society expects of them. Eventually they learn that it is in their best interests to listen to their parents a bit.”
Some hunter-gatherer and small-scale farming societies don’t intervene when children or even infants are doing dangerous things that may in fact harm them, and that could expose a Western parent to criminal prosecution. I mentioned earlier my surprise, in the New Guinea Highlands, to learn that the fire scars borne by so many adults of Enu’s adoptive tribe were often acquired in infancy, when an infant was playing next to a fire, and its parents considered that child autonomy extended to a baby’s having the right to touch or get close to the fire and to suffer the consequences. Hadza infants are permitted to grasp and suck on sharp knives (Plate 19). Here is an incident observed by Daniel Everett among the Piraha Indians: “We noticed that a [Piraha] toddler about two years old was sitting in the hut behind the man we were interviewing. The child was playing with a sharp kitchen knife, about nine inches in length. He was swinging the knife blade around him, often coming close to his eyes, his chest, his arm, and other body parts one would not like to slice off or perforate. What really got our attention, though, was that when he dropped the knife, his mother—talking to someone else—reached back nonchalantly without interrupting her conversation, picked up the knife, and handed it back to the toddler. No one told him not to cut himself or hurt himself with the knife. And he didn’t, but I have seen other Piraha children cut themselves severely with knives.”
Nevertheless, not all small-scale societies permit children to explore freely and do dangerous things. Variation in the freedom that children enjoy seems to me partly understandable from several considerations. Two are the considerations that I already discussed as accounting for more physical punishment among herders and farmers than among hunter-gatherers. While hunter-gatherer societies tend to be egalitarian, many farming and herding societies recognize different rights for men and women, or for younger and older people. The hunter- gatherer societies also tend to have fewer valuable possessions that a child could damage than do farmers and herders. Both of those considerations may contribute to hunter-gatherer children enjoying greater freedom to explore.
In addition, how much freedom children enjoy seems to depend partly on how dangerous the environment is, or is perceived to be. Some environments are relatively safe for children, but others are dangerous because of either environmental hazards or else dangers from people. Consider the following spectrum of environments, from the most dangerous to the least dangerous, paralleled by a range of child-rearing practices from adults severely restricting the freedom of young children to adults permitting young children to wander.
Among the most dangerous environments are the New World’s tropical rainforests, which teem with biting, stinging, poisonous insects (army ants, bees, scorpions, spiders, and wasps), dangerous mammals (jaguars, peccaries, and pumas), large poisonous snakes (fer-de-lance and bushmasters), and stinging plants. No infant or small child left alone would survive for long in the Amazon rainforest. Hence, Kim Hill and A. Magdalena Hurtado write, “[Ache] infants under one year of age spend about 93% of their daylight time in tactile contact with a mother or father, and they are never set down on the ground or left alone for more than a few seconds… it is not until about three years of age that Ache children begin to spend significant amounts of time more than one meter from their mother. Even still, Ache children between three and four years of age spend 76% of their daylight time less than one meter away from their mother and are monitored almost constantly.” As a result, Hill and Hurtado commented, Ache children don’t learn to walk independently until they are 21 to 23 months old, 9 months later than American children. Ache children between three and five years of age are often carried piggyback in the forest by an adult, rather than being allowed to walk. Only when an Ache child is five years old does it begin to explore the forest on its own legs, but even then Ache children remain within 50 meters of an adult for most of the time.
Dangerous, but not quite as dangerous as the neotropical rainforest, are the Kalahari Desert, the Arctic, and the swamps of the Okavango Delta. !Kung children play in groups that are supervised casually but effectively by adults; the children are usually within eye or ear contact of adults in camp. In the Arctic one cannot allow children to run around freely, because of dangers from accidents that would result in exposure or freezing. Young girls in Southern Africa’s Okavango Delta are permitted to catch fish with baskets, but they stay near shore because of danger from crocodiles, hippopotamuses, elephants, and buffaloes. These examples should be tempered, however, by mentioning that 4-year-old Aka Pygmy children, while they don’t go off into the Central African rainforest by themselves, do go off with 10-year-old Aka children despite the dangers of leopards and elephants.
A less dangerous environment, where children can be given more freedom, is that of the Hadza in East Africa. It has leopards and other dangerous predators, as does the environment of the !Kung, but it differs from the !Kung environment in being hilly, so that it is possible to see greater distances, and parents can keep an eye on children playing at greater distances from a Hadza camp than from a !Kung camp. The New Guinea rainforests are also moderately safe: there are no dangerous mammals, many snakes are poisonous but they are rarely encountered, and the main danger is from other people. Hence I often see New Guinea children playing, walking, or canoeing by themselves, and my New Guinea friends tell me of spending much time in the forests by themselves as children.
Among the safest environments are Australia’s deserts and Madagascar’s forests. In recent times Australian deserts have harbored no mammals dangerous to humans. Like New Guinea, Australia has a reputation for poisonous snakes, but one rarely comes across them unless one goes looking for them. Hence Martu children in the Australian desert regularly go out on foraging trips unsupervised by adults. Similarly, Madagascar’s forests harbor no large predators and few poisonous plants and animals, so children can safely go off by themselves in groups to dig yams.
Multi-age playgroups
On the American frontier, where population was sparse, the one-room schoolhouse was a common phenomenon. With so few children living within daily travel distance, schools could afford only a single room and a single teacher, and all children of different ages had to be educated together in that one room. But the one-room schoolhouse in the U.S. today is a romantic memory of the past, except in rural areas of low population density. Instead, in all cities, and in rural areas of moderate population density, children learn and play in age cohorts. School classrooms are age-graded, such that most classmates are within a year of each other in age. While neighborhood playgroups are not so strictly age-segregated, in densely populated areas of large societies there are enough children living within walking distance of each other that 12-year-olds don’t routinely play with 3-year-olds. That norm of age cohorts applies not only to modern societies with state governments and schools, but also to populous pre-state societies, because of the same basic demographic fact: many children close in age, living in proximity. For example, many African chiefdoms have or had age cohorts, in which children close in age were initiated and circumcised at the same time, and (among the Zulu) boys of the same age formed military cohorts.
But demographic realities produce a different result in small-scale societies, which resemble one-room schoolhouses. A typical hunter-gatherer band numbering around 30 people will on the average contain only about a dozen pre-adolescent kids, of both sexes and various ages. Hence it is impossible to assemble separate age-cohort playgroups, each with many children, as is characteristic of large societies. Instead, all children in the band form a single multi-age playgroup of both sexes. That observation applies to all small-scale hunter-gatherer societies that have been studied.
In such multi-age playgroups, both the older and the younger children gain from being together. The young children gain from being socialized not only by adults by also by older children, while the older children acquire experience in caring for younger children. That experience gained by older children contributes to explaining how hunter-gatherers can become confident parents already as teen-agers. While Western societies have plenty of teen-aged parents, especially unwed teen-agers, Western teen-agers are suboptimal parents because of inexperience. However, in a small-scale society, the teen-agers who become parents will already have been taking care of children for many years (Plate 38).
For example, while I was spending some time in a remote New Guinea village, a 12-year-old girl named Morcy was designated to cook for me. When I returned to the village two years later, I found that Morcy had gotten married in the intervening time and was now, at the age of 14, holding her first child. I at first thought: surely there is a mistake about her age, and she really is 16 or 17? But Morcy’s father was the man who kept the village birth and death record book, and he had recorded her date of birth himself. I then thought: how on earth can a girl only
