Is Babysitting the Ultimate Source of Our Ability to Understand Each Other?

The following is an adapted excerpt from Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential—and Endangered (Morrow, 2010) by Maia Szalavitz and Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD.

Teenage girls are not especially known for empathy. To adults, they often seem self-involved, moody and inconsiderate. Their obsessions with what seem like trivial social slights and their desperate yearning for status and friendships, however, may reveal important truths about the development of altruism in humans and the conditions under which children's brains evolved. And oddly, that stereotypical first job of a young girl -- babysitting -- may be the ultimate source of our ability to understand each other.

Here's how babysitting, teen cliques and empathy intersect. For centuries, human caring behavior was either ignored or dismissed. It was seen as mere self-interest; only occurring when, in fact, the goals of the self and the other happened to coincide, as in parenting. But recent research in neuroscience has complicated matters, showing that not only is altruism and a desire for fair treatment real, it shows up early in life and even in other species.

For example, chimps will protest when another ape is not rewarded equally for similar behavior, even rejecting their own treat. And children as early as 14 months will try, without prompting, to help adults having difficulty reaching an object that the child knows how to get.

How could this kind behavior evolve? The traditional explanation goes back to Darwin himself. He suggested that humans who were better at cooperating with each other would be much better at battling other groups, and therefore more likely to survive.

But this doesn't seem to account for the origin of altruism, for why people would have the inclination to connect with each other in the first place. Cooperation in battle may well have escalated the success of groups that stuck together -- but it doesn't explain why individuals would help at first. That's where babysitting comes in.

Anthropologist Sarah Hrdy is a key proponent of this new theory. In her recent book, Mothers and Others, Hrdy says, in essence, that an early human version of "daycare" -- not warfare -- drove the rise of human empathy. And, curiously enough, this may help explain why teenage girls are so obsessed with fitting in and forming tight cliques.

To explain her theory, Hrdy notes the dismal infant mortality rates that are seen where modern perinatal care isn't available. In prehumans, half of all children probably died before reaching puberty. Among the hunter-gatherer Mandinka tribe who were studied between 1950 and 1980, nearly 40 percent of all children were dead by age five.

Consequently, she argues, our species could probably not have survived at all -- let alone in numbers large enough to fight wars with each other --  if serious energy and attention wasn't devoted to childrearing. But Hrdy believes we have been misled about what early human childrearing was like. And this misunderstanding has kept us from recognizing the roots of empathy in childcare.

Great apes have traditionally been the model for early human parenting styles. Chimpanzees and orangutans infants are nurtured exclusively by their mothers, nursing from four to seven full years. In infancy, these little apes are in constant skin-to-skin contact with their mothers, day and night. But Hrdy thinks this breeding style of intensely possessive motherhood isn't ours.

Humans, instead, have traditionally shared the burden of baby care. Typically, a human birth prompts celebration. In most cultures, a welcome new baby is eagerly passed around among the waiting relatives. But among the great apes, a new baby that was passed around would soon be dead meat -- literally. The importance of helpers -- not just moms --  in human childcare was obscured by several things. For one, the people originally seen as the best model for early child-rearing practices -- the !Kung --  turned out to be rather unusual. !Kung hunter-gatherer mothers hold their children 75 percent of the time, These infants are either in a sling which allows them to nurse whenever they choose or strapped to their mothers' backs.