Kids at Play

Excerpted from
Kids: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Raise Young Children
By Meredith F. Small

Anthropologists have always been interested in people who make their living by hunting and gathering. For most of human history (that is, before ten thousand years ago when agriculture and animal domestication were developed and people settled down), everyone made a living by hunting and gathering. They might have lived in woodlands and gathered berries and hunted deer, or roamed across a dry plain and gathered roots and hunted antelope, but the method was basically the same-move across the landscape efficiently, picking up food as you go. People also lived in small kin-based groups, interacting with the same group of people for months at a time, perhaps meeting up with other bands that they knew well. Compared to how we live today, in villages and cities, it was a very different sort of social experience, one that few people today ever know. But, in fact, that's how our species spent 99 percent of our history. And so if we want to know where we came from, and perhaps why we act the way we do now, the lives of current hunters and gatherers might provide some clues about our biological and social design. And so anthropologists have turned to the remaining hunters and gatherers to glean some understanding about that lifestyle. In that sense, these people can also tell us something about the experience of childhood, how that life cycle stage was established, and how human kids behaved until very recently. In other words, following kids who belong to bands of hunters and gatherers might provide a window into what childhood is "supposed" to be like.

Interestingly enough, however, the story is not as clear as might be expected, and that's because even for hunters and gatherers, childhood varies among groups.

The classic record of a hunting and gathering community comes from the Kung San people of Botswana and Namibia, Africa. Until recently, when some San have moved onto settled areas, they lived on the dry savanna, gathering vegetable matter and hunting game. Since the 1950s, scientists have sought out the San, to record their lives and try to understand what it means to hunt and gather, at least in this particular ecological context. In 1963, a group from Harvard University decided to concentrate on one San group in the Dobe area and figure out how ecology (that is, land use and hunting) affects group structure.

In Our Babies, Ourselves, I outlined infancy for the San-babies are carried at all times, fed on average every thirteen minutes, sleep at night with their mothers. Parents respond immediately to infant cries. In other words, the baby is part of a very dense social milieu and intimately connected to parents, family, and social groups. This caretaking package results in a baby that cries for less total time than the typical baby in the West. More important, San parents believe that this caretaking package will result in an adult who will value what they value-social integration, mobility, and sharing. But what happens once these babies become toddlers? What happens as they enter early childhood.

Patricia Draper, a member of the Harvard contingent, took this analysis beyond the first year and concentrated on children in general. She lived with the /Du/da San, recording what children did all day and who they interacted with. She discovered that the way the San live is tightly connected, in a very real way, to the entire human life cycle. For the San, you simply can't separate life cycle from lifestyle. San children grow up among a very small number of people. When Draper was living with them in 1969, there were only sixty to eighty people in two camps in the area, although others might wander in at times. Draper writes of the "intimacy, closeness, and isolation" at the camps where members interact only with each other and rarely see strangers. As a result, San children know everything about everyone, and they conduct their lives in full view of every member of the camp.

The way the camp is constructed reflects this social intimacy. Although huts belong to each family, they are set in a circle with the opening facing inward. The structures are not really for living but for storing goods and sleeping in the heat of the day. The San spend all their time next to each other, rather than in their buildings. The camp itself is nestled into the bush; children venturing past the ring of huts are venturing into the outback, and so they seldom go beyond the huts. Draper says that children under ten always stay close to home and close to adults. At the same time, they have free range of the camp; there are no off-limits places or restricted areas. San children are simply part of the community, a community that consists of people of all ages. As a result, Draper explains, children interact with a variety of adults within the group over the years.

Also strikingly different from the Western norm, San children live and play in mixed-age groups rather than peer groups. For example, the average band might have only twelve children, maybe five girls and seven boys, and range in age from infancy to fourteen years. That group is the play group and the peer group. There are no real team sports-it's hard to make a team with members who have such different motor skills. Interestingly, there is little competition among the children at all-they are wise enough to know the older ones will always win over younger ones, and since this is no fun, everyone cooperates. And there's not much problem sharing, simply because there are few material goods to compete over.

Draper found that very small children always seemed to be in a group that included an adult. In fact, in 173 spot observations of San children, she found no case in which any child was not in eye contact or within hearing of an adult; in only five cases was a child not in visual contact. In 70 percent of the times Draper checked, kids were actually in face-to-face proximity with adults. But these supervisors are not designated babysitters as such. They are simply adults finished with their work. Both San men and women have extensive free time-hunting and gathering take only a few hours per week and are done by different people on different days-and so some adults are always in camp to supervise kids. And there's not much to supervise anyway-there are no steps to fall down, no doors to hide behind, no traffic to avoid, and weapons for hunting are placed out of reach. According to Draper, the atmosphere at camp is always peaceful. Adults are very easygoing with kids. They simply assume children will be underfoot and are never cross.

San children are not expected to contribute anything to the camp. They don't help find food or participate in domestic chores. Kids might only be expected to fetch something for an adult if asked. In fact, Draper explains that San expectations are unusual in comparison to other hunters and gatherers in that girls reach fourteen years of age before they begin to gather, and boys turn sixteen before they hunt. In other cultures, children take on these roles much earlier. Even more surprising, older children are not responsible for caring for younger children, a normal practice in other parts of the world. But there is much less pressure to care for younger ones among the San. Since San women give birth only about every four years, the mother alone is usually able to care for each infant herself. She carries the child on gathering expeditions until it is two or three years of age. And when the mother elects to leave a small child back in camp, there are always a few adults to watch.

And so childhood for the San is like an idyllic childhood in the West-no responsibilities, no chores, all the time to play in the world. Could this have been the childhood of our ancestors? Is this the model of childhood that we might emulate? Perhaps. But in a different part of Africa, another group of hunters and gatherers who have been intensely studied shows a very different picture of the early years.