What is the “evolved nest”?

Who is Darcia Narvaez? #

A psychologist who studies moral development, how children grow into caring, cooperative adults. She is professor emerita of psychology at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, a former editor of the Journal of Moral Education, and draws on anthropology, neuroscience and developmental and clinical psychology. Her Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality won the American Psychological Association’s William James Book Award in 2015.¹ With the Indigenous educator Four Arrows (Wahinkpe Topa) she wrote Restoring the Kinship Worldview (2022), and with G. A. Bradshaw she wrote The Evolved Nest: Nature’s Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities (2023), with a foreword by the physician Gabor Maté. See What does Gabor Maté say about trauma and addiction?

What is in the evolved nest? #

Eight things, in the version Narvaez and her co-author M. S. Tarsha set out in 2023: a soothing birth and time after it, without harsh or intrusive procedures; breastfeeding when the baby asks, often for several years; affectionate touch, nearly all the time in the early months; responsive care, so that the baby is neither left in distress nor overwhelmed; many responsive carers besides the mother, such as fathers, grandmothers and other adults; free play that the children themselves direct, with children of all ages; a warm, welcoming community; and a close connection with the natural world.²

The word ‘nest’ is chosen with care. Every animal species has its own way of raising its young, and mammals in particular depend on a long period of intensive care. Narvaez’s claim is that humans have one too, worked out over our evolutionary history, and that a child’s developing brain and body expect it. The nest is not about the parents alone. A mother is more attentive to her baby when she feels the support of the community around her, and amongst many First Nations peoples, traditionally, it was the village that raised the children, not just the mother or the parents.³

Where does the idea come from? #

From the way nomadic foragers raise their children, set beside the biology of other mammals. Narvaez treats the life of nomadic foragers as the ‘ancestral context’ in which the nest evolved, and draws on studies of hunter-gatherer childhood for what it held.⁴ In Restoring the Kinship Worldview her evidence again comes mostly from small-band hunter-gatherers, whilst the book’s Indigenous voices come from farming, herding and hunting nations alike, so the two should not be read as the same thing.

Therapeutic Shamanism draws on the same kind of evidence. Hunter-gatherer child-rearing kept children close and responded quickly to their emotional needs, and anthropologists studying hunter-gatherer tribes all over the world have described the children as unusually happy and well adjusted.⁵ The anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, describing the !Kung of the Kalahari, who were hunter-gatherers when she knew them, saw children who rarely cried because they had very little to cry about, and who were reprimanded, if ever, in a soft voice.⁶ Children were usually raised by all the adults in a tribe, not just by their parents.⁷ And for around 95 per cent of the history of our species, children were mostly raised without being hit.⁵

What happens when the nest is missing? #

In Narvaez’s account, the child’s nervous system sets itself for threat. A baby left in distress learns to shut down when distress becomes too great, and a child who rehearses this again and again goes on, as an adult, switching off feeling and thought whenever afraid. Following the psychologist Alice Miller, she argues that this produces people who are threat-reactive, self-protective and inclined either to submit to powerful authority figures or to dominate others.⁸ She asks how one human culture could come to destroy most of the living communities on the planet, and answers, in four words, “species-abnormal upbringing, unnested care”.⁹

The result, she says, is three splits: from oneself, from other people, and from the rest of nature. In industrialised societies, in her words, “everyone is suffering from not enough mothering”, and has been for a long time, since the power to mother well was taken from women by ideology, work and culture.¹⁰

How does the evolved nest relate to Therapeutic Shamanism? #

The two can be set side by side. In Therapeutic Shamanism, what we experience in childhood shapes how we experience and treat the world around us, so honestly looking at how we raise children is part of finding our way back to a healthy society. Hunter-gatherer childhoods give both a healthy standard to measure things against and a template to remodel things on.¹¹ Even our good childhoods seldom match what anthropologists usually report of hunter-gatherer ones; like the frog in the saucepan, we accept as normal what is not.¹¹ Narvaez’s eight components set out what such a standard holds in her account.

Narvaez places the damage in the culture more than in individual parents, and so does Therapeutic Shamanism in its own terms. Abuse and neglect are endemic in Taker culture; parents mostly raise children as they were raised, because they know no better, and so the cycle rolls on down the generations.¹² As humans, our survival as babies depends on finding someone to act as a mother to us, so the need for mother is hardwired, and when it is not well met it leaves the wound Therapeutic Shamanism calls the Mother-WoundMother-Wound. The near-universal injury of inadequate mothering in Taker culture, scaling from the personal wound to a collective distortion of the Mother archetype itself. Largely pre-verbal, it is healed not by insight but by receiving healthy mothering: from the Lower-World, the Power Animal’s unconditional love, and Mother Earth. More about this.¹³ In Therapeutic Shamanism it can be healed in the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer, through the Lower-World Mother and the wider Mother, Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this. See What are the Mother-Wound and the Father-Wound?

The two accounts put different things at the start of the trouble. Narvaez’s runs through the cradle, in which impoverished child-raising produces impaired adults, who keep an impoverished culture going. Therapeutic Shamanism’s account of the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer runs through domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this, agriculture and surplus, the rise of the city-states and the soul-loss and Power-loss that followed; the damage to childhood is one of its consequences, not its first cause. See What is the Fall? and What did Sarah Blaffer Hrdy mean by “mothers and others”?

Is the evolved nest disputed? #

Yes, by some. The American obstetrician Amy Tuteur, writing as the Skeptical OB, has called Narvaez’s account of what babies need a “paleofantasy”, a picture of the ancient past used to tell modern parents what to do. She says that “evolution did not stop” and that “Culture modifies nearly everything”, so that what our distant ancestors did is no sure guide to what babies need now.¹⁴

On the other side, Narvaez and her colleagues have studied present-day families as well as the past. In a study reported in 2015 and published in Applied Developmental Science, adults who recalled more of the nest’s elements in their own childhoods, such as affection, free play and feeling supported, reported less depression and anxiety, more ability to see from others’ point of view and more compassion; earlier work had linked more of the nest in childhood with more empathy, self-control and conscience in children.¹⁵ Tarsha and Narvaez also name the limits of the evidence themselves, saying that the components are hard to study apart from their setting, and what modern studies measure is often far less than what ethnographers saw.¹⁶

Is the evolved nest the same as attachment parenting? #

Close to it, but wider. Attachment parenting, which grew out of attachment theory, focuses on the bond between parent and baby through closeness, breastfeeding and responsiveness, and Narvaez sits on the advisory board of Attachment Parenting International.¹⁷ The nest, though, also takes in the many other carers, free play with other children, the community and the natural world, so it describes a whole way of life around a child, not only what parents do. Therapeutic Shamanism likewise does not ask parents to copy a particular tribe; its point is to see how far modern childhood has drifted from what children need, and to let that guide us.