gives in before the child is too far behind and may become lost.”

Sound familiar?

Basically, age three represents a difficult transition period for children in most hunter-gatherer societies: One that is accompanied by screaming, hitting, tantrums and every known trick in the toddler arsenal. But despite all of this turmoil and hell-raising, most children finish by adjusting perfectly well to the multi-age playgroup setting. In their observations of the Efe, Morelli and Tronick found that “young Efe children experience a significant decrease in maternal attention postweaning, and as this difficult transition wanes, they appear to be comfortably situated in mixed-age play groups of peers within their camp.” (See Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods p. 204)

In fact, by the time they have gotten over their initial shock, most children strongly prefer to stay behind while the adults go out to forage. As Shostack puts it, “Most [!Kung] children want to stay at home with the other children: playing with friends is highly preferable to the stressful travel and long hours often involved in gathering.” (Nisa, page 96).

And the gains in efficiency for mothers are remarkable. Among the Efe, the proportion of time that mothers spent in infant care was negatively related to the number of four- to seventeen-year-olds helpers she had and positively correlated with the amount of time that mothers spent acquiring food away from camp.

These primitive daycares WORK, and they are probably a long-standing feature of humanity’s evolutionary history for that reason, prompting some anthropologists to go so far as to suggest that they may have been “the key to human life-history evolution” (source).

Let’s stop confusing discomfort with trauma

I love these anthropological accounts because they throw into sharp relief just how universal the maternal experience is, and how these problems we all seem to feel are “new” have actually been around for millennia. Moms have always faced trade-offs between ensuring the happiness and security of their children and doing what they need to do to earn a living. Children are wired to crave maternal presence in order to ensure their own survival, and will resist separation (even when it’s in their best interest), but ultimately there is no evidence that frequent, temporary separations are in any way harmful. Hunter-gatherer children grow up to be mentally healthy, despite frequent forced separations, abrupt weaning, and other potential “traumas,” and your children probably will too.

Ultimately, I think this gets to the core of why I am actually interested in hunter-gatherer research. I grew up in a crunchy family, and my account has always attracted a crunchy following, so I know from experience that crunchy moms worship the “natural way” of doing things. And what way of life is more natural than the hunter-gatherer lifestyle?

But over the course of my research, I have discovered over and over again that what the crunchy community BELIEVES is the “natural” way of doing things is based on a lot of misunderstandings of how humans actually behave “in the wild.” Hunter-gatherer mothers hardly ever breastfeed their children past age three. They all work hard, “outside the home,” and they are not afraid to leave their children in the care of others. They are loving and affectionate, but they also yell and sometimes hit their children. They rarely, if ever, engage in play and they privilege adult socialization and even clandestine sexual affairs over the harmony and stability of their nuclear family unit. They are, at the end of the day, just women, with all of the same desires and needs and foibles as the modern Westerner. Yet somehow, their kids turn out fine.

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. It’s no longer enough to birth and raise a healthy child to independence. That child must also be happy, successful, smart, and kind. If they fall short on any measure, it’s undoubtedly because of something you, the mother, did wrong. Never mind that we know these things are at least 50% (if not 70%) genetic. Never mind that society shapes our children as much as mothers. Never mind that fathers also have something to do with it.

The irony is that in our quest to create perfect humans, we are actually creating anxious, depressed, and entitled ones. We want them to succeed, so we push them to the breaking point in school and their extracurricular activities. We want them to be safe, so we keep them away from friends and social events and give them a phone and an internet connection instead. We want them to be happy, so we snow-plough hurdles and discomfort out of their path and then rush them off to therapy at the first sign of distress. This isn’t helping kids and it isn’t helping moms.

So next time your kid is upset about something, ask yourself: Is forcing this situation really going to create lifelong trauma or is this just some temporary discomfort we need to push through for the good of the family? I can guarantee you that if your underlying bond with your child is strong, in the vast majority of cases, it’s the latter. When it’s not, I trust you can tell the difference and make the necessary adjustments. Our job is not to shelter our children from any upset or discomfort, or to be eternally present for them - but to show them that we love them and are there for them through thick and thin.

I think the reason that hunter-gatherers score so high on measures of mental health boils down to one thing: The quality of their relationships with other humans. This isn’t about total hours spent together (although they spend much more time in close physical and social contact with others than most of us do in the West), nor do their relationships blossom in perfect harmony without conflict (on the contrary, there are fights to the death), but the general sense of having strong social support safeguards against all kinds of things that we would absolutely consider traumatic in the modern context: hunger, disease, violence, the death of a spouse, child, or loved one. Real trauma was actually a fixture of human evolution, and yet somehow hunter-gatherers managed to thrive.

I think there’s a lesson in this for parents: Do whatever it takes to ensure you have a strong, loving relationship with your children (for many mothers, this means getting help with those same children so you can get a break), and then work to build a village of people around you who also care for and love them. This benefits both of you, since it takes some pressure off the mother-child relationship and let’s you get a break while also giving your child a greater sense of security.

This is no easy feat (as someone who has moved about 5 times in 10 years, my village is currently non-existent), but if you succeed, your child will have the best possible chances of emotional stability in adulthood. Will they be happy all of the time? Probably not. Will they be wildly successful? Probably not. Will they make it through the day most days, willing to try again and do their best the next morning? In all likelihood, yes.

And that’s really all we can give them.