On Your Baby Preparation List: The Village

Sabrina Scalfari - 13 Aug 17

Originally posted on our blog Well Made Mama.

Up until about 11,000 years ago, most of the world lived in bands of a few dozen members. A large, extended family. Everyone knew everyone. Strangers were rarely encountered. When they were, they were usually avoided. And that was that.

These days, it’s hardly uncommon for a person to live in a city of more than a million people. In fact, it’s the norm. In 1800, only 3% of the world’s population was urban. By 2030, 70% of the world will call a city their home. These are people who, like so many before, have come to accept that the collective efforts and fruits of urban centers may promise more wealth and opportunity than the village they are leaving behind.

Few things strike us as more telling about our general adaptability as a species than our ability to shift from our places of origin to our adopted homes. For millions of years, we more or less stayed together. Our group was our kin. And now, we move. Relentlessly. Our little tribe is no longer defined by blood lines, but instead by street, workplace, school, or place of worship. We are bound to others – strangers – by values, ideas and norms. Nothing more. And yet, in a quickly moving world, these identities become an anchor.. You can take the girl out of the village, but you’ll never take the village out of the girl.

We are drawn to the larger cities for the opportunities they can offer. Yet in seas of faceless millions, we seem to still be driven to create much smaller bands of contacts. Our new friends, our neighbors, our coworkers.The people we see often enough to make the world feel knowable. Without these relationships, we can feel adrift. A handful of people to call on feels like home. Nine million strangers to bump into on the subway does not. This is because the brain still perceives the world through the lens it evolved over millions of years of human experience – not the past hundred years of progress.

And so back to the story of us, way before we started to believe that larger groups meant better living. Customs and cultures evolve for a specific reason. They help a group live a better life. Practices that don’t get discarded. If a practice has remained with humanity over the eons, it seems reasonable to pay attention to the wisdom it offers. Customs that survive are usually the ones that work.

The best way to try and understand the way we lived thousands of years ago is to study the way groups of people who have had little contact with the modern world live now. In the earth, bones stand the test of time. Social customs do not. So anthropologists need to seek out groups of people who still live traditionally as a fleeting illustration of how things once were for all of us.

As it goes, traditional groups of humans that have been studied by anthropologists do not raise children in the modern, nuclear fashion, where parents form an isolated niche that is entirely self-sufficient. On the contrary, in traditional cultures, parenthood is a community effort. Mothers are helped by others, from birth onwards.

Over millions of years, human groups learned that parenting worked better when it was cooperative. Unique to other primates, early human parenting made use of the assistance of other caregivers in the raising of children. When mothers allowed others to help out, they were freed up to find more resources for their families. Everyone benefited.

It has been argued that cooperative breeding, over millennia, gave human offspring a long enough chance at survival to grow large, problem-solving brains. And that the human infant’s need to connect with its different caretakers has hard-wired us as a species to be aware of the emotions of others (a trait that has led to generosity, empathy and the sharing of resources for the betterment of all.) It  It has been argued it is the very reason for humanity’s evolutionary success.

Over the millennia of our human journey,  “the village” – a close knit network of supportive individuals who would offer protection, resources and nurturing to a mother and child – is the story of human parenting. To survive the challenges of the natural environment early human mothers needed the support and protection of many families in their group.  Humans need one another. Mothers really need one another.

The Village is nothing new. It’s the story of us. We may not spend a lot of time thinking about it,  but each of us knows it in her bones. The kinship of other mothers is not a luxury. It is the very fabric of our survival in this new and uncharted land. Finding the support of other mothers is an automatic reflex. Like a first breath, our brains recognize it and latch on immediately. We can’t help ourselves. We need to find one another. And we don’t really rest until we do.

So many new mothers today are starting parenthood far away from their village of origin. We were among their numbers. New arrivals in a city of opportunity, we were time zones away from our own mothers, grandmothers, and aunts. While we had carved out a small band of contacts in our adopted homes, there were few people who could be depended on to offer help when it was really needed. And how could we have known it would matter? Every magazine we read told us to go and buy a pram. No one told us to go out and meet other mothers.

Modern motherhood seems to be missing a link. We are so inundated with new research and new advice on baby rearing, that the lessons of our grandmothers can be sidelined. But it seems improbable that the last hundred years of industrial development should outweigh the wisdom of millions of years of opportunity to experiment with the parental set up. Our ancestors already tried our modern version of solitary super-mothering, all on their own, out there on the savannah. They didn’t find it very satisfactory.

So remember, when it comes to preparing for motherhood, there is probably little that can compare to finding a supportive village of friends, relatives, or other well wishers who can offer friendship, perspective, a shoulder to cry on, and a well-needed laugh at the end of a long day. The village is history’s gift to us. You’ll find yours. Or it will find you. There’s a mother out there who needs you just as much as you need her.

Tell her we say hi!

Academic resources:

1. Diamond, J. (2012) The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? Viking Press. Viking Penguin, USA
2. Lambin, E. (2012) An Ecology of Happiness. University of Chicago Press. Chicagohttp://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/evolution/evolution-motherhood.html
3. Hrdy, S.B. (1999) Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection. Pantheon Books, New York

Sabrina Scalfari

Sabrina is co-founder of Well Made Mama, bringing you evidence-based advice, techniques, and perspectives that help you prepare for the most rewarding and challenging job you will ever have.

View profile for posts, events and more info