Running from your day job to coaching soccer practice at night. Eating dinner in your car in the dance studio parking lot. Racing to the store to pick up the glue your third grader absolutely needs for tomorrow’s science project.
Modern parenting can sometimes feel like both a marathon and a sprint. But it wasn’t always this way.
For 95% of human history, mothers had a much different experience.
Science writer Elena Bridgers researches a style of “Paleolithic parenting” practiced by hunter-gatherer societies. It included longer intervals between births, increased community support and (gasp!) more time for leisure activities.
“The self-sacrificial idea of motherhood, where you’re supposed to just be burning the candle on both ends, is not healthy and not normal,” Bridgers tells TODAY.com.
So, should we all be Paleo parenting? Not necessarily.
Bridgers, who is the mom to a 3 and 5-year-old, doesn’t dole out parenting advice. But her research does validate that being a mom today is hard … and that we can learn a lot from our evolutionary ancestors.
Longer intervals between births
“We all have this idea in our heads that without birth control, women would just be churning out these huge families,” Bridgers says. But Stone Age families likely had a relatively manageable amount of children.
On average, hunter-gatherer women gave birth to four children spaced roughly four years apart.
“Exercise, diet and breastfeeding patterns acted together to suppress ovulation in a woman who just gave birth,” she says. “Combined, those three things are effective as birth control for four years or so.”
After humans turned from hunter-gatherers to agriculture, the space between births decreased: Bridgers notes that the median interbirth interval was 33 to 38 months in the US in 2014.
Why the shift? Experts aren’t sure — it may have been due to changes in diet or breastfeeding patterns.
Experts are more aligned when they go back even further into our evolutionary past to our closest animal ancestors: the great apes. They gave birth to babies every six or even eight years.So what do they believe enabled humans to evolve into giving birth every four years instead of six?
Communal childcare.
Increased community support
“Women in these societies have far more help from extended kin and community networks than the average mother in the West does today,” Bridgers says. Hunter-gatherer societies are “extraordinarily cooperative and egalitarian.”
In the first year of a baby’s life, it was normal for a baby to have as many as 14 different caretakers in the space of a single day, and in some cases, the mother only provided about 25% of the care, according to Bridgers.
Women used that (childcare) time to go out and forage. There was no such thing as a stay-at-home mom.”
Elena Bridgers
Once children were weaned (around age 2 or 3), they spent most of their days in multi-age playgroups with “very little adult supervision or intervention,” Bridgers says. “There is kind of an evolutionary precedent for daycare.”
The older children instinctively learned to supervise the younger kids, and by doing so, they were often more prepared to become parents than we are today.
“Women used that (childcare) time to go out and forage,” Bridgers says, adding, “There was no such thing as a stay-at-home mom.”
More leisure time
Moms who lived through the Stone Ages didn’t have iPads to entertain their kids … and yet, Bridgers notes that hunter-gatherers spent “about half” their waking hours in leisure.
Not only that, but everyone in these small nomadic societies enjoyed about the same amount of free time.
Bridgers says, “The distribution of leisure is extremely equitable, so mothers have no less leisure time than fathers. And parents have no less leisure time than other childless members of the community.”
Can you even imagine the thrill of having the same amount of free time you had before you became a parent? It seems absurdly unattainable, yet that’s exactly what happened for thousands of years.
As Bridgers knows firsthand, “Mothers need rest and deserve rest, just like anyone else in society, but the way we’ve structured society these days makes it almost impossible, whether you’re a working mom or a stay-at-home mom, to get the help that you need to be able to rest.”
The original “tradwives”
On social media, tradwives, or women who lean into a 1950s-inspired ideal of homemaking, tout what they often call a “simple” or “traditional” way of living. The often have many children close in age, seem to be completely self-reliant and appear to use every spare moment for the benefit of their family.
As we now know, these three traits are in complete opposition to how families operated for the vast majority of human history.
