Where Are the Multi-Age Playgroups?

The argument for benign-neglect childcare after age 3

At age three and five my children are now in a phase of life where all they really need to be happy is a roaming band of other children. Whenever this serendipitously happens—at the beach where a shared passion for digging up sand crabs unites my children with another sibling pair, or at the park where a gangly redhead suddenly realizes sticks can be swords and lures my son into an epic quest through the adjacent woods—I am amazed at how little I am suddenly needed. I am free! Free to read, to write, to chat with another adult, to stare at the sky.

This was not always the case. When my children were smaller, they mostly needed me (or another caring, attentive adult). They toddled around the playground, seemingly oblivious to the presence of other children, teetering precariously on the ledge of the highest structure they could climb to while I stood and watched, pretending to be a “chill mom” while I quietly clenched my teeth, my muscles tensed, ready to catch a falling body if need be. Sometimes they did that thing where they just stood and stared awkwardly, open-mouthed, at another older child, seemingly mesmerized, but with no actual desire to interact in a meaningful, collaborative way.

I’ve been writing a lot about the daycare debate lately (you can catch that here and here if you missed it), and one of the main findings seem to be that age matters. Most of the controversy centers on whether children under the age of three benefit from daycare or whether, on the contrary, it does them harm. And while I tend to reject the idea of “developmental windows” (do everything right before age three and you’re good to go! As if a four-year-old doesn’t have needs. As if different children don’t have different trajectories) there is some truth to the notion that most children go through a shift around age three.

I suspect this has something to do with the fact that three is the average age of weaning in most hunter-gatherer societies. Since all humans lived as hunter-gatherers for at least 95% of our evolutionary history, it makes sense that this would coincide with a developmental shift in all children (even in the modern, post-industrial context). In traditional foraging societies, before a child is weaned, she must always be in close proximity to her mother. That doesn’t mean she is always being actively cared for by her mother. As I discussed in previous articles on the daycare debate, in some societies mothers provide as little as 25% of care in the first year. But it’s true that baby care in the first year is very high-touch (literally). Babies are constantly held, entertained, bounced, and sung to by a huge variety of caregivers. So challenging daycare (or nanny care) on the grounds that children need exclusive maternal care in the first year is a bunch of bahooey, but questioning whether very young children need more than what your average contemporary daycare can provide is reasonable.

BUT…by the time they are three, children in hunter-gatherer societies are no longer coddled and held all day long the way a one-year-old would be. On the contrary, as soon as they are weaned, children begin spending the majority of their waking hours in multi-age playgroups, with very little adult intervention.

A group of young !Kung boys “play” at hunting

Play groups in the hunter-gatherer context typically consist of a band of six to eight children of both genders, many of whom are related (though not all) and range in age from three to about twelve. The purpose of the group is play. They are not expected to forage or contribute much to adult work. And they usually play close to camp, though not always in camp.

In their observations of the Agta, a group of UK anthropologists reported that “adults had very little, if any, involvement in playgroups: collectively, parents and grandparents consisted of less than 1% of playgroup members” (source). There is usually an adult within shouting distance, but that adult may not actually be providing any direct supervision or care. In fact, the designated caregiver is often an elderly member of the group or a sick person, since all healthy, able-bodied people generally prefer to go out hunting and foraging.

In a hilarious anecdote from his ethnography of the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania, Frank Marlowe describes how the adults would often sneak out of camp and leave him, the anthropologist, to babysit the playgroup so they could forage more efficiently. To me, the fact that they let this strange white dude supervise their kids for the day is proof both of how trusting they are of other humans and how much confidence they have in their kids’ ability to take care of themselves and look out for one another.

Marjorie Shostack made similar observations of the !Kung play groups. She says, “although a watchful surveillance is always kept, adults rarely intervene in children’s play, nor do they offer frequent suggestions. They do occasionally mediate fights, especially between children of unequal size, and they generally try to prevent children from getting hurt” but that’s about it.

One of my favorite facts about playgroups is that, once children become active participants, mothers all but cease playing with their children. Studies show that mothers in hunter-gatherer societies actually play with their children less than any other category of caregiver. They provide nurturance in the form of feeding, comforting, and other forms of direct care, but they very rarely play. Play is the job of other children.

Of course, we have no way of knowing whether or not this approach is “ideal” for children, but I am fairly confident that most Paleolothic hunter-gatherers were not walking around with crippling levels of anxiety and depression, eating disorders, and substance abuse problems. In fact, based on the limited research that we do have on contemporary hunter-gatherers’ mental health, they pretty much blow us Westerners out of the water (this is the best source I have on that).

So what are the implications? Are children in the modern context suffering from a lack of peers and unscheduled time for free-range play? Should we all have our kids enrolled in outdoor, lightly-supervised forest schools starting at age three? It’s not a bad idea (and I certainly think that, based on the evolutionary evidence, preschool starting at age three is fine fine fine) but there are some important differences between the hunter-gatherer model and the Western preschool model that might help explain why some kids have such a hard time transitioning.