Hell is other people - Why individualism shrinks the next generation

Humans evolved to take care of children cooperatively. Small household size forces us to break with that tradition, with low fertility as a result

A compartment of one's own. Capsule Hotel in Ueno, Tokyo, 2018, Wikimedia Commons 

What is wrong with humans? How come an animal chooses out of free will not to have children? Presumably because humans evolved to have children and care for children under other circumstances than the current.

The obvious thing that has changed since the times of our ancestors is the invention and acceptance of reliable contraception. Not having children is clearly easier and more appealing when it does not involve killing babies. Humans evolved to take care of (most) of the children they get - not to carefully plan their path to parenthood.

Still, I think contraception is far from the whole story. Another reason why people don't want to become parents more than once or twice is that current society is placing a proportionally bigger burden of work on parents than ancestral societies did. 

Today, parents are supposed to take care of children in couples and alone, with varying degrees of assistance from professional childcare. In most other societies, childcare is more of a cooperative venue. Mothers perform most, but far from all care of infants or toddlers. Other individuals, like grandmothers, older siblings and aunts, tend to help substantially with childcare. 

Among all societies that have been studied, the champions of cooperative childcare are the pygmies of Africa. In studies of pygmy groups, infants have been found to be held by people other than the mother for 50 percent of day-time. Older siblings provide a substantial part of that holding time.¹²

The Bushmen of Botswana were not as cooperative. Infants were in very close contact with the mother and were nursed very frequently. When an infant started to cry, different people could respond, but the mother was there and responded to the great majority of crying bouts³. In Mother Nature (1999), Sarah Hrdy attributes that to the presence of big predators in the desert where the Bushmen live. Children can be trusted to carry their infant siblings in the rainforest, where there are no big cats to fight.⁴

The Hadza come in somewhere in between. In one study, children below the age of four were held by someone else than the mother during 30 percent of the time the children were being held by someone⁵. When the children are too big to be carried comfortably but too small to walk efficiently, Hadza mothers tend to leave them with relatives in the camp when they go out foraging.⁶

No quantitative study has been made among the Yanomamö, as far as I know. But Kenneth Good, the anthropologist who got famous for marrying a Yanomamö teenage girl, reported that his wife, Yarima, worked with childcare also before she had children. In Yanomamö linguistic custom, cousins from same-sex siblings are called siblings and nephews and nieces from same-sex siblings are called one's children, and people actually treat such nephews and nieces much like their children.⁷ When Yarima moved with Kenneth to New Jersey, she didn't consider herself very lucky to have become a suburban housewife. Caring for three children alone all day when her husband worked was not the kind of life she had prepared for.9 

Also more advanced societies tend to share childcare duties significantly more than our current society. Everywhere where families are big, older siblings tend to help with younger siblings (that's also the case in my own family situation: five siblings aged 2 to 17 are all helpful with the baby). Everywhere where households are multi-generational, the non-breeding generations tend to provide help. 

On a personal level I understand perfectly why mothers want to share childcare duties with others and why others want to share them with mothers. Holding a baby feels fantastic. Even more so when I don't have to do it 24 hours a day. Ideally, I would like to always live in a household with young children, but without spending any day taking care of a baby all by myself. 

In their prime

Helping mothers with childcare is a winning strategy for the family and for society as a whole, for one simple reason: Women can only have children in their prime. Otherwise, gestation and birth is too dangerous to be worth it. When women are in their best shape to bear and breastfeed children, they are in their best shape for more or less everything they will ever do. That means that groups that free women in their prime of childcare duties should be more productive compared to groups that make mothers responsible for almost all childcare duties. If a group can make less vigorous members care for infants and children, more work will get done in that group. There are also simple synergy effects: The more time children can be cared for by those who have a moment to spare instead of by someone who needs to forsake other work, more work will get done.

These principles have implications for the evolution of both mothers and children. As a recent paper argues, it probably made children evolve into expecting a lot of attention and physical contact and to interact with different people. As Sarah Hrdy argues throughout her works, it also implies that mothers evolved as working mothers. On average, mothers who strived to work with other things too while they had babies to care for were probably more reproductively successful than mothers who only strived to spend time with their babies. For that reason, mothers should have evolved both to adore their babies and to feel an urge to get things done also when having a baby. 

And for that reason, it should be no surprise if both small children and mothers are not overly satisfied with being isolated with each other for most of the day. For ancestral women, the outlook to have to care for a baby and a toddler all by themselves most of the waking hours might actually have looked like a situation where breeding should be avoided. 

Hell is other people 

Why has the nuclear family become the norm, if it is such an unpleasant place to be a mother or a small child? The simple answer is: Because people don't like each other enough to form bigger units than absolutely necessary. Humans are both an intensely social and an intensely conflict-prone species. We both need each other and stand in perpetual conflict with each other.

The Yanomamö are an example of that principle. They lived in circle-shaped, communal houses, without walls between families. Everything except coitus and defecation happened in public. Social relations were intense, but not only harmonical: Village size was kept down by internal conflicts. Whenever a village got more than a hundred inhabitants, it tended to split: Sooner or later conflicts rose to the level that people just didn't want to see each other all the time. Splitting a village came to a cost - a smaller village was more difficult to defend. And still villages split when people got too tired of each other.⁸

People all over the world are like that. On the one hand, deeply social. On the other hand, always in conflict with each other. Both are as natural, for humans just as for other group-living animals: Group members always have both common interests and opposing interests. 

In the past, it was necessary to rely on other people for subsistence and warfare. The reasons to stick together were so obvious that people didn't have to evolve psychological inclinations to do so:  When leaving the group means a near-certain death, no fine-tuned preferences for a certain group size is needed. People will just do what they need to do.

In the 20th century, the pressure to cooperate for subsistence and warfare eased quickly and significantly. Leaving the family group suddenly didn't mean high risk of imminent death - instead, it meant ample opportunities to thrive in terms of subsistence. For the first time in history, people could choose how to form households. 

They almost invariably chose to form small units: Nuclear families for people of reproductive age, couples for non-reproducing people. Even those very small units struggle. Increasingly, people forego reproduction because they can't stand each other. To a certain extent, the smallest possible reproducing unit; the nuclear family, is being replaced by the smallest possible unit; the individual.

We adapted to living in groups of a certain size, but never evolved any urge to design such groups. In that sense, human group size is a bit like dietary fibers. In the past, eating fibers was necessary for survival because they were in most foods that were available. So people ate fibers and their bodies adapted to a diet containing fibers. People never had to evolve any particular urge to eat fibers, because eating fibers was just a side-effect of eating at all. To the contrary, urges to avoid fibers evolved, because fibers were the easy thing to find. Today, when we can choose to avoid dietary fibers, such urges are causing ample health problems. 

I suspect that it is the same thing with household size. In the past, living alone was almost as lethal as not eating. That was reason alone not to choose it. Instead, the big problem for the individual was to forge a decent position for themselves within a community. Individuals had to work for not being too much used for someone else's purposes and for not doing too stupid things under pressure from other group members. In the past, the decision to live among others was a no-brainer. It was how not to be completely devoured by those others that took the most concentration. 

The result is that telling people to get off our backs, whenever we can, tastes sweet as sugar. Living peacefully together day after day is as unglamourous as chewing fiber. It can be mundanely pleasant, but it holds none of that sharp excitement that comes with asserting one's own preferences and ambitions to people who want to overrule them. 

I'm in no way certain that people who are forced to eat plantains are happier than people who can, and do choose doughnuts instead. But I'm rather certain that refined, low-fiber foods make people less fit. The same way, I'm not at all certain that people get happier when they are forced to live closely together with other people. Conflicts between humans are both real and very forcefully perceived by the human mind. But I strongly suspect that individualism makes humans less reproductively fit.

Eating unhealthy food can be instantly pleasant. The unpleasant effects come at certain points, like when having a heart attack. It is the same with individualism. At many points it is pleasant. The unpleasant effects come at certain points, like when trapped alone in an apartment with a baby and a toddler who cry and want to be held at the same time. People can't choose to avoid heart attacks. But they can avoid having babies. That way, people avoid the downside of individualism through choices that exacerbate the state of individualist isolation. 

Love can't compensate

When the ideal of a lonely female caretaker if children arose in the 20th century, people hoped that the arrangement was in line with female nature. People in general loved each other too little to live together. Mothers were expected to compensate for that through loving their children so much that they wanted to spend every minute with them. 

I think the fertility decline of the last decades indicates one thing: That hope was based on wishful thinking. Whatever the exact reasons, one thing is clear: Women don't love being with their children limitlessly. If they did, they could have chosen such lives: in current Western society, staying at home with children doesn't mean starving to death (at least not outside of metropolitan areas). 

We can also look at what happens to the women who spend a lot of time with children: About 10-15 percent get depressed after having a child, without having been depressed before having a child. It is called postpartum depression, but that is a misleading name, because it tends to develop a few weeks after birth. Infant care depression would have been a more appropriate name: Women develop it after having cared for an infant for a while.

Women choose to only have a fraction of the children they could have. Among those who do, a not insignificant minority develops depression. That is reason enough to assume that maternal love is not strong enough to compensate for the burdens and loneliness of modern motherhood. I'm not alone in this conclusion. In the general mind, the idea that women are made for a life at home with children seems to be in decline. Currently I see some attempts to revive it and re-mythologize the mother role. For example Mary Harrington expresses thoughts in that direction and writes about motherhood as an unique state of mind. I don't think most women will buy into that myth a second time. Not after the concept of isolated childrearing has been tried, tested and gradually abandoned.

What to do now? 

What is there to do if people can't stand living together or raising children alone?

Government-funded cooperative breeding is one solution. Dr. Nikhil Chaudhary, author of the previously mentioned paper on the Mbendjele BaYaka pygmies, reasons that the government needs to mitigate the problem with overburdened parents and understimulated children. Dr Chaudhary suggests that free childcare should be expanded to younger children and the children of non-working parents. He also suggests that daycare should be offered not only to allow parents to work, but to allow them some rest from their children.

Maybe that is all there is to do about things in modern society. But also with the proposed expensive reforms, it would be far from the reality of the pygmies or any pre-modern society. The thing among the pygmies is that no one needs to be a childcare specialist. Most people, especially on the female side, take care of children when they have the opportunity: those with a moment to spare or a free pair of hands take the child. That kind of efficiency is difficult to imitate for an individualistic, formalistic society like Contemporary Western.

It could be that the only thing to do is to pay people to cooperate, as we normally do in current society. But a good beginning would be to at least recognize organic, unpaid cooperation as a virtue. As things are, living together or apart is presented as a matter of taste. People are only urged to live together if they really like it. If they get any problems from it, their decision not to immediately part from each other is spontaneously questioned. Co-parents and romantic partners get a little more understanding and moral support also if they stay together during hard times. But in general, living together is not recommended over living apart.

If it was recognized that raising children is a good thing and that it is easier to raise children cooperatively than in isolation, people would find some moral support to overcome and mediate conflicts instead of avoiding them. I guess that would be far from enough to bring us to the fertility levels of cultures that force people together. But it could be a beginning.

1. Melvin Konner, The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind, 2011, 42-43 percent of e-book

2. Nikhil Chaudhary, Sensitive Responsiveness and Multiple Caregiving Networks Among Mbendjele BaYaka Hunter-Gatherers: Potential Implications for Psychological Development and Well-being, 2003,

https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2024-21265-001.html, Article about study https://phys.org/news/2023-11-hunter-gatherer-approach-childcare-key-mother.html

3. Melvin Konner, The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind, 2011, 42-43 percent of e-book

4. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature, 1999, pages 502-503

5. Melvin Konner, The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind, 2011, 42 percent of e-book

6. Frank Marlowe, The Hadza Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania, 2010, 64 percent of e-book

7. Kenneth Good, Into the Heart, 1991, page 242

8. Napoleon Chagnon, Yanomamö, 1992, page 76-77