Why parents might wish they had alloparents on their team
What is alloparenting? A December 2023 article from NPR highlights recent study and other research that illustrate the benefits of providing parents with more social supports and hands-on help with the care of infants and young children.
Altogether the research across cultures suggests that human parents are psychologically adapted to raise children cooperatively, not in isolation. Yet in Western culture, many times the mother alone is expected – or even required – to provide this incredibly intensive parenting, which often sets them up to fail.
EXCERPT FROM THE ARTICLE:
In Western societies, much of the responsibility often falls to one person. In many instances, that's the mother, who must muster the patience and sensitivity to care for an infant. And a lot of time she's working in isolation, says evolutionary anthropologist Gul Deniz Salali, who's at the University College London.
"There are these narratives [in Western society], that mothers should just know how to look after children and be able to do it [alone]," says Chaudhary, who's at Cambridge University.
But human parents probably aren't psychologically adapted for this isolation, a new study with a group of hunter-gatherers in the Congo suggests. A "mismatch" likely exists between the conditions in which humans evolved to care for babies and the situation many parents find themselves in today, says Salali, who contributed to the study.
Together with a handful of previous studies, this new one suggests that for the vast majority of human history, mothers had a huge amount of help caring for infants – and even a lot of support with toddlers as well.
We're not talking about just an extra hand on the weekends. We're talking about more than a dozen people for daily help with all sorts of tasks – cleaning a child, holding them, keeping an eye on them and soothing them when they cry. Scientists call these helpers "alloparents." The prefix "allo" derives from the Greek word for "other." So these helpers are literally "other parents."