Others' Day

Probably because I grew up in a part of the world where most families were small and nuclear, I often heard friends remark that nothing in their experience--not the baby-sitting jobs, certainly not complaints from their own overworked mothers, not all of Erma Bombeck's brilliant wisecracks--had quite prepared them for the night-and-day relentlessness of the task of caring for their first baby. (The only person among us who knew the score ahead of time was herself the oldest of eleven. It could truly be said that Kathy had already been a parent.)

A human infant is, of course, about as helpless a creature as one finds in nature. And it needs support for an extremely long time. Mothers and fathers are not born with the skills required. (Basic issues of caretaking sometimes stymie even the experts. Is crib death best prevented by putting the baby down on its back, side, or stomach? The most recent official answer from pediatricians is that the back is safest.) As soon as an infant can crawl, its moment-to-moment existence is threatened by physical dangers. Getting a child past infancy requires unending vigilance, and attending to its social and emotional education is one of life's most challenging long-term commitments. (The writer James Agee once observed that "begetting a child is at least as serious an act as murder." Yet for the most part, we cheerfully opt to reproduce.)

Humans are flexible creatures, and what we consider the proper and most loving way to bring up a child varies with cultural background, financial circumstances, and individual experience. Yet we are not infinitely flexible. We are mammals, primates with a unique evolutionary history. If our offspring are to survive and behave as social creatures, we must toe a biological bottom line.

In this issue, anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy ("Mothers and Others") takes an extended look at that bottom line. Pulling together evidence from social anthropology, endocrinology, and studies of animal behavior, Hrdy bolsters her hunch that the original human family was far from nuclear. As Mother's Day approaches, we can pause to think about not just the traditional honorees but also fathers, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, day-care workers, and foster parents. It may well be that the devoted labors of "others" made it possible for humans to evolve.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning