"Cooperative Breeding"

On the occasion of Mother’s Day, I was considering the role of nurturance in our lives and stumbled across sociobiologist, Sarah Blaffer, Hrdy’s new book, Mother’s and Others. Hrdy’s work is somewhat anthropological. Her premise is that human mothers and the species before us, needed “other mothers” to help raise the human infant. She points out that without additional nurturers, our ancestors were more likely to abandon their early offspring in the preservation of survival of the self.

This cooperative breeding culture in which parenting duties were spread out across a network of friends and relatives affected our development as a human species. Earlier anthropologists had believed that our cooperative nature was a response to an early, war-like nature, but according to Hrdy, it was more a function of us as humans, nurturing the infants in the community. This was true of both men and women. The somewhat primeval view of the nuclear family where the dad was out hunting while the mom stayed home in the cave with the children alone, may not have existed.

Hrdy’s work echoes psychiatrist, Allan Schore’s (http://www.thinkbody.co.uk/papers/interview-with-allan-s.htm) work as well in that both believe that this nurturing behavior helped to develop empathy and cooperation in humans. Schore, in one of his works, calls this “right mind” which helps to create persons capable of living in a more civilized society. By nurturing others and being nurtured, the human infant’s brain develops an ability to self-regulate. It is this ability to regulate emotions and feelings that forms the basis of our abilities to live together cooperatively.

It is what psychologists and psychiatrist’s call “attachment.” With it, we understand our effects on others; we develop a shared understanding of each other’s needs and wants. Children who lacks early bonding are said to have “attachment disorder” which leads to difficulties in self regulation as well as self-discipline. In severe cases, it leads to socially deviant and psychopathic behavior.

Emotional bonding and cooperation are touted today (Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence and others) as a “new” way of thinking in the workplace. Looking at works like Hrdy’s and Schore’s, makes me think these ideas have been closely held and maintained by the society’s nurturers. Given our current state of world affairs and violence, perhaps we should remember our ancestral heritage and perhaps remember as a species we are all, women and men, nurturers of our next generation.