With A Little Help From My Alloparents

When I was in search of childcare for Lydia, I was avidly reading the baby book of my generation, which is rooted in the attachment parenting philosophy. There is much to love about attachment theory and its promotion of the special bond between mother and child. However, I reacted with lots of self-condemnation as I read the section on mothers working outside of the home. While Sears - the popular media attachment parenting guru - is careful to say that the issue is attachment, not whether a mother works outside of the home or not, the advice given suggested I was a second-rate mother if I worked outside of the home. In the first section of the chapter, Sears gives suggestions for women undecided about whether to return to work outside the home, emphasizing only the arguments for why full-time mothering is important. Next, there is a section for mothers who feel they have to work for financial reasons, outlining strategies for getting out of the financial burden, like a shared job arrangement or borrowing income from parents (options that are unavailable to the vast majority of women). There is no section for women who feel they have a vocation outside of the home apart from mothering. There is no chapter on whether fathers should work outside of the home, because presumably it is really mothers that matter for healthy infant attachment. It seemed to me that while attachment parenting practices are wonderful in many ways, it was not an affirming philosophy for mothers who choose anything but working inside the home.

Pumpkin decorating with Judy.

When I did decide to work outside the home, we shopped around for childcare, and I kept telling people that I wished I could find a Mary Poppins. (As an aside, I recently watched the Mary Poppins movie, and I bristled at the depiction of the flippant mother who is not minding her children because of her "silly" mission to support suffrage for women.) After signing Lydia up for a daycare near our home, a very close friend's mother - Judy - actually agreed to take care of Lydia. We knew Judy, and had heard how wonderful she was with children. Although she does not have a magic carpetbag (that I know of...), Judy is an amazing, caring, creative, fun-loving woman who raised two awesome kids of her own. And she loves Lydia, which was and is the most important thing to us. We now feel like she is a part of our extended family, and that - like the girls' grandmothers - celebrations and life events would not be the same without her.

Yet, there have been hard moments. Like the times that Lydia cried when Judy left to go home for the evening. Or when Lydia asks about Judy on the weekend and we have to tell her that Judy has her own home. Given what I'd read on attachment theory, I worried that these multiple attachments might be hard on our kids, and felt guilty about the emotional impact of my work outside the home.

I'm currently reading a fascinating book by an anthropologist and primatologist on the evolutionary origins mutual understanding, "Mothers and Others" by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, that expands upon attachment theory in a way that has been fascinating and healing. Hrdy asserts that the initial focus of attachment theory on mother-only care was myopic and "an impossible ideal projected onto traditional peoples by Western observers" (p. 129). Hrdy does not dispute how important mother-child attachment is, but the central argument of her book is that humans developed prosocial emotions as a result of the cooperative breeding arrangements that arose to help human babies survive and thrive. "Both before birth and especially afterward, the mother needed help from others; and even more importantly, her infant would need to be able to monitor and assess the intentions of both his mother and these others and to attract their attentions and elicit their assistance in ways no ape had ever needed to do before. For only by eliciting nurture from others as well as his mother could one of these little humans hope to stay safe and fed and to survive." (p. 31) As Hrdy describes, anthropological research on hunter-gatherer and foraging societies suggests that human mothers depend significantly more than other primate species on non-maternal others - "alloparents" - to help with their babies. Mothers are vital for children's survival and attachment, but unlike the traditional attachment parenting picture of a mother exclusively caring for her child, Hrdy details anthropological research that suggests alloparents - fathers, grandmothers, aunts, siblings and other kin - support mothers by frequently holding, nursing, and feeding their children. For example, although ape mothers have not been observed nursing youngsters other than their own, "shared suckling" is observed in 87% of human foraging societies (p. 77). (Sadly, this practice isn't at all common in modern industrial societies. If it was, I might have had more support for my nursing struggles.) This support and provisioning from alloparents has a powerful impact on the physical and emotional health of both mothers and children. Hrdy describes a longitudinal study of one foraging society (p. 107) that found that the number of alloparents a baby had at one year of age was correlated with how likely that child was to live to the age of three. Another study (pp. 129-130) found that that the best predictor of socioemotional development was the child's network of attachments (the magic number was three secure attachments), not just her attachment to her mother. As Hrdy puts it, "Well might anthropologists and politicians remind us that 'it takes a village' to rear children today. What they often leave out, however, is that so far as (...) Homo sapiens are concerned, it always has. Without alloparents, there never would have been a human species." (p. 109)

Lydia apple picking with her grandmas.

In modern societies, historians, anthropologists, social workers and psychologists have long found that both at risk mothers and low weight babies are far more likely to succeed when they have support from alloparents, especially grandmothers (pp. 102-103). I depend heavily on my network of alloparents: Judy, my mother, and my mother-in-law. There were moments - like when Anna suffered from colic - when I don't know how I could have taken good care of her without their help.

The version of attachment parenting promoted in most popular parenting books focuses almost exclusively on a mother's attachment, with an occasional nod to a father's attachment. This limited scope misses how vital alloparents - a network of supporters who care for and provide for a child - are for both a mother and her child. A support network actually promotes better attachment between a mother and her child. For children, multiple strong attachments help them grow to be socially secure and understand diverse others. Mothers are vital for children to survive and thrive, but so is the tribe that surrounds each family. We evolved to raise our young in community, not to be isolated in our homes with only the members of our nuclear families.

While I still haven't persuaded my mom to come move in to our guest room, I'm more convinced than ever of the significance of the alloparents in my life. The pressure created by popular media versions of attachment theory for mothers to do it all and be everything to their children is limiting (never mind an impossible ideal). Our daughters' relationships with Judy and their grandmothers will enrich their lives and expand their hearts. All mothers need several significant others.