The Birth of A Better World
What we can learn about community from present-day villagers
We are eager to build a better world, and we might begin by imagining the world we want to live in… but, if we start here, we quickly encounter an unexpected obstacle.
What do we believe is possible? Are we limiting our vision of the future by preemptively and unnecessarily eliminating possibilities we wish for but decide are not achievable?
Because we are born into a capitalist system — a culture I call the marketplace — our very notions about individual value are distorted and we can sometimes believe wealth, power, prestige, and productivity define worth. Peering through this culturally-created lens, it can be difficult to believe in a future valuing human connection, intimate relationship, and an abundance of time for shared relaxation above all else.
And none of this is our fault. The ideas that shape our world are inherited. From birth to our first days, weeks, and months, our worldview forms based on the actions of the adults who care for us.
First-time parents all too often find themselves bewildered by an abundance of books, gadgets, products, and services being marketed to them. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of books on how to raise a happy, healthy baby and, later, a well-adjusted, ambitious, and successful child, adolescent, and adult. Confusingly, the advice offered varies so wildly from one book to the next that a parent can find guidance from one directly contradicting another.
Worse, many of the top experts have their own product lines or subscription services for everything from monthly boxes of sensory toys to self-swaddling beds promising to lull even the crankiest baby into a blissful sleep. There may be no better illustration of how the marketplace preys on insecurity and vulnerability than the proliferation of products promising lasting relief to sleep-deprived, socially isolated parents of newborns often desperate to do whatever they can to soothe their new arrivals.
In the marketplace, these well-intentioned, exhausted, and frustrated parents are viewed as a customer base representing a marketing opportunity, instead of what they are: community members in need of the wraparound support and attention — 40 pairs of hands ready to help and hold. Our culture has replaced these much-needed hands with technology, gadgets, and techniques taught in books, all designed to make children's existence more convenient to their parents.
In sharp contrast to our marketplace culture is the traditional village culture, where children were once tended to by dozens of adults, never wanting for comfort or lacking loving arms to hold them. While some may argue that this is a romanticized imagining of a time we cannot possibly understand — before the advent of written history — we do have present-day evidence supporting the “it takes a village” notion. And the current research is, frankly, breathtaking.
Late last year, a flurry of stories made the news when researchers studying a nomadic BaYaka population in the Republic of Congo published a study in the journal Developmental Psychology. The group studied, the Mbendjele, is a highly mobile, egalitarian group that lives in multifamily camps of 20 to 80 people. They are considered “immediate-return” hunter-gatherers because they don’t store food for the future. Researchers conducted fieldwork with this community in 2014, following 18 children aged 4 years and under, to track how caregivers responded to these children on a typical day.
The team observed that many caregivers responded rapidly to crying children by comforting, feeding, holding, soothing, or offering affection, but never scolding. These children enjoyed a high level of physical contact and care for the majority of the time they were observed. Almost all incidences of crying were responded to by one or more village caregivers within 25 seconds! Out of 220 bouts of crying, only three weren’t tended to within that immediate time frame. While this is remarkable, what researchers were most compelled by was not the amount of care given to these children, but rather how much support mothers received in this village setting.
Between 38% to 46% of caregiving was provided by non-relatives, older siblings, and fathers, and more than 40% of crying bouts were resolved by someone other than the mother of the child. What made headlines was the idea that Stone Age children were likely to have received better parenting than our children today.
In this modern-day village setting, children receive approximately nine hours per day of close contact with various caregivers, giving mothers a chance to rest or work. In stark contrast, infants in Western marketplace cultures receive less than 30 minutes of close contact per day, despite this contact being a critical part of early development.
Parents today are living with less support than at any point in human history, and the legacy we are passing down is the idea that the struggles created by individualism are normal. While no one is suggesting a return to a hunter-gatherer community, these findings give us pause and offer us an opportunity to imagine another world. A world where mothers are supported by their trusted community and young children are given the levels of comfort and care we are evolutionarily built for.
What might such a system look like? How could it shape our children to feel the welcome and comfort of a village? Do you know of any solutions that exist today that offer hope?
My best advice to parents is to take the time they might otherwise spend reading books or shopping for gadgets and instead invest that time in building whatever community of support they can piece together. What babies and children really need is attention and love, and asking one or two parents to meet a child’s ongoing needs is often asking for too much.
Start here, by building whatever community you can as a parent, and raise a generation better primed to become interdependent villagers.