As far as the anthropological record shows, hunter-gatherers raised their children in a much more relaxed way than modern societies do: babies were kept close and their needs met quickly, children were cared for by the whole band and not only their parents, they were rarely if ever hit, and they learnt by watching, playing and joining in, with a lot of freedom and trust. Anthropologists have often described the children as unusually happy and well adjusted. In Therapeutic Shamanism this is the healthy standard against which our own childhoods can be measured, and part of what was lost with 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.
How do we know how hunter-gatherers raised children? #
Mostly from anthropologists who lived with hunter-gatherer peoples in the last hundred years or so, and that is not a window straight onto the deep past. The peoples studied had often been in contact with farmers, herders, traders or missionaries for some time, and they differ a lot from one another. Still, accounts from many parts of the world describe much the same picture, and anthropologists studying hunter-gatherer tribes all over the world have described the children as “unusually happy and well adjusted”; unusual, that is, compared to ours.1
Who raised the children? #
The whole band. The nuclear family is a recent invention, and among hunter-gatherers children were usually raised by all of the adults in a tribe, not only by their biological parents. A child was free to spend time with whichever adults they felt closest to, and sleeping arrangements varied, from children sleeping with their own parents to the whole band sleeping together. The bond with biological parents still mattered and was honoured, but in a different setting.2
Fathers were closely involved. In most tribal cultures both men and women were actively and intensively involved in raising the children, and men spent far more time with them than most modern fathers do.3 Among the Aka of the Central African forest, hunter-gatherers who also trade with neighbouring farmers, the anthropologist Barry Hewlett found fathers holding their babies or within arm’s reach of them for more than half of a 24-hour day.4 See What did Sarah Blaffer Hrdy mean by “mothers and others”?
How were babies cared for? #
Kept close and answered quickly. Hunter-gatherer child-rearing is marked by keeping children close and responding quickly to their emotional needs, so that childhood neglect was rare to the point of being virtually non-existent.1 Babies were never left to cry.5 The geographer Jared Diamond, drawing on studies of the !Kung of the Kalahari, then living as hunter-gatherers, and the Efe of the Ituri forest, forest foragers who also trade with farmers, reports carers answering a crying baby within seconds, and !Kung babies crying for at most a minute in every hour. Across a sample of ninety traditional societies of many kinds, not only hunter-gatherers, he found none in which mother and baby slept in separate rooms.6 The fuller picture, and the psychologist Darcia Narvaez’s account of what babies evolved to expect, is in What is the “evolved nest”?
Were children punished? #
Rarely, and seldom if ever by hitting. Corporal punishment existed in some hunter-gatherer cultures, but it was rare, and most hunter-gatherer adults did not hit children. For around 95 per cent of the history of our species, children were mostly raised without being hit, yet they grew into well-adjusted adult members of their tribes.7 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 little to cry about, and who were reprimanded, if ever, in a soft voice.8
This was not permissiveness for its own sake. Children were shown trust and respect and raised with kindness, and that is how they grew into adults with what the writer Starhawk calls power-from-withinPower-from-within. Starhawk’s term for the healthy mode of power, as against power-over. Egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands held power this way; practising shamanism from power-over is ‘just more Fall’. More about this, the power of people who have no wish to have power over others and no willingness to hand their own power to anyone else.8 It also answers a common fear. Our culture, following Freud, tends to assume that children’s nature must be reined in or they will grow up selfish; most cross-cultural studies of animist tribes show the opposite, children raised in a laid-back way growing into cooperative adults.5 See How did hunter-gatherers keep their societies equal?
How did children learn? #
Mostly by watching, playing and joining in. The psychologist Peter Gray, from his reading and a survey of anthropologists who had lived among hunter-gatherers, concluded that children learnt what they needed without lessons, through observation, play and exploration, and were given enormous amounts of time to play. They were never shut away from adult life, so their play grew by degrees into the real thing; Nancy Howell described !Kung children building a whole play-village of huts a short way from the real camp.9 Children of all ages played together, since a small band has too few children to split them by age, and the older ones looked after the younger.6
Not everyone agrees that there was no teaching at all. A review of 58 publications led by the anthropologist Sheina Lew-Levy found that ethnographers generally report no teaching, whilst studies that measure behaviour do find it; the difference, the authors argue, lies mostly in how narrowly ‘teaching’ is defined. On a wider definition, which includes adults providing chances to learn, teaching does happen, and direct instruction appears mainly in adolescence, above all in hunting.10
Was hunter-gatherer childhood an idyll? #
No childhood is. Hunter-gatherer children had to take in a great many ‘shoulds’ and ‘should nots’ to belong to their tribe, as all social animals do, and they formed a persona, a face to show the group. The difference was one of degree. Their way of life was closer to what humans evolved for, so the gap between the real self and the persona did not need to be large.11 Some critics go further. Jared Diamond, who admires much of hunter-gatherer child-rearing, is clear that he does not recommend all of it, naming the selective infanticide practised in some societies and letting small children play with knives and fire.12 Lew-Levy and her colleagues stress that today’s foragers are neither copies of past ones nor all alike.10
The other side of the case is the evidence already given, of children who were rarely hit, seldom neglected and given unusual trust, and who grew into cooperative, well-adjusted adults, across many peoples in many places.7 For the wider argument about romanticising hunter-gatherers, see Isn’t the Fall just noble-savage romanticism?
When did childhood end? #
At adolescence, with initiation. All hunter-gatherer tribes waited until adolescence to begin the process of finding Soul, because that is an initiation into Adulthood. Children raised among real Adults, who modelled Adulthood all their lives, knew what they were stepping into when the time came.13 After that, relating as parent and child was over; in Therapeutic Shamanism a parent-child way of relating should be a phase in people’s lives, not a lifelong thing.14 See How did traditional peoples initiate young people into adulthood? and What does it mean to become a true Adult?
What does this mean for parents today? #
Kindness, first of all, towards themselves. A hunter-gatherer becoming a parent knew what to do, having had healthy parenting modelled all their life, and had a whole tribe of people around them for support, people with good mental health who shared and cooperated freely. They did not have to deal with bullying, social media, exams, body shaming, mortgages and the thousand and one other pressures of modern life. Most parents today learn on the job, having often been raised by parents who had little idea what they were doing either, so doing even a half-decent job in this culture is heroic.8
What changed was not human nature but the culture around children. With the Fall, children came to be treated appallingly, and abuse and neglect have been passed down the generations ever since, because most people raise their children as they were raised.15 Looking honestly at how hunter-gatherers raised their children gives a standard to measure against, and a way of seeing that many of our own childhoods were not as ‘normal’ as we were told. In shamanic work, spending time with the Lower-World Tribe can also give a direct experience of what it might have been like to be raised by animists.16 See What are the Mother-Wound and the Father-Wound?
