Taken from an article I wrote for Families Thames Valley East magazine, September 2010 (p.31)
Hunting for meat could never bring in enough calories to survive on – foraging was always essential. Everyone helped get the food. Mothers have always worked.
Mothers have shared the care of children with others within their families. For most of human history, we have lived in extended families. Raising children takes a lot of effort and a long time – by sharing this around, human beings have thrived.
Mothers have mostly shared the care with other women in their families, but again and again in history these women have been in short supply and men have been pulled in. Sometimes men are deeply involved, sometimes not at all – it depends on what is needed of them. Men’s hormones are triggered by being close to pregnant women and babies, and the more their hormones are triggered, the more they react – they become sensitized. This is nature’s way of pulling men into the caring role when they are needed.
Children have adapted to this method of care. They thrive on being cared for by different people. They have the ability to make adults fall in love with them (very different from some of the closest species to humans where the instinct it to kill the children of others). Babies are extremely sensitive to which adult can give them the best care – anthropologists believe this is how humans developed the ability to read each others’ minds.
A mother staying at home in a a small family unit by herself to look after children is very unusual compared to the way we’ve been operating for over 200,000 years. If the time-line for the whole human race were 24 hours, the “mum at home/dad at work” model started about 30 seconds ago.
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