Guinea, while some tribes do not even punish babies for brandishing sharp knives, I encountered an opposite extreme at a small village (Gasten) of a dozen huts around a clearing, where village life took place in full view of all the residents. One morning, I heard angry screaming, and I looked out to see what was happening. A mother was incensed at her daughter of about age eight, shouting at the daughter and hitting her, and the daughter was sobbing and holding her arms in front of her face to ward off the blows. Other adults were watching, and nobody was interfering. The mother got more and more furious. Finally, the mother went over to the edge of the clearing, bent down to pick up some object, came back to the child, and vigorously rubbed the object into the child’s face, causing her daughter to scream uncontrollably in agony. It turned out that the object was a bunch of stinging nettle leaves. I don’t know what the daughter had done to provoke this punishment, but the mother’s behavior was evidently considered acceptable by all of the onlookers.
How can one explain why some societies practise physical punishment of children, while others don’t? Much of the variation is evidently cultural and unrelated to differences in subsistence economy. For instance, I am unaware of differences between the economies of Sweden, Germany, and Britain, all of them industrialized agriculture-based societies speaking Germanic languages, that could explain why many modern Germans and British spank but Swedes don’t. The New Guineans of both Gasten and of Enu’s adoptive tribe are gardeners and swineherds, again without obvious differences to explain why physical punishment with nettles is acceptable at Gasten while even mild physical punishment is rare among Enu’s adoptive people.
However, there does seem to be a broad trend: most hunter-gatherer bands do minimal physical punishment of young children, many farming societies do some punishment, and herders are especially likely to punish. One contributing explanation is that misbehavior by a hunter-gatherer child will probably hurt only the child and not anyone or anything else, because hunter-gatherers tend to have few valuable physical possessions. But many farmers, and especially herders, do have valuable material things, especially valuable livestock, so herders punish children to prevent serious consequences to the whole family—e.g., if a child fails to close the pasture gates, valuable cows and sheep can run away. More generally, compared to mobile societies of egalitarian hunter- gatherers, sedentary societies (e.g., most farmers and herders) have more power differences, more gender-based and age-based and individual inequality, more emphasis on learning deference and respect—and hence more punishment of children.
Here are some examples. Among hunter-gatherers, the Piraha, Andaman Islanders, Aka Pygmies, and !Kung practise little or no physical punishment. Daniel Everett relates the following story from his years of living among the Piraha. He became a father at the age of 19, and he came from a Christian background that practised physical punishment. One day, his daughter Shannon did something that he considered to merit a spanking. He grabbed a switch, told her to come to the next room where he would spank her, and she began yelling that she didn’t need a spanking. The Pirahas came running at the sound of angry voices and asked him what he was doing. He didn’t have a good answer to tell them, but he still recalled biblical injunctions about spanking children, so he told his daughter that he wouldn’t spank her there in the presence of the Pirahas, but that she should go to the end of the airstrip and find another switch to be spanked with, and that he would meet her there in five minutes. As Shannon started on her way, the Pirahas asked her where she was going. Fully aware of what the Pirahas would think of her answer, she replied with glee, “My dad is going to hit me on the airstrip!” Out came Piraha children and adults to follow Daniel Everett as he was about to carry out this unthinkably barbaric behavior of hitting a child. He surrendered in defeat, leaving his smug daughter to celebrate her triumph. Piraha parents instead talk to their children respectfully, rarely discipline them, and do not use violence.
Similar attitudes prevail among most other hunter-gatherer groups studied. If one Aka Pygmy parent hits an infant, the other parent considers that ground for divorce. The !Kung explain their policy of not punishing children by saying that children have no wits and are not responsible for their actions. Instead, !Kung and Aka children are permitted to slap and insult parents. The Siriono practise mild punishment of a child that eats dirt or a taboo animal, by roughly picking up the child, but they never beat a child, whereas children are allowed to have temper tantrums in which they beat their father or mother as hard as possible.
Among farming peoples there is variation, with the most punitive being herders whose valuable livestock are at stake if a child looking after the livestock misbehaves. In some farming communities, discipline of children is lax, and they have few responsibilities and also few opportunities to damage valuable possessions, until they reach puberty. For example, among the people of the Trobriand Islands near New Guinea, who are farmers without livestock except for pigs, children are neither punished nor expected to obey. The ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski wrote of the Trobriand Islanders, “Often…I would hear a youngster told to do this or that, and generally the thing, whatever it was, would be asked as a favor, though sometimes the request might be backed up by a threat of violence. The parent would either coax or scold or ask as from one equal to another. A simple command, implying the expectation of natural obedience, is never heard from parents to child in the Trobriands…. When I suggested, after some flagrant infantile misdeed, that it would mend matters for the future if the child were beaten or otherwise punished in cold blood, the idea appeared unnatural and immoral to my [Trobriand] friends.”
A friend who has lived for many years among a herding people of East Africa told me that the herders’ children there behave like little juvenile delinquents until the age of male circumcision, at which time they are expected to assume responsibilities. Then, following an initiation ceremony, boys begin herding the valuable cows, girls begin caring for siblings, and both begin to be disciplined. Among the Tallensi people of Ghana in West Africa, no one hesitates to punish a child who seems to deserve it, e.g., for dawdling while driving cattle. One Tallensi man pointed out to a visiting British anthropologist a scar that had resulted from his being severely whipped as a small boy. A Tallensi elder explained, “If you don’t harass your child, he will not gain sense”—similar to Butler’s dictum “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”
Child autonomy
How much freedom or encouragement do children have to explore their environment? Are children permitted to do dangerous things, with the expectation that they must learn from their mistakes? Or are parents protective of their children’s safety, and do parents curtail exploration and pull kids away if they start to do something that could be dangerous?
The answer to this question varies among societies. However, a tentative generalization is that individual autonomy, even of children, is a more cherished ideal in hunter-gatherer bands than in state societies, where the state considers that it has an interest in its children, does not want children to get hurt by doing as they please, and forbids parents to let a child harm itself. I write these lines just after I picked up a rental car at an airport. The recording that was broadcast to us passengers on the shuttle bus from the airport baggage claim to the rental car lot warned us, “Federal law requires children under five years of age or weighing under 80 pounds to be transported in a federally approved car seat.” Hunter-gatherers would consider that warning to be none of the business of anyone other than the child and perhaps its parents and band members, but certainly not of a distant bureaucrat. At the risk of overgeneralizing, one could say that hunter-gatherers are fiercely egalitarian, and that they don’t tell anyone, not even a child, to do anything. Generalizing or overgeneralizing further, small-scale societies appear to be not nearly as convinced as are we WEIRD moderns of the idea that parents are responsible for a child’s development, and that they can influence how a child turns out.
That theme of autonomy has been emphasized by observers of many hunter-gatherer societies. For example, Aka Pygmy children have access to the same resources as do adults, whereas in the U.S. there are many adults-only resources that are off-limits to kids, such as weapons, alcohol, and breakable objects. Among the Martu people of the Western Australian desert, the worst offense is to impose on a child’s will, even if the child is only three years old. The Piraha Indians consider children just as human beings, not in need of coddling or special protection. In Daniel Everett’s words, “They [Piraha children] are treated fairly and allowance is made for their size and relative physical weakness, but by and large they are not considered qualitatively different from adults… the Pirahas have an undercurrent of Darwinism running through their parenting philosophy. This style of parenting has the result of producing very tough and resilient adults who do not believe that anyone owes them anything. Citizens of the Piraha nation know that each day’s survival depends on their individual skills and hardiness…. The Pirahas’ view that children are equal citizens of society means that there is no prohibition that applies to children but does not equally apply to adults and vice versa…. They have to decide for themselves to do or not to do what their
