What Does Paleo Parenting Look Like?
From a Darwinian perspective, human reproduction is pretty idiotic. “We are terrible at getting pregnant,” writes the American-born British archaeologist Brenna Hassett, “then when we do we undercook the baby and end up with a ridiculously helpless infant.” That doesn’t even account for the nightmare of human childbirth, the biological equivalent of the old sofa-in-the-stairwell dilemma. Then there’s the absurdly long time it takes us to reach maturity. Many chimpanzees breastfeed from their mother until about age 4, then shoot up into adults who are fecund by 10 and reproducing by 13. By contrast, many human babies in developed countries wean by age 1, but then reproduction doesn’t happen for two or three decades after that.
Hassett’s project looks anew at what we’ve largely taken for granted. Her, helps explain that last strangeness: why human childhood is so long. But she is also interested in entering a conversation about just how much we should apply our prehistoric ancestors’ ways of dealing with these oddities to contemporary child-rearing. Hassett is not pleased with what has essentially become a sort of paleo-parenting style—including trendy practices such as “”—that is supposedly drawn from how we nurtured humans in their early years before modern life took over.
