Camp Gagnon - How Ancient Civilizations Raised Children | Dr. Meredith Small

Episode Date: December 12, 2024

Meredith Small is an award-winning anthropologist, best-selling author and anthropology Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Cornell University. Her current area of interest is in the intersection of biology and culture, and how that has influenced parenting. Meredith is in the tent today to tell us how people of past civilization approached parenthood and the factors that have influenced the raising of children in both past and present times. WELCOME TO (a live episode of) CAMP! Shoutout to our sponsors Huel and Morgan & Morgan! Huel: https://huel.com/camp TIMECODES 00:00 Welcome Meredith Small 05:40 No Parenting Manual 13:29 Why Are Baby’s Helpless + Gestation Period 23:23 Prematurities Influence On Parental Interaction 28:25 Co-Sleeping 42:00 Baby Awareness 47:26 Sleep Training + Cry It Out 56:19 Importance of Research 1:02:12 Can Babies See Ghosts 1:04:40 Baby Wearing + Head Shape 1:16:45 When Should Babies Move To Bedroom? 1:22:17 Breast Feeding 1:34:19 Different Types Of Breast Milk 1:42:00 Weaning Children + Benefits Of Nutrients 1:50:53 Declining Birthrate 2:03:13 Should Children Ride Airplanes? 2:05:39 Microplastics Effect On Breastmilk 2:07:48 Resources For Help 2:12:09 Benefits Of Mixed Aged Groups 2:19:25 Do Primates Cry? 2:26:26 How To Prevent Over Dependence 2:33:02 Helicopter + Snowplow Children

Hello, what's up, everybody. Welcome back to camp. This is a very exciting episode. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. As always, dropping F. Miles in the chat. Miles is my friend from college that the audience does not like, and that makes me very happy for some reason. So again, campfires in the chat. Drop some tents in the chat. I'm dropping F Miles, just for all the time's sake. Thank you guys so much. Really appreciate you guys tuning in the episodes this week with Shama and Omar, which was awesome. And my good friend, Anthony DeVito, on Monday talking about mobsters. Today is a very, very exciting guest for me. These are one of the days of the podcast that I get very excited about because a very specific niche interest that affects me on a very personal level that I get to explore and unpack.

And it's a very, very interesting substrata of anthropology and parenting that I think make complete sense. And I'm so excited to have this woman in front of me today. It's Meredith Small. Dr. Meredith Small. I can't leave that out. Thank you so much for joining me.

It's a pleasure. This is so, so exciting. I read your book when my wife was about four months pregnant. This is how long ago? This is like, yeah, maybe eight months ago or something. My baby is like two months old now. And he's amazing. And I don't exactly even remember how I found your book.

I've always been interested in anthropology and sort of understanding human beings on a fundamental level, right? Like, what is it that truly makes human beings what we are? And going all the way back to the very beginning of the Anthropocene, what have we been doing for the most amount of time? And applying those things to my life as much as possible. And I think there's a lot of things happening within, like,

sort of the productivity movement that people have been doing. Like Dr. Huberman talks about getting sunlight in your eyes in the morning because it helps sort of regulate your hormonal and circadian rhythms. You know, like in terms of dietary things, I'm trying to pull out processed foods. Because, again, these things are all so. new in the scope of humanity. And then when I was having a baby, I was asking myself the same question. How did people raise kids for, you know, 100,000, 200,000, depending on when you believe that, you know, homo sapiens began in terms of the, you know, the present consciousness we have?

How do people raise babies? How have they been doing it in hunter-gatherer societies, pre-regorian times? What did we do? And it sort of just like rocked my world. I was like, this is crazy. And I found your book. I read the whole thing. I immediately emailed you. And I was like, this is the greatest thing ever. And I've applied the rules and the things in the book. I shouldn't say rules, actually. I've applied some of your findings in the book to our parenting strategy, and it has been remarkable. Our baby is, and maybe it's coincidence. I can't say it's causal, but my suspicion is that it is. But it's just been remarkable. So thank you so much for writing this book. You're welcome. I want to add when you're, when you were thinking about what was it like in the past when

homo sapiens were, as we are today, about 200,000 years ago, but also added to that is Western culture is 1.2 billion people, and there are 8 billion people on the planet. So what do the other 6.8 billion people who are not in Western industrialized culture, how do they bring up their babies and are their hints and clues and what are their babies like? People only know about that if they travel. Yeah. And they land in, you know, Asia or Africa or, you know, some distant culture and see children running around in a certain way and babies being on mother's backs all the time. And I remember my ex-brother-in-law who was in Zimbabwe for a year as a student. And he came home and he said, hey, Meredith, do you know that they carry their babies all the

time and I said, yeah, Ben, I do. And he goes, no, no, I mean all the time. So it's even, it's even looking in different directions, not just the past. Yeah. That is, is useful because the way we parent in Western culture and the United States in particular is wacky. It's really wacky. And it's, I think it's the most difficult place on earth to be apparent is the United States. Yeah, I don't think you're wrong. I mean, talk to parents. in America and, you know, pockets of Western Europe, the Western world, sort of, you know, generally speaking, and they're stressed. Absolutely.

And they're tired. And it's very, very difficult. There are no social networks. There is no help. You're supposed to, as in with the, in anthropology, we call them the belief system that we run by, which is independent and self-reliance. So, you know, put that baby on a schedule, get them to grow up and become a CEO of a company. And it's all about isolation, really.

And humans aren't designed like that. Little or big. Nobody is designed to be by themselves all the time. Absolutely. And again, I just want to sort of preface with the audience, your role with writing this book. You are an anthropologist. I am an anthropologist.

And you taught at Cornell for, I think he said, 35 years. At least, yes. Wow. And what's also amazing, and we'll have a different podcast about this, we're also an expert in Venetian history. Yes, I did make that odd turn in the last conversation. a couple of years, but I'll say I'm back. I'm writing a book right now. Pegas is my publisher, and it won't be out for probably a year and a half, but I'm back to being more anthropological,

and I'm writing a book about the anthropology of family. And let me tell you, it's really hard. I can imagine. I can imagine. But again, the book was just excellent. So throughout this conversation, I just want to unpack some things when it comes to parenthood, that again, some people told this to me when I was having our baby. They go, it doesn't come with a manual, right? Which is sort of like this, you know, aphorism you hear, this little idiom. You're like, all right, yeah, whatever. And it is so true. And it comes down to every little thing that you do with this tiny human.

There's no rulebook for. It's like, okay, breastfeeding or not breastfeeding, where does the baby sleep in a crib, in the room, in a different room? When do we pick them up when they're crying a lot or when they cry a little? Or, like, how do they go to sleep? long should they sleep? Like every question, a stroller, not a stroll. Like, there are so many things you take for granted that may or may not be the best thing for our kids. And furthermore, things that we don't even consider that are actually really beneficial. Everything is brand new when you have a baby. And I'm going through that now. And your book just offered so much,

so much comfort. Let me ask you a question. Please. You and your wife, do you have siblings? Do you have younger siblings? Did you ever have to take care of your siblings? Yes. I had one younger sibling and then five older siblings. So they probably took care of you. Yeah, I was probably getting to take care of. Did either of you ever babysit? Yes. But I think that's one of the problems is because, and I always come to this, the decrease in the

birth rate in Western culture, that most people by the time they're going to have a baby, they have had no experience with a baby because they were in, you know, a family with one child, two children. And when I was younger, people had four kids, eight kids, six kids. And so there was more exposure to infants. And when my daughter was little, I took her over to the neighbors who had babies because there wasn't going to be another child. And I wanted her to be exposed to kids. And her father, when he was young, his mother was going to have another baby.

And she sent him to the Red Cross babysitting class twice. So he knew how to do everything because of that. But I think we're missing that. intergenerational experience with babies. And so people are left with exactly those questions. What do I do with this thing? I'm in charge. Yeah.

And it's going to die if I don't do something? It's crazy. What is it? I mean, my friend Miles that we talked about that the audience hates. Shout out to you guys. He came over, like, I don't know, a week after our baby was born, and I put him in his hands. He was just so awkward.

He was like, what do I? And I was like, have you held a baby before? He was, no. Why would I meet a baby? I was like, yeah, that's a good point. The two things that we are not used to in Western culture are babies and death. I was just about to say that. It's very interesting that our society has compartmentalized these things that I think socially we see is inconvenient.

That I think young children are seen as sort of a nuisance. We don't really want to be around them. It's like a whole headache. Don't deal with it. They're expensive. And then death is the ultimate inconvenience. You know, your parents get old, your grandparents, they become a burden on you. And it also is a reminder of her own mortality.

Let's just put them in a home and we don't look at it. And I think that it robs us of a fuller human experience by, you know, being removed from the bookends of life. I think it also makes us a more lonely culture. Absolutely. I mean, what a shame, right? Like all these, you know, young children, like looking for, you know, mentorship and looking for connection that may or may not have it. And then all these old grandparents in homes by themselves. Yeah.

It's like if only we could all come live together in some type of community. And the assumption that every culture has this assumption that what they are doing is the right way. Sure. And that it is the normal way. And the only way you get out of that is to take a class in anthropology or to, again, to travel. Right. And not to travel to Europe because that's Western culture. Right.

to some other place where you're confronted with different lifeways. And basically that was my job for 30 years. Which is amazing. Yeah, I wanted to put all these 18-year-olds on a 747 and take them somewhere. But I would say to them, not everybody in the world has a cell phone. And one out of every five people on the planet is Chinese. And if we don't know what the Chinese think and feel, we know nothing. And, of course, there are a zillion different kinds of Chinese people.

It's not like there's one type. So I think Americans especially are not well experienced or educated in other cultures. And we learn mostly, I think, from others who immigrate into the United States. Or if we have an ancestry, you know, that came over here from some other time. Sure, absolutely. Yeah. And I think sometimes in America there's a little sense of like maybe like a cultural centrism, maybe like an ethnocentrism. Always.

Oh, what can I really learn from, you know, someone in Malawi? What can I really learn from someone in, you know, West Africa, living in like a small village? What can they teach me? And again, coming from this perspective where it's like I'm trying to, you know, see how parenting is done from every different culture. What is the human experience, you know, outside of America to parenting? You look at that and you go, oh, wow, they have a lot of things figured out that they've been doing for a very, very long time that I think we can learn a lot from. And that's what I'm hoping to discuss today. Yeah, the anthropologist Robert Levine and his wife who worked with the goosey people in East Africa.

once showed the Goosey mothers and grandmothers film of Americans changing their baby. And these people said, what is wrong with them? They don't even know how to diaper a baby because the baby's screaming and, you know, everything. Wow. So, I mean, it makes sense also. The judging goes both ways. Sure. I mean, it makes sense also, right?

America, we are a relatively new country of, you know, predominantly immigrants within the last few generations that all came here that typically. that typically cut ties with our old ancestry, and we had to figure everything out from scratch. So I also have sympathy for, like, the American experience. Like, yeah, like I talked to my parents, my grandparents, and they're like, we didn't breastfeed, we didn't know what to do. Like, we were told from some corporation,

and I couldn't talk to my mom because they were off in England somewhere, and I had to write a letter and take three weeks to get advice. So we just figured it out. So I think that kind of explains a little bit about it. And then one last little underpinning, I want to say, before we dive into some of like the substantive, of little, I guess, actual actionable items. The things that we discussed today, they can be sensitive.

I think a lot of people take a lot of personal, maybe umbrage with the way people describe parenting. And that, you know, the way that we're sort of discussing parenting today might be outside of the way that someone listening that is a parent is parenting their kids. And I think it's worth noting, like, you know, whatever you're doing is probably fine. Like, I think, I just wanted to say, like, if, you know, everything, a lot of parents, feel guilty about the way they parent. They're like, oh, I'm not doing this. I'm not doing this enough. I do this too much. Whatever you're doing, it's probably fine. If you're not using your kids, you're probably okay. I totally agree. And watching this over the last, you know,

25, 30 years, I am like personally, personally saddened by especially how difficult this is for women because this used to be the bastion of women. You know, if they're going to take everything else away, still we were mothers. And then the culture came and told women they didn't know how to mother and that infuriates me yeah you know so uh it's very contentious when my niece was having children she's like i you know this is horrible i need to talk to you everybody's telling me what to do and my response was don't listen to anybody you know listen to yourself yeah so i guess the first place to start something that uh i think i think you begin your book this way is sort of discussing from an anthropological lens, why are babies so helpless?

We are very different if you think about, let's say, a deer and the baby deer is born and it stands up and it immediately starts suckling on its mother and it can walk. We have these neurologically unfinished babies who can't sit up, certainly can't talk, can't feed them. Well, they can sort of feed themselves, but it seems like you have to operationalize that feeding and clearly they can't take care of themselves in any way, shape, or form. Well, it's very odd that we're like that, especially for someone like me who spent lots of years watching monkeys in the field, macaque monkeys, which was what I used to do a long time ago. And those babies are born

and they can immediately cling to their mothers and then they eventually, after a month or two, they're on the backs of their mothers and they're holding on and they're toddling away and coming back. So we have these extremely, almost like kangaroos, you know, babies who are inside for so long, extremely dependent infants. And so what anthropologists, the theory that everyone has is that at first in human evolution, the first thing that made us human, if we want to label it that way, is actually bipedalism, standing up on two legs and walking. It's not a big brain. And everybody says, oh, humans have big brains. That's what makes us different. But if you look at the fossil record, it's really bipedalism.

So around four or five, six million years ago, we have paleontological evidence from pelvises and footbones that those creatures who are our ancient ancestors became bipedal. But at that point, their brains were still very small, the size of a chimpanzee. So we know from looking at the pelvis, and I'm talking about. talking if any of your listeners know the fossil Lucy. There we go. That's great. The fossil Lucy in Australopithicicicocin, australopithicocerensis, about 3.5 million years ago. Oh, and we have the fossil Lucy, which is a 40% complete skeleton. So we've got her pelvis. And the parts that we don't have, they could mirror image them. So Lucy's pelvis doesn't look like

a modern human pelvis, and it doesn't look like a chimpanzee pelvis. So a chimpanzee pelvis. So a chimpanzee pelvis has a very reasonably small, round opening for the baby's head to go out. And the pelvic blades are very thin and upright. And so that chimp baby going out is basically going out a tunnel. And it's not a problem. Lucy's pelvis, the what are called the Iliac blades or the pelvic blades, the broad bones of our pelvis, really tilt outwards. but the opening is ovoid. And still, Lucy's baby, if she had any, but Australopithecine babies, which are, the word is hominids like us, they feel that the babies turned an angle and then they went out and it was really easy. So the problem came at about 1.5 million years ago when there was a dramatic increase

shown by the fossil record and the skulls in brain size. And one of the big questions in this research is how come, and we can get to that a point. Why do we have such big brains? My personal favorite is social intelligence, keeping track of relationships. That's not tool use because this all happened before there was much tool use. Certainly not language. That's very recent. What about cooking food?

Still a little bit later. There's some of that. And an anthropologist named Richard Rangham has written a book about the possibility of food. But that's still a little, it's later. Interesting. So Lucy is sort of a transition. Australopithecines are a transition between a more ape-like creature and a more of what we think of as a human creature. And the problem came about one point that, like I said, 1.5 million years ago, huge increase.

And as sudden in geological times, meaning not overnight, but, you know, hundreds of thousands of years. And then you have a misfit between the pelvic opening. and the size of the baby's head. And that's why women go through labor is because humans became bipedal. That's the reason. And then we got big brains. And so there's a misfit. But the reality is if you take a chimpanzee skull as a baby and plot it out to adulthood and you take a human one,

human babies should really be born with much bigger heads and bigger brains to make it. to make it to adulthood, and they don't because they can't. It's an evolutionary compromise. The pelvic area is restricting the birth of a bigger-headed baby, because if the head got any bigger, women wouldn't be able to walk. The pelvis would change so dramatically. So it's a very interesting evolutionary compromise that the baby is born sooner, but earlier than it should be.

and anthropologists estimate about three months earlier, and they think that Neanderthal babies actually had a 12-month gestation, not nine months like we do, that they were able to manage that because their brains, you know, somehow they managed it. But anyway. So we gestate for nine months as human beings, and that technically every baby that's born is premature.

Yeah, that's really it. Neurologically unfinished is the way academics put it. But that's it. So they come out. And they're very dependent. Now, what's really interesting in this story to me is that when all babies cry, of course, and they cry in a certain way, they most people cry worse in the evening. And one of the people I write about in the book Our Babies Ourselves is a guy who was working at the University of Montreal,

Ron Barr, pediatrician, and also anthropologically educated, spent time with the Kung San people in Namibia. And he ran a crying clinic in the hospital, and he said people would come in, and they say, my baby is crying, blah, blah, blah, blah. He said, I'd show them the universal crying curve. And that is a chart that shows that crying increases, and in about three to four months, it drops off in all babies. And isn't that interesting that it's the same three to four months that baby should have stayed inside? And he said to me, it's neurological. You know, now their brains have developed.

And so they're, you know, they're sort of right on where they should be. And they don't have to cry as much because they're getting everything they need. Oh, wow. Look at this. There we go. Yeah. That's the universal crying care. So I said to him, so what do you say to these people?

He goes, I show them curve. And I said, and then what do they do? He goes, they go, oh, okay. And they go home. And they had come in saying, my baby has colic. blah blah he goes they just go home wow and they don't come back that is fascinating so all this you know my baby has called like what do i do what i did you do you know if you just wait it'll go away your baby's not supposed to be here okay they're supposed to be back inside you

try to put them back in or something stick them back in put them in the toaster oven wow that yeah that makes a lot more sense doesn't it yeah and and it's knowledge we don't know we don't know as parents we don't we don't know as you know as you know citizens of this culture and we always assume we're doing something wrong or something is wrong with the baby. And the reality is there's nothing wrong. Nothing at all. Yeah, it's fascinating.

And again, the thing about having our baby that I thought was so, so, so cool, was doing the reflex testing. And you talked about something in the book about this second phase attritional, a second phase atritional, I think is the term, that these babies come out with these reflexes. And they have like a walking reflex.

They have a grabbing reflex. They have like this, you know, hanging reflex, all these interesting things that are baked into sort of our, you know, ancestral heritage, our DNA from a time where we were able to come out and be, you know, more precocial. We were born being able to do more things. And because we're premature, we don't necessarily have that to the same degree. Is that a fair explanation? I think that's fair. And a biological anthropologist and a friend of my name, John Marks, has just written a great book. about human diversity. And in there, he says, we know that we're affected by culture,

but we're also affected by development. Everything we do is affected by development, meaning the life stages we go through, being a baby, being a toddler, an adolescent, and an adult, then aging, that whatever we do, our bodies and our minds are affected by that as well. Yeah. I'm curious, how long do, like, other primates gestate for? Like a macs? Well, I know macaques. It's four and a half months. Four and a half months. I mean, they're really small. You know. Right. And I guess... Elephants are really long. Yeah, I think elements are like two years or something. Yeah. And that's a lot to do with body size, I think.

Interesting. Yeah, I'm curious, like, is there a curve to chart, you know, gestational length and, you know, any other type of factor? I'm sure there is, but I don't, I don't, I'm not familiar. with it. Interesting. So now thinking about little babies, right, that they basically all are premature. And once they get here, they're still so brand new and they don't even really understand what's going on, right? How does that change the way that we interact with them? Like, how does that change the way that parents should be looking at their one month old or they're two month old and how, you know, some of the decisions that they make in that early developmental period? I want to put a little bit about the cross-cultural in here because the way,

we in the United States and Western culture, the way we interact with a newborn, is very different across the world. I mean, there are cultures where people don't speak to newborn babies. They think it's stupid, you know, because the baby can't talk, so just wait. But then it turns out that all the siblings and the other kids around are talking, they talk to the baby. So they're still learning language and how to talk with that. I think my impression of most Americans is that everybody is afraid of.

of their baby than anything. And the funny part is in Dr. Spock's book that sort of revolutionized parenting in the, I don't know when it was the 1950s or something, the first line is you know more

than you think you do. And even though he went on to tell people what to do, and I think that's it, that our instincts, our reactions, are, unless you're someone

who's very, very anxious and doesn't trust your own reactions. It's there. If let's say you're in a grocery store and you hear a baby screaming, I react to that. I mean, I do want to go over or push the mother out of the way and pick up the baby. I've never done that, but I, you know, I would like to do that. And I think that fear stops people sometimes. It's just an opinion. I've never collected data on this or anything that people are afraid almost to be physical with their babies to pick them up and hold them all the time because they have their grandmother or somebody saying,

no, pick that baby up, you know, because you'll just spoil it. And there's a long history of that from like the 20s and the 30s of don't touch the baby, don't pick it up, and the crying out business. Like, what is the point? The baby is screaming. That's a signal. And that's all the baby has. It can't talk yet.

And it is telling you, as Ron Barr would put it, that something is off balance. Something is wrong. That they just feel like something's wrong. It could be food. It could be their diapers wet. It could be they just feel weird. And what they're craving is contact. And so I'm a big proponent of carrying your baby all the time.

Because if you do travel in other countries and you see babies always stress. to somebody, you never hear crying. Yeah. Very, very rare. And Americans always think, well, then you'll spoil that child. And it will never become independent like we want it to be. Well, research shows that that is not true at all. In fact, they followed some little kids who did co-sleeping until they were in kindergarten.

Not they didn't necessarily co-sleep to kindergarten, but they followed them until kindergarten. and those kids turned out to be more independent and more self-reliant. They had a sense of security, whereas I think that in American culture, we bring up anxious people. And part of that is forcing babies to sleep on their own and not finding, it's not that you necessarily have to sleep with your baby, but compromises in which there's more tactile, a sensory, hand the baby to somebody else. And we also have a problem because we don't have big extended families much anymore. Right. Some people do, and they're the lucky ones. Right.

I had a graduate student for a while who worked with the Yanomami in the Amazonian rainforest, and she was just telling me about her life there. And they live in these long houses, and so an extended family is all sleeping together. And nobody sleeps through the night. People wake up, they go to sleep. You know, we have this thing in Western culture that if you don't sleep through the night, something's wrong with you but in fact humans are

biphasic sleepers they normally wake up in the middle of the night but the trick is then you take a nap in the afternoon and we don't allow that so we've made that the work day is more important but anyway I said to her what happens in the middle of night when a baby is

crying and she said oh let's just hand it off to whoever is awake and I thought wouldn't it be great if you had 25 people that you could just turn to and turn this baby because that's the other pressure we experience in Western culture is just there are usually one or two people taking care of that baby. And that's crazy. Yeah.

I mean, it really does take a village. Let's talk about sleeping. So I want to talk about baby caring in a second, which is fascinating. But sleeping, again, I think that's one of the first things that you're sort of doing with your newborn. Like, you know, our baby's born. And my wife and I kind of looked at each other and the midwife left and the dula left. And we were all alone in our apartment. We just looked each other like, all right, I guess we'll go to bed.

It's so crazy. And again, so many little things come into question as to what should we do. And I read your book, so I was very fortunate because I felt like I had some information. A couple things. One, could you explain what co-sleeping is? And then could you also explain sleep training and sort of like the, you know, what people would call the cry-it-out method or self-soothing? And why these things have kind of come into culture and what your opinion on these

different sort of sleep styles are. The interesting background to that is that when my daughter was born in 1997, those words didn't exist, co-sleeping, you know, that kind of stuff. What was it? Nobody talked about it at all. They never talked about sleeping. I think the assumption was you put the baby in the crib and nobody ever talked about it. And in fact, my oldest sister and her children are now way grownups, she once said to me,

I always slept with my kids. It was the happiest time of my life, and I never told anyone because she knew. It's controversial. It's controversial. And I think part of the reason it's controversial is that in Western culture, we, at least in America, we have infused the bed with sexuality. And so, oh my God, you can't sleep with your children

because that's where you have sex. And one time I was giving a talk to about, I don't know, hundreds and hundreds of people, and I was talking about this and saying, you know, something and some woman at the back yelled out you can always have sex in the living room and everybody burst out laughing you know because we have sort of idolized the bedroom as that that's mom and dads or you know mom and moms or dad and dads that's their their sacred place you know but in other cultures people sleep together right you know a professor at Cornell said in Nepal one day

She just wanted to go sleep by her, take a nap by herself. And she went in and laid down. And sure enough, somebody came in and laid down right next to her because they didn't want her to be lonely. You know, but we have this thing that's part of our belief system. That's hilarious. You should sleep alone. You should sleep through the night. Yeah, I mean, even just you saying this, I'm like, yeah, I believe that.

As an American, like, as someone grew up in America, I'm like, yeah, you sleep alone. Like, why, like, if I took a nap somewhere and someone joined me, I'd be like, whoa, this is, are you making, are you making? Are you making a sexual advance? That would be my first thought. That's right. And it's imprinted on me culturally. And these deep-seated belief systems, which we all have, I have them, we all have them, they are really hard to change.

It's part of our socialization that we do this. And again, the only way you know any different is to read or travel to another country. Anyway, so when I wrote the book, and then the book came out and somebody called me for an interview and said, What do you think about attachment parenting? And I had never heard that word before. And I said, what other kind is there? And I didn't realize that was going to be like a big thing. Right.

And then how I got into the understanding of what we now call co-sleeping is through my truly fine anthropological friend, Jim McKinna, who I interview in the book and I went to his sleep lab. He's another former primate behaviorist who became interested in infant sleep when he had a little baby boy. And he says, his name is Jeff. And he said, I would be rocking Jeff standing up. And then I'd put him down to go to sleep. And he'd cry. And he said, and this happened over and over. But for Jim McKinna, this was an interesting thing.

And he began to dig into it. and he went to University of California, Irvine. He said he went to the neurology department. He knocked on the first door. And he found someone to collaborate and do EKGs and sleep studies with mothers and babies who didn't normally sleep together. So he wired them up. And then he and this other person would stay up all night and they had a infrared camera on them. And he said, and I saw some of the films of women who normally didn't sleep.

with their babies and in their sleep, they are patting the baby, moving the covers, comforting the baby, and the mother and the baby are face to face. So Jim spent decades studying this, especially at Notre Dame when he was in the anthropology department and he had a baby parent sleep lab. And so he has lots of data. And his final conclusions are that human infants are meant designed to not be alone at night. And normally if you're breastfeeding, you have to breastfeed through the night. Well, what a pain if you have to get up from bed and walk in another room, get the baby, even go over to a crib.

He said it's just so much easier. If you're close sleeping, a woman naturally turns towards the baby and the baby finds the mother's breast. And he has the film to show this. And so we've gone to a system where, babies are often bottle-fed. There's nothing wrong with that. I mean, I was bottle-fed, and I seem to be okay. But we've kind of disconnected that contact point at night because we have a belief system that if you don't do that, if you don't regulate the baby's sleep, it will never

sleep alone and it will never sleep through the night. And that is untrue. But we've got it in our heads or the idea that if you sleep the baby, you will roll over on it and kill it. And that will, you know, it would be sudden infant death. But if you look at the real reports of sudden infant death, there is often an explanation. And it usually has to do with, you know, awful things like the baby's crib is way too close to the radiator or, you know, the covers, the baby got tangled in the covers. And so you have to, you know, be prudent. about this. Morbid obesity is another one. Another one. Drug and alcohol use. Drug and out, sleeping on a sofa, you know, which I did with my daughter. And when I read that, I was like, oh, no. But it's sort of common sense things. But culturally, we've also disconnected sleeping with a child. Like, you just aren't supposed to do that. And Jim looked at the history of that. And he said it really comes from, I don't remember the dates exactly, but not medieval time. but later when poor people were killing their babies infanticide because they just couldn't deal with it.

And so they would say, oh, I must have rolled over on the baby, but it turned out it wasn't true. And he had slides of these sort of odd kind of lobster traps that people put in their beds and put the baby in it so they wouldn't roll over on it. And one of the lines, we used to give talks together, and one of the lines he would say to people is, how many people sleep with your dog? And, you know, a lot of people raise their hand and they go, you ever worry about rolling over and killing your dog? And people just go, no. But it feels like a dog has a more agency.

They can run away. It feels like it. But, you know, you can try it. And this is actually sort of a fun thing to do. If you're going to have a baby, get a doll about the same size. Put it in and find out if you roll over it. Because I'm guarantee you you won't. You won't because you are conscious of it.

And you're still going to wake up every couple of hours because the baby's hungry. Yeah, we had read there's a protocol for co-sleeping now. I'm not exactly sure where it came from. Chris says, would you mind pulling up like the seven rules for co-sleeping? And it's sort of the things that you discuss in the book. Like if, you know, avoid these things like don't swaddle. That way the baby can sort of brace. Don't be drunk.

Exactly. Don't be doing drugs or alcohol. And even drugs like, you know, a sleep aid. If you're taking some type of sleep medication, that would count. This is not like illicit drugs. use only. And then like morbid obesity, things like that. And I think Chris is going to pull up that list because I think it's interesting to look at. But anytime I tell people like, yeah, you know, we are, you know, we originally got like a bassinet to have the baby sort of next to us. But anytime we talk

about this, people get very concerned. They say, oh, what about sudden infant death syndrome? You know, you're going to roll over on the baby. They won't be able to do anything. Oh, yeah, baby on their back. Don't overheat. Couch sleeping. Well, you know, that's really interesting. would say this, the baby on the back thing. When I was a baby, you put the baby on its stomach. All right. And then it came along and babies would vomit and choke on it and die. On their stomach. On their stomach. So there was campaign. I don't remember when this was. It wasn't that long ago putting babies on their backs. And the number of Sid's deaths dropped dramatically. And Jim said to me, isn't it interesting that one behavioral change

had such an incredible effect on infant mortality. Yeah, that's interesting. But putting the baby on the back, you had another moment in the book where you discuss that babies that sleep on their stomach seem to sleep longer and harder, which is a really interesting finding. Which is not good.

But it's very counterintuitive because you read it and you go, don't you want your baby to sleep long and you want them to sleep well? You say, of course. We'll put them on their stomach and they'll sleep very long very well. But then you realize it's actually beneficial

for babies to be mildly, waking up and doing this act of sleep. Can you talk about active sleeping and why that's good for babies? And this again is Jim's work. He had all kinds of devices on people and I would say to him, but these women come in and they're going to sleep with their baby for the first time and like, how do they sleep? He goes, they sleep like a dream. And he said, I think it's because they know someone's watching.

You know, so they're not afraid. They've got these scientists, you know, behind a window who are watching them. And what he discovered is that these mothers and infants go through what he calls a sleeping tango. So there are four levels of sleep, including REM sleep, and they go through a level of sleep. And they might be able to find that too. I don't know. But for a visual. So let's say the baby goes through the levels of sleep and then goes down.

Then the mother follows or the mother goes through a level. The baby follows like a tango. and that they really are entwined in their different levels of sleep. And he has said it's basically teaching the baby how to sleep. Fascinating. Isn't it? That the baby in the mom, their brainwaves are basically sinking up. They're sinking up.

And if the baby has an apnea, it stops breathing. And if the mother is facing, the mother is breathing out CO2, and that triggers the baby to breathe again. Yeah, it's pretty awesome work. Evolution is really clever, huh? Yeah, it's really clever. Call it God, call it nature. That's right.

That's right. So it makes sense. Yeah. But without the scientific experiments, if you want to call them that, or observations, we wouldn't even know that. We'd just go with that. We'd go with, oh, you know, the baby should be bad. It'll breathe better if it's by its own, but it's not true.

Yeah, so interesting. And again, I think the Western notion is that you put the baby in a crib, maybe in the room but, you know, distant from you or then eventually in its own separate room. That's right, because that's safe. That's safer. And also they'll grow up to be, you know. More independent. More independent.

More independent. You'll be a CEO or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is that what you want? Yeah.

So, yeah, that's an interesting concept. Let me add in here. There's also the other side of that is the number of people who choose not to go-sleep because they don't sleep well. when they're sleeping with a little kid, you know, or with a baby. And sometimes they don't sleep well with a partner. You know, some couples who sleep in separate beds or separate rooms because they just don't sleep well.

Well, if you think about it, since we never did this go-sleeping thing for people of my generation, that didn't happen, it's so odd in this culture that we put a baby in its own room in its own bed and then at what, 18, 20, 25, they have a partner. and they're expected to sleep with someone for the first time in their life. So, of course, they don't know how to sleep with another person. Right. You know, you've seen those ads for the beds. They have two separate things and two separate duvets and two separate whatever,

because people really don't know how to sleep with other people. But, you know, if you come from Nepal, you could probably lay down to sleep with anybody. Yeah. Because, again, sleeping is, it's so culturally influenced in this culture, and it isn't in a other cultures and we have all these sleep problems insomnia everything you know and that isn't true for other places yeah i'm curious how do babies know when you put them down because my baby does this i'll you know he'll fall asleep on me in two seconds and the second i put him down he's crying yeah how does he know that i'm not holding your heartbeat and your warmth yeah pretty straightforward you know

when you think about if he's on your chest his head is probably turned and he's right over your heartbeat. You know, they know. And is there a pheromonal element that they can smell me? I don't know. I would assume so. I would assume so. Yeah, we always think humans don't have a very good sense of smell, but we still have one. You know, we're not cats, we're not dogs, but we still have, we still have one. Interesting. Yeah. And there's another element I'm, I don't remember if it's in the book if I read this elsewhere, that as babies are sort of active sleeping, like they're kind of, you know, startling themselves. And I think parents sometimes get frustrated by this because they're like, my baby was perfectly sound asleep and then he startled himself and then he woke up this is bad i should put him

on his stomach and that way he'll sleep longer and not startle himself uh and it's i'm curious what your thoughts on this are that sometimes this startle reflex can get worked out by going through it by these babies startling themselves they're able to kind of calm their sympathetic nervous system and not startled themselves as much and as a result by active sleeping and occasionally startling themselves and falling back asleep they uh are less anxious later in life I don't know about that work, but what you're saying makes perfect sense to me, that we are learning animals, you know, much of what we do. And so there's a lot of practice. It's back to that issue of development.

It surely is part of development. And Ron Barr talked to me a lot about the terrible twos. And good luck with that. you know that a friend of mine and Ithaca said her son he just had a meltdown like on the street and I said what did you do and he was like two she said oh I got him off the sidewalk and I put him on the grass so he wouldn't hurt himself and then I just stood there and waited for him to get over it you know so he wouldn't hurt himself because this is sort of a normal thing and Ron says it's just part of development and it's part of that the brain starting to sort itself out

you know and it's not your fault and it's not their fault and you just live through it sort of like puberty yeah you live through that too yeah yeah i'm excited for that one yeah sure good luck and uh i guess similarly babies don't know that they're separate from the mother's body they don't that's a fascinating concept as well and they aren't yeah that's very true um as jim puts it well i actually It wasn't him. A pediatrician who's long dead said that there's not just a baby. There's a baby in someone. Because they're so neurologically unfinished, you know, unfinished. There has to be somebody else on the outside. And as adults, we are designed really to respond to that crying. And that's why we have a reaction to it. If we didn't, and there are cases when people don't, and that's a real problem.

Yeah. There was a really nice piece of work that was done at Boston Children a long time ago where they took babies. I don't remember how old they were, a couple months old, and they put them like in a car seat. And then they would have the mother go in and they would be doing this sort of interaction with hands and, you know, and everything. The baby would be all happy. And the women had an ear, earbud in their ear. And the researcher would say from the other room, okay, now. give the baby a dead affect. So the woman would just change her face and stare at the baby

and not respond to the baby reaching out. And the baby, every baby that they tried this, I think it was 90 seconds, the baby would keep trying and then it would just go limp and turn its face away. And even more interesting, then the research would say, okay, be yourself again. and the mother would be herself interacting, and the baby didn't respond right away because it was pissed or scared or unsure. And it was the same for all the babies they tried. So they really are born ready and waiting for that kind of interaction. It's how they learn and how they regulate themselves.

They can't regulate themselves. by themselves. They have to do it with us. I had a conversation on this show with a gentleman named Sebastian Younger. He's brilliant. I love Sebastian. And he made a comment,

and the clip actually went for like fairly viral. I was kind of surprised by it, where he said that human beings are the only mammals that don't sleep with their children, specifically in the West. That's right. He's also a great writer. But yeah.

He's brilliant. Human beings in the West are the only mammals that don't sleep with their babies. That's exactly right. As soon as you put it in that context, I was like, huh. Isn't that odd? It's a little dumb.

So you have a dog, you have a cat, you have a litter of kittens, you see them all snuggling there, they're all sleeping together in a ball, and then you think, but I can't sleep with my baby, you know, because I'll ruin it psychologically or something. Yeah. You know, it's pretty twisted. Yeah. So now there's this thing in the West, and maybe not only the West, but I say the West sort of an encompassing term for this, you know, progressive sort of scientific ideal of sleep

training and this notion of cry it out, which is effectively you put your child on a sort of rigorous sleeping program where they're awake for a certain amount of hours and asleep for a certain amount of hours. And I think that amount varies depending on sort of the philosophy you kind of take up with this, which is nice because it gives the parents a lot of like autonomy and time and their schedule is more or less organized, which, you know, if you're working a job and you have a nine to five as a mother, it's probably very important that your baby's on a more regular sleep cycle. And that often includes, you know, putting them into a separate room so they can sleep independently. They can learn to be independent.

And if they cry, there's an idea known as I cry it out where you sort of let them continue to cry until eventually they self-soothe. Is there anything on it? Which is a really funny word to me. Self-soothe? Right. I mean, if you think about adults, how do we self-soothe? Well, let's see. Alcohol, drug, sex, shopping, dancing, music.

Right. And to think that that's a good thing, that's very cultural, that you should be able to take care of yourself in your worst moments when you're unhappy. I think that's really wacky. You know, if you look across other cultures, people don't do that. You know, they're more connected. You know, not across the board, but, you know, you could say that. And whenever I hear that term, I think you really want a two-month-old somehow to teach you. itself to self-soothe? It's a nice word for teach itself to stop crying and fall asleep because it's exhausted. And, you know, I have a reaction to this, and I know that's really hard on people, and I really have no right to tell other people what to do in this. But I don't think there's, and I might be wrong, that there's any research, it'd be great to know if you took the babies that went through this kind of, quote-unquote, sleep training. and see what they're like at 18. I think that would be really interesting because I could be wrong. Maybe it's perfectly fine. I'm sure that happened to me as a baby, but I had lots of siblings.

So I was never, ever alone, ever. But I just don't get it, basically. And I've had mothers say to me mothers who work, and they say, I sleep with my baby because I don't get to see him during. the day and that that's a way to make up for lost time during the day because if you're coming home from work and then you're doing whatever the family's doing that evening and you're exhausted and you go to bed and you put the baby alone and you get up and you go back to work but you could have had you know seven hours with that baby but I know these are really sort of culturally

unacceptable ideas that I have at some level and people, you know, they may try it for night and don't like it or whatever, but we've, we have a primacy, a primacy of going to work and the intimacy intimacy of the partners, adults, over the baby, rather than trying to compromise and integrate all those things. And, you know, I just sound like, you know, a privileged academic when I say those things. But, I've met enough people who have figured out compromises, you know, who have incorporated, I knew a woman at Cornell who was an older student and she was pregnant when she took my primary class. And she and her husband, who was a student and they had two other kids, they patched together, you know, relatives. You know, it's a shame we have to do this in American culture that you don't, there's no other, you know, state funded daycare or anything.

and they patched together a system of different people, some that they paid, some who were friends. And I so admired them for going to all that trouble to try to figure out how to do it. And sometimes people just can't figure it out. They just have to do what they have to do. People especially who have manual labor jobs and are exhausted, you know. And so, you know, in reality, people have to work out for themselves. And it's not like every single thing you do to your baby is going to, positive

or negative is going to affect them for the rest of their life, unless something, you know, truly terrible and traumatic. But, you know, basically, we all kind of make these decisions as we go. As a friend said to me when my daughter was a baby, and I was trying to decide between cloth and paper diapers, because, you know, I lived in Ithaca, which is called the Berkeley of the East. You know, and it was like, oh, the shame I'm going to get from people. And she just looked at me and she said, this is one of many compromises you will be making. Right. And that has stuck with me.

You know, my daughter's an adult and I, it's still, it's one of many compromises you will make. And you will never be a perfect parent by your own judgment or anybody else's. Right. And you will make mistakes and you'll make bad judgments. But, you know, it's the greatest roller coaster ride in the world as far as I'm concerned. Absolutely. On the idea of getting more sleep and being tired, I mean, I've just found on a personal basis, which is, again, is an anecdote, a sample size of one. Yeah. And, you know, we've been sleeping great. And our baby is, you know, don't tell that to any other parents. Yeah, I know. Hopefully they're not listening.

Well, we had a, we had a very, we were very lucky and I would say privilege to have this because I was an academic. I was older and I had tenure and nobody could touch me. And so I could, and my ex-husband, my father, my daughter's father, is a carpenter, a contractor, and worked for himself. So we just very quietly divided it up 50-50. And I would go to the university, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and he would work Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. And the person who had to take care of the baby, the person who had to go to work, got to sleep by themselves. So they went downstairs and slept by themselves. That's hilarious. And, you know, I hesitate to say that because we were lucky that we could do that and most people can't.

Right. And a lot of that had to do is that I was an older parent and my career was established. And so there was no risk for me. And that's very, very unusual. Yeah. People having their babies in their 20s, their 30s or even younger, it's much more critical on what they have to do. That's the other thing. Having babies young, I mean, I'm 28.

So in the scope of humanity, probably not actually that young. But I guess in New York standard, it's pretty young. And I feel it's great. Like I still have like some dumb young man years where I can just be awake for a lot of nights and not feel it as much. You know what I mean? Like I think once I'm in my 30s, 40s, like the hangover will start to hit. You know, that you lose like four hours of sleep and you're like, I have to go away for a week. So I feel pretty good.

But sleeping with the baby in our bed, one of the nice things about that is, the ability to breastfeed in the night. And so not having to get up. And so as a result, my wife is just able to kind of like lean over, baby's happy, and then everyone goes back to sleep. Yeah. And, you know, when thinking about, you know, sleep training, like, oh, I want to get the optimal amount of sleep.

The most amount of sleep as a parent, it's kind of counterintuitive, again, but having the baby with you can actually offer more sleep because the baby is more placated. And I think that speaks back to sleep in general being such a problem in America. and probably most of Western culture because we've made this day where you're 24 hours where you're supposed to work during the day and then you do whatever you do in the evening

and then you're supposed to sleep. And if you don't sleep eight hours, who came up with eight hours, then there's something wrong with you. And it'd be nice if we got over that. Yeah, absolutely. Because, you know, in most cultures, people take a nap.

Yeah. You know, and if you go, I remember being in Indonesia and Bali and, you know, in the afternoon, all the shops were closed. And they weren't having lunch, like in Italy. They were sleeping behind the counter. And if you walked in, somebody would wake up and go, and I thought, this is awesome. It's nice, right?

It feels a bit more human-centric. Oh, yeah. You don't have people conforming to a society that's sick thinking that they're healthy. I want to ask about baby wearing and also about breastfeeding, which is two very, very interesting topics from an anthropological perspective. Is there anything else about sleeping that you wanted to underpin before we move on to that section? I don't think so. Only for your listeners out there, just do some reading and trust yourself about that.

And, you know, you'll figure it out, you know, and the baby will be fine. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I would read resources whether you're going to, you know, sleep train or have the baby in, like, sidecar or in the bed and just kind of, you know, do your own personal research on the best ways to do that and if it fits your lifestyle. You know what? I'm guessing that when you go through the teenage years, I think as a parent you begin to understand how little control you have over everything.

And I think there's a fantasy that when you have a baby, you are in control. Right. And Americans do love their control. Absolutely. You know, we are not relaxed about these things. And if you can take a step back. And think. And also, you know, that old adage, the days are long, but the years are quick, it's so absolutely true. And it changes. That's my biggest piece of advice. Whatever is upsetting

you or trying you or exhausting you today, I guarantee you it will change. It's so short. It really is. And another great piece of advice that I had heard when it comes to young babies is try to be more of a gardener and less of a carpenter. Yeah. You have this human being that comes with its own personality and its own ideas and you can sort of mold it and shape it in certain ways, obviously, by being a great parent, but they will just be sort of how they are. Yeah.

And trying to nurture that and cultivate that is oftentimes, again, I don't really have a ton of experience or advice to be giving on the topic. But I find that with like even my nieces and nephews, cultivating the spirit of the the humans typically more beneficial than trying to mold them into what you think they should That's right, because you really have no control. Yeah. You think you do. You have influence, but you don't have any control.

And when my daughter was a teenager, I never read parenting books, but somebody gave me one, and it said, okay, your job is over when they're adolescents and anything you've been trying to teach them about right or wrong, morale, you know, whatever. And here's what you shouldn't do. Don't criticize their hair, their clothing, their friends, or they're. their music and your job is only about drugs and alcohol. And that's what you have to, safety is your only job. You're now an ethicist. Yeah. That's, that's really it. And so you do have influence and you hope for the best. But they are also human beings and nobody's controlling you.

So why do you think you're controlling them? Absolutely. Okay, we're going to discuss a couple more topics, but really quick, we're going to hear from our sponsors that make this show possible. And we'll be back in just a second. If you have any questions from my dear friend, Dr. Small, aka Meredith, on the streets, as we know her. Yeah, just one of the homies, Meredith. If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the comments. I hope you guys are enjoying this as much as I am.

This is like one of my favorite topics. I love anthropology. So this is so fun. We'll be back in just a second. Hey, guys, really quick. Did you know that on this day in history in 1582, Pope Gregory introduced the Gregorian calendar, which most of the world still uses today.

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Be on time. All right. Sudden alarm. Let's get back to the show. And we are back. Thank you all so much. We are here live with Dr. Meredith Small. We have a question.

When a baby's first born, can they see ghosts? Nathan, that's an excellent question. All right, what say you, anthropologists? What do we think? Can they see ghosts? Well, you know, it's hard to say because they can't tell us, can they? Oh, that's a good point. They might be.

That's why they're crying. Could be. They see ghosts and they're so scared. But the question is, what kind of ghost? Who is it? Who is it? Someone haunting the house from years ago? Some ancestor or someone haunting the house?

Oh, my goodness. See, but maybe the ghost can babysit. That's what we really should do. It takes a village. Let me, I'll quickly tell you about my friend Amagatli, who's a cultural anthropologist, lived for years with the Beng people of Ivory Coast. And they have a whole different idea of where babies come from. They come from, we would think of it as like reincarnation, but it's not that.

It's a pre-life. And that they are alive and well there. I'm sure I'm not saying this right, but it's W. U-R-G-E, I think, anyway. And they have a name and they have parents. And then when they're born, they are not officially into this world until their umbilical cord falls off. And so the new parents do a lot of things, you know, ointments and stuff to get that umbilical stump to fall off because they want the baby to stay. And if the baby cries a lot, they take it to a diviner, spiritual diviner, who says, this baby's not happy and it wants to go back.

the other parents and the way to make it happier is to give it money and jewelry, which sounds pretty good to me. And so that babies come from, they're fully formed, their people already. Isn't that fabulous? Oh, that's interesting. I wonder how that changes the psychology of how you raise your kids being like, this is our kid right now, but it used to be someone else's kid and we're just having them for this little moment. I better be a good parent. Yeah, or else we're going to get our our ass kick. It's also spiritually a good way to deal with, you know, infinite child death is about 50% in a lot of cultures. And so when you have your babies are dying a lot, you know, this is a way to deal with grief as well.

I mean, I'm just projecting that, but it just seems that way to me. Oh, absolutely. Wow. Okay. I want to ask you about baby wearing. Again, for a lot of people that don't have kids or, you know, maybe they'll never have kids. They're not interested. This concept of baby wearing is really fascinating to me because in my mind, again, as an American, I go, you have a baby, you put them in a stroller, and you push them around on the stroller.

And it's like, duh, that's exactly what you're supposed to do with babies. And then I was thinking about it was reading your book. I was like, wait a second, strollers only been around 150 years. I guess. I don't know, but yeah. The scope of human beings as, you know, these bipedal hominids with the same brains we have right now, if that's this much, we've had strollers for. such a small amount. So I guess my question is, what did people do when they didn't have strollers?

And what do they do today in places that they don't have access to strollers? Pretty simple. It's a piece of cloth. And tied, I brought one back from Bali. It's this long piece of cloth. And whatever they've got, a towel, anything. And if you were to go, let's say, to East Africa, you would see that all babies are carried all the time. And part of the advantage is for breastfeeding, the babies wiggling around and finding the breast, once they can wiggle.

And, you know, the breast is getting stretched out for sure. But this way women go about their business and their business is growing things in the fields and, you know, bending over a lot and weeding and that sort of thing, taking things to market, whatever. And also, by carrying a baby all the time, somebody else can do. it so the baby can be handed off. And the reality is around the world, 90% of child care is done by other children. It's not done by adults. And when people go to, you know, foreign countries, I mean, people have come back and said to me, I couldn't believe it. You know, this 10-year-old is carrying a baby. And I go, yeah, but that 10-year-old has been doing that forever. And also, well, there we go. And also, but that looks like somebody from medieval.

times, anyway. But also, there are always adults around. So when a child is doing child care, there are monitors. You know, there's somebody there. They're adults, grandparents, other people in the village, you know, whatever. So they're not totally by themselves. So my personal experience is I, we never had a stroller. I, I think they're more trouble. in their worth, actually. And just recently, my daughter was telling me that she's just sick and tired

of the strollers in the subway. You know, people coming down the stairs, going up, going up, and even worse, go spend some time in Venice where I go a lot, 400 bridges, and people with a stroller taking up the whole bridge and then they walk 50 feet and they have to do it

again. Yeah, not ADA accessible. We got to do that. We've got to change some of Venice. We've got to tear it down and make it ADA accessible. That would be... That's right. That's right. Bring in the cars. Exactly. And so I always found it very easy.

And we had a sling kind of thing for my daughter and then eventually a backpack, you know. And as she got bigger, I just make my husband care. And then sometimes she just sit on his shoulders. You know, I have pictures of them in foreign countries and she's just sitting on his shoulders. And I just think people think a stroller is really convenient, but I don't get it. myself and they do like motion you know i i admit to you know putting my daughter in the car and driving around to get her to sleep you know that happened to me once um but i it's a very interesting thing it'd be it'd be fun to look up the history of the when strollers came about and now there

are those umbrella strollers you know that you can oh yeah yeah well there's actually a i've seen them back in i think this is like around industrial revolution kind of turn of the century time. They had like sort of like baby carriage prototypes, but they also had this thing that I thought was so cute. It's a little wheel with a seat. Oh. And then there's like a handle on it. And so this is for like toddlers.

And so they can kind of sit on like the little like wheel seat and the parents can kind of wheel them around. I was like oh, it's so cool. Well someone recently asked me, a young person asked me and all the time when you didn't have a stroller and you were carrying your daughter, did you did you ever have a time when you wish you had two hands and I went

I did have two hands because with a front pack or something your hands are free and just at that instant when we were having that conversation a woman came down the street the other way she had her baby in a front pack

and she was holding two bags of groceries and I went see you know it isn't like that I never found it to be a burden in any kind of way I just liked it and it seemed easier. I mean, there are photographs of me vacuuming the house with my daughter on my back.

I just, you know, only when she got older, but then she could walk. Right. So, I mean, most babies walk around one. So by the time, they're two. Now, let's say someone listening, they say, well, I think the stroller's more convenient. They like the stroller better. Is there any neurological or developmental benefits to baby carrying over stroller? I don't think anyone's ever studied that, but intuitively, I would think that the baby is more comfortable and will cry less because it's having physical contact.

That heartbeat, the smell, the warmth. Yeah. And you could say, and Ron Barr's work with the son about crying, that all babies around the world cry the same number of times during the day. but Western babies cry longer per bout so we put up with a lot of crying

and what Ron Barr would say it's because we don't carry our kids and if you carry them you have less crying and for what reason specifically

you can nurture them you can soothe them and they're quieter because they feel your warmth your heartbeat and they feel the motion

as you're walking along and that's how most baby is in the world are dealt with. The motion element is really interesting, that babies are gestating and forming from an embryo to its own self-sustaining organism in the womb of a woman swaying back and forth, walking around, feeling motion, hearing the heartbeat of their mom. And then we expect them to not like the same environment when they're outside the womb.

It seems a little... Yeah. And then we have the invention of the car seat, which of course, need for safety reasons. But I always, you know, judgmentally would say the worst invention was the pop-out car seat where you can, you know, just take it out of the, and then you're just carrying it into the house and then you put it on the counter, you know? Or maybe those mechanical seats where the baby is going back and forth and back and forth

like that, which is giving it the kind of motion that would, I mean, I'm just speaking from personal experience here. And it was, I just, I thought it was easier. Yeah. I had read that there's some potential neurological development benefits from baby carrying. Oh, that's probably true. Is that as you're carrying them, they are moving and I guess their sort of motor function is getting a little bit more dialed, kind of in the way that active sleeping is kind of helping them learn how to sleep.

I guess by moving and swaying, they're, again, having like a little bit of surprise, and they're neurologically, they're able to reach milestones. I have to double-check the research. I don't know if Christos is able to look anything up on this. You know, this is this past from when I wrote my two books on childcare. But as you say this, my daughter never fell. She walked at one and she didn't even do the grab onto things. She just walked across the room.

And all her little friends had scraped knees. She just never fell. And she's always had an incredible sense of balance. And I don't think I ever connected it to the possibility, the hypothesis, that maybe it was because she was carried all the time. Yeah, I need to double check where this research is from. Again, I don't want to say with full certainty that that's exactly what it is. And she's also brilliant. So I'm sure everything I did was perfect.

But it's, yeah, it's an interesting thing that, again, when I hear it, I'm like, oh, this kind of makes sense. If that's what human beings have been doing for, you know, eons, then, you know, it tracks that it would continue to help. And then there's also the developmental component of constantly holding and wearing your baby, you know, the head shape, which is another fascinating thing that I never really considered until I had a baby that babies that are left on their backs, are they sleeping or not sleeping? They have to have operations. I forget the name of that operation where they get a flat head in the back. Right. And then there's an operation that has become more and more popular because they have a flat head. And they have such these soft fontanelles and their, you know, they're cranes.

that are still forming and fusion. Oh, yeah. They don't close for a long time. Yeah, that leaving them on their backs, they can actually change the shape of their heads. Which, again, is one of those things that was like, oh. Well, you must know about people in different cultures long ago, like the, it might be the Inks or the Aztecs, I'm not sure.

And they wrap the skull, and the skull deforms because bone is plastic. Right. If you break your arm and you don't have it done well, oh, there we go. Pagiocellophie. Pledgiosilophily. Wow. Yeah. pull up an image Christos of the baby head wrapping and how it actually changes the shape.

There's these fascinating fossils. I'm sure you're seeing them. Yeah. And it's done for beauty. Right. Is that still done? Do you know? It's an interesting little historical feature where you look at these heads. I've heard, you know, different theories. People were like, oh, this is evidence of extraterrestrial life and things like that. It doesn't change brain function at all. How fascinating, right? The malleability of the human brain that you can change the shape of the vessel, but the thing itself still is functional. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it's just remarkable. Because your bone tissue is replaced every 12 years. You know, it's constantly growing. Right. It is very, we think of it as a, the skeleton as being so strong and stiff, but it's actually constantly changing. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, the baby wearing thing is we found very beneficial.

And they have such great carriers now. You know, we did sort of the wrap for a while. Yeah. But now we just have these carriers. areas that are great and I prefer it. It's also great in the wintertime. Again, living in New York City, I never, you know. That's true.

The notion of having a baby in a cold place is just so wild to me. The other thing, I mean, we found with our daughter is people in Ithaca would say, you're the only people we ever see in town who aren't carrying food for their toddler, or their baby. And there's, and I don't, I think this is a more recent development that when, ever a baby is or a small child is crying, Americans tend to feed them, you know, with a snack, a healthy snack, but, you know, Cheerios, whatever. And I think we didn't have, it never occurred to us to do that, but she didn't fuss like that. We didn't, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't

think to, like, give her food when she was fussing, you know, so I'd be interested in some, long-term study about the relationship between that new cultural practice and the rates of obesity. I think that would be really interesting. Oh, I wanted to ask. I actually forgot to bring this up when we were discussing sleeping. At what point do you believe based off the anthropological record or looking at other cultures around the world, should a baby be moved out of the bedroom of the parents and have their own sort of sleeping place? I never. I don't, you know, I think you wait for them to tell you.

Mm-hmm. You know, but again, it gets back to that cultural idea that the bedroom is a sacred place for the adult partners. And some people want the baby out of there because that's their intimate space. And, you know, fair enough. But, I mean, that's what happened to us. You know, our daughter said, I'm going to go sleep in my room now.

How old was she roughly? Do you remember? Right now? No. No. This is last year. She's like, right. I think she was, I don't remember.

Maybe five, six, something like that. And she said, I'm going to go to that. Yeah, I'm going to go in there. She had a bedroom. Her dad fixed it up. It was beautiful. And enough with you people. But I think also what happens with children who are comfort.

sleeping with their parents is they come back if there's a trauma in the household or whatever, and it becomes a comfort place. I think humans in general like to sleep with somebody and that, you know, makes you feel lonely when you're by yourself all the time. Yeah. Again, talking about baby wearing, talking about sleeping. I see all these like TikToks and Instagrams or it'll be, you know, mothers, you know, sort of lamenting or discussing the issue of their baby only wanting to sleep with them or on them. Isn't that interesting? And they don't like it. Well, yeah.

And I understand if you have a job, if you have to work, if you have, you know. Or you just brought up as an American. Sure. So your belief system is that the baby begins to feel like a parasite. Right. And the reality it is a parasite, you know. So a friend of mine who used to study chimpanzees in Uganda said when they had, their two young sons, he said, you know, Americans just complain about parenting all the time. And he said,

when people start doing that, we usually say, we're having a blast. And that's what gets lost in all this, all the things that you have to decide about. Should we go sleep? Should we care? It becomes such a conundrum. And I think that what gets lost in that are the moments of wonder and joy. And just, no, it's not all good. Some of it is really, really hard. Jim McKinnah, again, the co-sleeping guy and I were giving a talk, and he gave his whole presentation, and then a question afterwards, a woman raised her hand, and she said, you know, I feed my son, and then I put him down, and he cries, and I feed him, and then I put him down, and Jim said, I just spoke for an hour about why that is, And you know, evolution didn't promise you a rose garden.

Like it's going to be hard. Yeah. That's what it is. We expect our jobs to be hard. Maybe we expect our adult relationships to be hard, our friendships, but somehow we think this is going to be smooth sailing. Yeah. No.

I can empathize with the American experience in the sense that it is harder, like we mentioned before, because society, American society, is not built to support parents and mother specifically, I think. I understand the frustration. But you see all these TikToks and mothers saying, I'd love to, you know, my baby wants to sleep on me and you go, oh, wow, yeah,

there is some sort of ingrained evolutionary feature where they enjoy having that presence, being with the mom, other being held. And I feel like you can probably see this through, you know, all different primates, right?

Absolutely. And it's, it's, I mean, humans have a little too much time to think about things. And we mostly just think about ourselves. And so also in Western culture, children are thought of as burdens. And in non-Western cultures, they're considered assets because they are assets economically. These are the little helpers on the garden plot. They're taking care of other children. They're hauling water and

firewood. It's not child labor. It's just their appropriate task for these kids, but they contribute to the household, where we've switched after the Industrial Revolution to where the only thing that children are supposed to do is learn. So they grow up and they learn and then they get a job. And so they become not assets, but burdens, dare I say college. And that's, so we've missed out on something, I think, in that sense. And trying to bring back some sort of fun. And an observation of, whoa, this is, it's quite an amazing thing to watch a little tiny person become an adult.

It is unbelievable. And you can't predict anything. And the only way to do it as a friend once said to me, the only reason to be a parent is for the experience. And that's it. You know, there is no other reason. Just you want that experience. And a lot of people don't want that experience. And that's perfectly fine.

want to ask you about breastfeeding. This is, again, another fascinating thing. I grew up in an environment with my family again, we're maybe a little bit more holistic, a little more hippie-dippy-dippy. I was going to say were your parents-hippies. They weren't. They were these like Catholic Canadian people. But for whatever reason, they sort of just, I think, gravitated to sort of like more naturalistic approaches to things. My mom had a couple homebirths, things like that. And so my family was just, again, more, that made more sense to our family. And so, you know, me and all my siblings were breastfed, but I was talking to my mom and my

grandmother. And there was this discussion where there was a concerted effort to stop breastfeeding. Yeah. And, you know, throughout America in certain parts, you know, after World War II, there was very little breastfeeding. And certain parts of, you know, Afri and Asia today, there are companies and corporations that have concerted interests into stopping breastfeeding that they're effectively trying to tell mothers to no longer breastfeed your kids and actually just a buy formula in order to breastfeed your kids.

And again, this is another sensitive topic because I think the breastfeeding relationship between the mother and the child is so specific and unique and special in its own way. And physiologically important. Yeah. So I don't want to diminish whatever anyone's individual choices with this sort of path. And again, there's women that can't breastfeed. There's adopted parents that can't breastfeed. I think however the baby gets fed and nourished is obviously, I think, paramount is probably the most important thing. But looking at, again, the anthropological record and how it's done in other cultures, what is sort of what you, the research you've done on breastfeeding around the world?

What have you found that comes up a lot through other cultures? How is it done? Is it done on a specific schedule? What are sort of the protocols you see? No, certainly not on a schedule. I mean, especially among, if you were looking at hunters and gatherers or what anthropologists call small plot agriculturalists, you know, they're growing. crops and either eating them or taking them to market. And it's, they don't, places where, let's say, Nestle hasn't gotten to them, that's just

normal life. It's just totally normal. And sometimes there is cooperative breastfeeding. You know, you might hand it off to your sister if she happens to be lactating as well. And it's just not a big deal. It's just, that's what you do. There are cultures where very quickly, there is. feeding the baby something else, some kind of gruel or, you know, something like that.

So they do, people do do that as well. The problem with, it used to be the problem with the corporatization of baby formula is that it was lacking in omega-3 fatty acids. And that was the real problem. But that has changed. But I have the card of my recipe from the hospital of what my mother was supposed to feed me, you know, because she wasn't going to breastfeed. It was like corn syrup and... It's exactly what it was, Kero syrup and milk.

Hilarious. And so when you think about it, maybe that's why I really like candy. But there it is. This was not a formula produced by some company. It was just milk with sugar. How bizarre is that? And it also was not a long time ago.

I mean... No, and well. And the other thing is, if you look at the nutritional basis, We use cows' milk, and that's just an accident of the domesticated animals that we have. But in fact, goat's milk would be better. It's more like human milk. The problem with breastfeeding as humans compared to other animals is that human breast milk is watery.

And so compared to, let's say, a seal where a mother can feed her baby and go off into the ocean and look for fish. because the baby is very sated because there's a lot of fat in that. But human breast milk is very watery. And that means it's designed to be fed almost continuously. So babies cry. If you do it on a schedule and say, okay, I'm going to breastfeed for 15 minutes, that's it. The baby might not get full. I'm using satiated, really.

And that has to do with the fat content. And so humans are really babies are designed to breastfeed whenever they want. And much more often than every four hours or something like that. And even La Leche League, where people are breastfeeding like every hour and a half, that's still less than let's say, a Bushman, a Kungshman or Kungshman. We would call that on-demand. On-demand, that's right. That's what it's called, which is derogatory, right?

And it's really, the word that, you know, people I know have to try to get a change to is on cue rather than on demand. Because demand sounds, again, like the baby is taking something away from you. And we really have this same relationship as was sleeping with breast milk culturally, that it has been, you know, morphed by culture into something that it was never intended to be. And the fact that when a woman breastfeeds in America, she has to go hide somewhere because Western culture has sexualized the breast. And that's not necessarily true in other cultures. They are for babies. That's what breasts are for. Yeah.

It's interesting. The way that, yeah, once my wife started breastfeeding, it's like it no longer is this thing that, again, the society is put on to it, you know. Might come back. Maybe. But it is interesting how, you know, culturally it is. is so sexualized and in other places. Again, you would see sort of pictures or videos of, you know, indigenous people living in a specific, you know, tribal community.

And the woman would be topless. And as, you know, sort of pearl-clutching Westerners, I would see this. And I would say, this is so strange. Right. And you wouldn't want your little boy to watch. No, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then you think it's like, oh, well, they have so many children.

Perhaps they have, you know, two or three children, and they might be breastfeeding another sibling's child. Well, probably not. They might, but the other thing is that breastfeeding is a natural birth control. So when women are breastfeeding, and if they're doing it with a big space in between, it won't work. It has to be more on cue on demand. It has to be more continuous. And what it just stops is the production of the hormones that cause ovulation.

So that's why when you see someone who has two babies in, you know, 12 months, within 12 months, you know, one right after the other, most likely they are not breastfeeding. And so usually if they're breastfeeding, a woman, if they're breastfeeding for three, four, five years, and they're in a culture that has no real birth control, that's the thing that will space out children. Yeah, this is an interesting point. Again, I think for myself at least, I would look at what I imagined a hunter-gather society to be in that, you know, families were massive and they had 10, 12 kids. It doesn't seem to be the case that it seems like women would go into puberty a little later. They would...

It's the breastfeeding and it's also babies dying. You know, it's also that because there's no medical care, no antibiotics. And of course, there are a million ways to be a hunter and gatherer, you know, from marine resources to forests to savannas, whatever. And these days, since a lot of groups have been settled on reservations, but I was just writing about the Ache people yesterday. and even though they've been settled by the government in Paraguay onto reservations since the 60s, they still go into the forest and gather honey and plants and go after game. And how many kids might they have? I don't know exactly.

I mean, the answer is there, but I don't know what it is exactly. But the women are still breastfeeding. I think one of the big tragedies that Western culture imposes on other cultures is formula. because people can't afford to buy it. And, you know, it's, you have to, it has to be clean and safe and all those things. And it's really just capitalism at its worst as far as, it's my opinion anyway. Breast milk is a fascinating substance on a sort of microbial level. It is.

It offers a ton of nourishment to the newborn and is, seems like it's sort of like codified specifically for them, that there is actual bacteria. and nutrients found in the breast milk that is kind of custom tailored for that specific new body. Can you speak to that? It's so important for the baby's immune system even to adulthood. And there's the hypothesis, the reason the growth in asthma in Western culture has something to do with fewer people breastfeeding. And also, toddlers not crawling around on the floor where they would be eating stuff

that would, you know, then their body is making an immune system. So sometimes our healthy protection of them is not necessarily the best thing you can do. But the best thing a mother can do is breastfeed for a while to get that immune system going. I mean, I wasn't breastfeeding. I'm still here, but I'm an asthmatic as well and have lots of allergies. And I would never say that to my mother. I wouldn't, anyway, because she's not here anymore. But, and I'm sure there are data on that, and I just don't know it.

But that's certainly, I mean, doctors encourage women. There are hospitals that are certified breastfeeding hospitals that will help. And there are lots of lactation specialists who are great when you think you can't do it. A woman who cannot breastfed, this is very rare. It's usually just positional. And because we don't have our mothers and grandmothers who did this, we don't have anybody to tell us how to do it. And so at least friends of mine have hired a lactation specialist to come in, you know, two or three times to make sure everything's okay. And sometimes nurses in the hospital will do it too.

Make sure you're okay before you go home. Absolutely. You know, and adapt to that. And a lot of women when they're working, it's pretty much impossible to keep that up. So either you have to use a breast pump and that's a mess or, you know, you know, you're not. you have to get some kind of way you can go home or you compromise and do both, you know. Yeah, I had read, I need to find exactly where maybe they can pull up the study that new, the newborns are kissed by their mothers and that the actual ingestion of sort of the amniotic film that is present on the newborn's body can actually inform the breast milk as to what type of, you know, sort of nutrients to deliver based off of, what's there. And then I think there's another feedback loop that happens throughout the breastfeeding

process that the baby's sort of bacterial biome within their mouth can inform in some way through the areola the type of milk production that occurs on a, again, sort of a microbial scale. Yeah, yeah. I had read this and I was like, this is just fascinating. And also if you breastfeed with long periods in between, breastfeeding happens because of the motion of the baby's sucking on the breast. And that's where, and that milk production happens. So if you have long spaces of time in between, that's going to dry up. The milk supply. It's, it's a sign that babies were really meant to be breastfeeding all the time all the way long, whenever they're hungry. Something that I'd read in your book that absolutely blew my mind is that there's different

types of breast milk. Again, this is a concept in my mind where I was like, you know, the milk that comes out of a breast is breast milk and it's the same no matter what time of day you do it or you know what session in the feeding it is what minute in the feeding it is so can you speak to the ways that floor milk and hind milk are different well yeah well first of all there's colostrum which comes out right after soon after the baby's born and in some cultures they don't allow the mother to eat that or to feed the baby that colostrum they think it's bad what's just cultural who knows but it's actually really good. So because breast milk is made physiologically, basically from blood, it's a process that happens within the breast.

And the first milk to come down could be very watery. And then the production goes and it gets more fat is contained in it. So again, if you're breastfeeding, you put a timer on and you're only going to do it for five minutes. the baby's not going to get that hind milk that's full of fat. And you're going to think, I don't have enough milk for this baby. But it's not that. It's really a mechanical relationship between the baby's mouth and that breast. And as the baby sucks, then the milk is being produced.

And so you should just let it go. Just let it go until the baby stops. Right. You know, but many women, even when my daughter, you know, was young, they'd say, I can't breastfeed. And I'd say, well, I remember one friend, I said, well, here's the name of lactation special. That woman came. And my friend said, that didn't help.

And I said, what do you mean? She said, oh, yeah, it worked. But I'm still not going to do this. And really, she just didn't want to breastfeed. She just didn't, for whatever reasons. Fair enough. And I'm just like, yeah, okay. You know, you don't want to, so don't do it.

You know, your kid will be fine. but physiologically, immunologically, the baby is better off if it's breastfed. Yeah. And that's just not me saying. That's pediatricians saying that. Right. Is that discussed through pediatricians when it comes to pumping? Like if a woman is pumping to, you know, label sort of for milk and hind milk and have an awareness that the different types of milk that you actually produced in a specific feeding session will have different levels of fat to sugar ratio. I don't know. My only experience was that was taking my daughter.

to some will baby check and, you know, it's all ready to feed her. And the nurse practitioner said very snoddly, well, you know, we like to have them weaned by one year of age. And I thought to this woman, you have no idea who you're talking to. And then I said, very nasty. I said, I bet you do. And went home and just was, you know, furious. And my husband said, you are never taking her to the pediatrician again.

And the next time he took her and the doctor asked all the right questions. He came in the room and he said, do you understand her? By this time she was, you know, like a year and a half and she was talking. Do you understand her? And my ex said, yes. And he said, does she understand you? And he said, yes. And he just would check.

You know, like, that's the, he wasn't, pediatricians are looking for pathology. They're looking for the outliers. And they're not there, really, to give you advice on how to bring up your baby. They're looking for sickness. And all the pediatricians I've talked to said, our biggest business is behavioral and mostly sleep. And we have absolutely no training in that. Interesting. And, you know, if you have a sick baby, that's why they look at the growth charts.

They're not trying to tell you your kid is going to be tall or short. They're looking to see if something's wrong. Right. And that's what they're always looking for. But they have been pushed by the culture into giving advice. And one pediatrician said to me, I just tell them what my parents did. And I went to the trouble to look up medical schools and the trainee of pediatricians. And they get a course in behavioral genetics, which is, if,

something is off genetically how that might affect the baby. So we've really put them as in this position, and they don't like it, most of them. One pediatrician said to a friend of mine, her daughter was like two years old, and he said, you should have another baby right now. And she went, why? And he, like, was flustered and said, well, well, you know, you just don't want to give your uterus that much time off or something. And she said, what's the evidence? And he went, well, I don't know.

I don't know. You know, he made it up. Why do people have babies two years apart now in America? There's no good reason. None. It's just something that has happened. Right. Yeah, it is funny going to a pediatrician.

You're seeking some type of wisdom. But again, that isn't the purpose of the pediatrician. Like, when you explain it, like, it'd be like going to like an orthopedic surgeon being like, oh, I hurt my knee. What sport could I play? Exactly. And it'd be like, I don't know. It's a place. baseball, like whatever you want.

I'm here to fix your needs. Right. It's like going to the optometrist and saying, what should I read? Great? Exactly. Yeah, it's true. Yeah, it's an interesting phenomenon. So, yeah, it makes sense that there's so many people that are, you know, unsure what to do.

But this, the notion of four milk and hind milk, and then even melatonin as a natural byproduct for sleeping is present in PM milk, milk that's produced in the nighttime to help your baby sleep. I didn't know that. Wow, that's great. a fact check because here I am explaining things to a professor and I'm afraid that these are all wrong. I don't have a baby anymore but I hope to have grandchildren and so you know

I need to know you know yeah I'm almost certain that's the case I hope this is the case. There's like actual sleep agents that'll be found in nighttime milk. Absolutely and that sometimes women will pump and then they'll give their uh okay here we go Bresmo will produce a night more

like and it's one of these things that you look at sort of the You know, evolution's undefeated, and you're like, oh, this makes so much sense. Yeah, that's great. But if you're pumping and you're not aware necessarily of when you're pumping, then you might give your baby PM melatonin late in the morning. And then they'll sleep all day and then they're up all night. Or vice versa. You give them sort of an activating daytime milk that doesn't satiate them.

And then it's like you're out of lockstep with the way that we've done things for, you know, 300,000 years. My philosophy is that we have such big brains, and it's really a mistake. Because we spend all our time trying not to think about things, overthinking things, making stupid decisions, and really it's a curse. Yeah, absolutely. I always look at human nature, and I'm like, we've done a good job with the human part. You know what I mean? Like, the human part is thriving. We're thinking. We're consuming things.

We're conscious. We're examining ourselves. And we sort of neglected the nature part. Yeah. And it's like we kind of need to bring both into the fold a little bit. True. Until we can go full singularity and just, you know, join ourselves with the supercomputers and become on the web of things. Until that point, I think we have to be aware of our natural history.

Absolutely. Yeah. And how other people in the world do things. Absolutely. So I'm curious, culturally around the world, when do people typically wean their children? Four, four or five, whenever. Mothers are not going to be happy about that. No.

They just heard you say that. American mothers. I'm not saying they should do that. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. And they do that because they don't have many, you know, they have alternatives, really. And I don't know if those women are conscious that it's a natural birth control. But surely they can put two and two together and see that if they keep breastfeeding,

some cultures have a taboo against sex when breastfeeding is going on. Oh, really? That's another way that they're controlling the birth rate. Oh, that's interesting. I've also heard that there is a physiological benefit to the health and composition of mothers as they breastfeed. Well, they certainly will lose weight because it's twice the number of calories. And so women who breastfeed tend to lose their pregnancy fat very quickly. Not always, but they're...

I had seen a doctor on Instagram that said breastfeeding is the greatest liposuction in history. And it's one of these things you're like, oh, wow. Or you can eat like a pig for you. You can like double your calories. And it's one of these things, again, I just think about the way human beings have been. And, you know, if you're living in an indigenous sort of tribal community, you're going to breastfeed and then you're going to walk around frequently carrying your baby. And you were going to burn calories so quickly. That's right.

Whereas maybe if you're living in a suburb in the United States and you're not breastfeeding, you know, you're going to put your baby in a car so you're going to drive, not walk as much, not burn as many calories. and your ability to, you know, lose that weight or to sort of gain the semblance of yourself prior to having the child might take longer. Right. And it's, again, one of these things you're like, oh, it just makes so much sense the way it was. Now that you're saying that it just occurs to me, since we've seen such a major change in the composition of American food with processed foods and the increase in obesity that just tracks it perfectly, I wonder how that affects breast milk. I'm sure the preservatives and the gums and the stabilizers. Yeah, I mean, there's no question in my mind that it's terrible. There's actually a book I'm reading right now, ultra-processed humans.

Excellent book. I forgot who it's by something. Robert something. I can't remember. You can look it up. But it's an excellent book that is actually, so far, I'm not through it all the way. It's making the case that the sort of nutritional components, the make-up food, is different, whether it's a homemade item versus a store-bought processed item.

So you can look at a homemade cookie and a store-bought processed cookie. And even if they have the same exact nutritional components, they actually affect your body in a different way because of the stabilizers and preservatives that are inserted into the processed food. And again, it's one of these things where I was like, ah, if it's the same amount of sugar-fat, you know, sugar-fat, it's the same. It's not.

Thank you for encouraging me to make another batch of chocolate chip cookies. See, you make them at home. It's great. And you look at the ingredients of the things you use in your home. You're not using, you know, dextrose. No, that's right. Just read the labels. Yeah, exactly.

It's frightening. And I've seen this change in my lifetime, you know. And it's quite shocking to see that everything is processed. Oh, absolutely. Everything. Unless you're picking it up, you know, out of a bin and it's green. It's remarkable. Things you would anticipate.

Like you might get some type of organic, natural-looking granola. And you'll be eating this granola and you're like, oh, this tastes so good. And you look at the label and you'll see these stabilizers and these other types of agents in it that are keeping it able to be transported and stay on shelves that are ultimately affecting your body's ability to lose weight, your metabolism. I had a farmer friend who had an organic farm. This is off the topic of babies.

But he used to give tours of the farm. and he said, oh, we use fertilizer. We can call ourselves an organic farm because we use fertilizer that breaks down quickly. And it was like, what? That's the only, that's a manipulation of the label. Yeah. That's interesting. The way that the book puts it, which again, I would encourage people to read,

is that they say five or more ingredients. Yeah, I read that too, yeah. Five or more ingredients, be skeptical that what you're eating is not processed. Again, you can eat processed food. I'm still going to have ice cream from time to time. But an awareness of how. how much processed food because I'm pretty sure one in five Americans, again, according to the book, is having 80% of their diet coming from ultra-processed foods.

And there's a ton of issues, socioeconomic, food deserts, all these things that are contributing to this. And also consumers kind of want it. Oh, absolutely. It tastes good. When you buy ice cream, you don't want it to have ice crystals and all these problems. You want it to be creamy and you want it to be filled with palm oil. Yeah, yeah. We did this to ourselves. It's cheaper and it travels better.

and it's, you know, it tastes better. All those things. Actually, it doesn't taste better, but it does, it is cheaper and it does travel better. Yeah. And if you do takeout or eat out, you don't know what the ingredients are. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So, again, that homemade food and, you know, like high, my wife is doing a lot of, like, oats and things like that for, like, milk supply, which are excellent from, like, nuts, oats, things like that. And that's, those are the things that we've been doing. Maybe it's too personal, but did she need to have somebody help?

Her? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, we had a lactation consultant that was hugely beneficial. Yeah. And I would encourage, you know, again, it's not my experience necessarily. So, you know, my advice probably doesn't go far here. We've grown up where we don't. I've seen the benefits. Yeah, we don't see people doing it. Most of us weren't breastfed ourselves. And it's weird. When I was writing that chapter of the book, I got on an airplane and a woman had maybe a five-year-old and then another maybe a, maybe a, two-year-old or one and a half-year-old, and she was breastfeeding, and she looked at me, and I said, I don't care. But it occurred to me that it was the first time I had seen someone breastfeed in like 10 years in public. Yeah. And it seems like things are kind of moving back that direction.

It seems like more people are breastfeeding, which I think is probably a positive trend. Yeah. Just for development. And, yeah, I'm curious to know. Yeah, I'm curious if that plays some type of, you know, cultural shift on the aggregate, you know, breastfeeding versus not breastfeeding. It's such a strange culture, you know. It's not particularly family friendly. It's not baby friendly.

And it makes it really hard. And it makes people not want to be parents because it's, you know, the culture makes it really difficult. Well, most of my friends live in foreign countries. And when I talk to my Australian friends, my friend recently said her brother just had his second baby. And she said, and so he's doing his, some word I never heard. heard before and I go like, what's that? And she goes, oh, well, he's a lawyer. He gets six months off from work because they had a baby and he can divide it up any way he wants. Like he can take two weeks here, three weeks there, a month there. I was like, whoa, you know? Yeah. And when my daughter

was born, I got nothing. Wow. I could have taken the New York State eight weeks of unpaid leave if I wanted to. And that was it. Yeah, it's brutal. And again, it's, It's bad for you, but it's worse for your children. Like, those are really the people that carry the brunt of it. And again, on the aggregate, what that does to a culture that doesn't care about the mother-child bond or even just like the family triad, I just think, you know, I think is a mistake. And yet American culture always talks about, oh, we care about family. And I beg to differ. I don't think it does.

I did see a study that apparently millennial dads are spending significantly more. time with their children. That's good. Which, yeah, it seems like a big positive. I don't remember exactly how much, but it was like 60% more time with their kids. And you look at it and you're like, oh, this is, this is awesome. Yeah, that's great. And again, I'm curious to see what the cultural shift of that is going forward. Yeah. I mean, 40% of babies in America are born to single mothers now, but in some of those cases, the mother has a partner. They just aren't married. That's one of the statistical things. My family book, yes. That's interesting. That's a statistical

point they're like, all right, are they with someone? Are they alone? Are they with someone? They're just not because the rate of marriage is, of course, down. Although America has the highest marriage rate and the highest divorce rate in Western culture. Oh, wow. Stay tuned for that book. Yeah, that's interesting. What do you credit the declining birth rate in the United States?

Well, I find that really interesting because when I was younger, most of my friends, my female friends, did not have children out of choice. And I was odd because I really wanted to have like three kids. And so did my sisters. And I think that we were the, you know, the generation after the sexual revolution and the feminist revolution. And because there was decent birth control, finally, women could say, I don't want to. And when I've asked my friends, they've just said, I don't know. money. Or they say, one friend said, I just thought it would cause a conflict between me and my husband over everything. And another one said, I don't like the family I grew up at. I didn't want to have that. And I guess she didn't think she could make it different, you know. So the reasons are very broad. But what I see now, and even during the last year, there have been so many articles, you know, in the newspaper, online, books written about women in America choosing not to have children, the numbers have skyrocketed.

And let me just say, The Onion, you know The Onion? Yeah, absolutely. Well, I subscribed to The Onion, and their recent issue had an article said, U.S. birth rate is holding steady at zero. It was great. I laughed out loud. But the birth rate is way down, and not just in America, but actually. everywhere, Italy, Spain.

Yeah, Korea and Japan. Yes, now that's happening too. And I think that when you give women decent birth control, they go, okay, because not everybody wants to have kids. And there was no choice before. If you wanted to have sex, you either didn't have sex, so you didn't have children, or, you know, and, you know, more American women go to college than men. are in the now more than half the workforce, more women go to graduate school than men.

And so, you know, we're going to be in charge, so really you all should pack down. But I think it's interesting. And the reasons women don't want to have children vary greatly. Some people just say, you know, I want to travel or I don't want this in the way of my career or whatever. Well, then I don't think they should have children, you know, because you don't want that. You don't want unhappy people. Sure. Being parents.

And there was a lot of that. Yeah. What do you think of the economic strain? I've seen this argument brought up. Yeah, I've seen that too. Sure. You know, the wealth inequality obviously is increased. You know, the idea of a Gen Z person buying a home is, you know, far, far lower than their, you know, parents or their grandparents.

So I'm curious, do you think that the economic component plays a role? Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think if you're in a subculture of America that has more of a history of large families, whatever that might be, and you know that you're actually going to have a lot of family members around are going to help you, because grandparents are often very involved. I don't remember the statistics, but very involved. And if you're someone who doesn't have that kind of familiar network, being a parent would be overwhelming.

I think, and people don't seem to see the benefit in having children. Women don't. Like, it's just all burden and no asset, no fun. And so it's very cultural. And culture is very powerful. And, you know, I don't really have an opinion about that. I think it's just like whatever happens happens is just interesting to me to see it happen. I know some of my friends would have been great mothers, but they choose not to do it.

And I've never heard a person say to me they regretted it. I haven't heard that. To having children. To not having them. Oh, interesting. No one has said that to me. I had a friend say that they were making up their will, and their problem is they don't have any kids, so they don't know who to give their assets to. And I said, give it to a charity.

Yeah. you know, do that. Because they would give it to their brothers and sisters, but they're the same age. So that seems kind of stupid. So that's kind of interesting, you know. And it would be nice to do an ethnography of women who, by that I mean, really hang out with women who have decided they don't want to have children and hear what they have to say. Yeah, it's a interesting dilemma that I've, even just speaking with, you know, friends of mine, Sure.

Saying, you know, I feel on the one hand a very strong compulsion to, you know, become a mother and have children and, you know, have many children and that, you know, likely would pull me away from the workforce. But then simultaneously having this strong desire to be a career professional and, you know, succeed in the workplace and sort of actualize whatever their academic degree was in. They maybe got a master's degree in school and they said, if I don't work, then I sort of wasted this collegiate time. and the money. And I can, you know, empathize with that. That's because, especially in American culture, we have separated children off from everything else. Children are only supposed to be seen in places that are designed for them,

you know, playgrounds, preschools, whatever. They're not incorporated in the culture very well. You go to a foreign country and the kids are there. People complain, oh, I was in Spain and, you know, the kids are at the dinner table at midnight. You know, like how horrible. is that. We don't do that. You go into a restaurant in America, there are no children, you know, especially if it's like fine dining. And maybe that's why I like being in other cultures

a lot because I really like kids. And I think some people forget that they were kids. You know, they forget they were babies too. Yeah. It's a, it's a cultural development and culture is strong and hard to, it changes by who knows what means. Yeah. I'm very grateful my parents took me, included me in a lot of things. I'm grateful for that. And I took many naps on very many nice restaurant booths.

And I slept at the restaurant. We took our daughter everywhere, everywhere. And once I was invited to a cousin's wedding, and they said, she's not invited. And we just went, okay, we're not going. You know, that was our decision. And they made their decision. and they're perfectly, you know, they didn't.

But those were people who went on to have their own children. So I don't know what that was about. But I just wish children were more socially integrated, you know, where I live in Brooklyn Heights. I love it now that I live in a place where I see the kids going off to school in the morning and coming back at night and these fill the streets. Yeah. And it's awesome, especially at Halloween, when they're all dressed up and stuff.

And where I lived in Philadelphia recently, there were no kids in downtown Philly. And I thought it was weird. Yeah, it's interesting. I remember reading just, you know, children and their desire to be included. And I remember that as a kid. Like, to be included was like so, it was so special. And I think parents sometimes feel burdened with the idea of like, oh, we have to entertain our child constantly.

We have to play with them constantly. When sometimes a solution could be including them to say like, hey, I'm going to make dinner and you're going to be included in that process. And that's going to slow down. process. It'll slow it down. It will make it messier. Yeah. But so hard. But it will be really valuable to the family unit. And then also it might in some ways be quicker because I don't need to placate you. I don't need to set you up with some type of toy or put you in front the TV, which who knows what that, you know, from a biological standpoint, the screen exposure can do to our kids. And we come back to that issue of the decrease in the birth rate

because this family that was from Binghamton, the Burns family, they had like, I don't know, eight, 10 kids, whatever. And I was talking to their mother once. And I said, boy, you must have just never had any time. And she said, what are you talking about? She goes, the first one, your life changes. You have no time. The second one, it's worse.

She goes from the third one on, it's nothing because they take care of each other. And my older sister pretty much, in a lot of ways, brought me and my other sister up. Yeah, I mean, my parents are seven kids. Well, there you go. And if you only have two, you know, it's harder. And if you only have one, which I think the birth rate is going so that the norm is going to be not two kids but one. I see it happening soon, you know. Yeah.

You got to be outnumbered. Yeah. As soon as you're outnumbered, you just let go. You accept. And you say, you know what? We're going to make it through. And you're not so overly focused with every little decision driving yourself crazy. Yeah.

And Jim McKinna, the sleep guy, he said he was from a family from, I don't know, seven kids. me, he goes, I slept in the same bed with my brothers forever. He said, we'd fight, you know, your stinky feet, whatever. And he said, we're still close, you know, but he said, it's not a surprise I'm interested in this topic because really I had to sleep with people, you know. I'm curious what the pro-social dynamics of primates are. Like, do, actually, before we get to that question, I want to, I want to just jump to a quick break and hear from our sponsors that make the show possible. Thank you for everyone that is watching. I hope, again, I hope you guys are enjoying this conversation live here with Dr. Meredith Small here. I mean, what day is it?

Today is the 11th. Not a lot of people think these are live. I've gotten comments about that. Are these really live? We're really live, December 11th. And we're here talking about the anthropology of early childhood. We're going to go to a quick break. If you have any questions for Meredith, please drop them in the comments. We'll be back in just a moment. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because it's 2024. And it's time to talk about something important. When you are seriously hurt, your injury could be worth millions. Yes, that's right.

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All right, Meredith. What about this one? Should children be allowed on airplanes? What do we say? Yes. All right? Why not? I mean, I can tell you a couple of reasons why.

Well, I, you've been next to a crying baby. Of course, I've been next to a crying baby. You've had a crying baby, probably. I do remember a flight once from New York to San Francisco. go, my daughter was, I don't know, three or something like that. And she spent the entire time, you know, back when that short period where they had phones on the back seat. And she just pulled it off, put it in, put it in, listen, pulled it off, put it in. And I thought, oh my God, she must be driving the people in front of me crazy. And I think I asked them and I don't think they even heard it. She did that for hours. And I, we flew to Europe. I mean, we flew around the world with her and flew to Australia. with her. And I, you know, looked up stuff and I would make a bag for like little, I'd wrap up little toys and stuff. And as a result, as an adult, she loves airports. I think that's very odd. But she does. And, you know, that's strange behavior. I don't know about that.

Daughter of an anthropologist, she flies all over the place. Yeah. But they don't, they transport big dogs. Sometimes they put them in the cargo hole, right? Oh, yeah. They do that. Yeah, sure. And cats can be in. You can't do the other kids. I guess. No. I'm very sympathetic. I just saw some really funny humor skit where, excuse me, from a TV show where, you know, there's the people with the crying baby and the other people who got on and they have

presents for everybody all around them. And, you know, it's pretty good. Oh, I saw one of those. I thought it was very sweet. Yeah. And, you know, it really does separate the baby to children hate. from, it's okay, because most of the people on that plane who've had children, been there, done that, and they're fine.

Yeah. But for other people, and I just feel sorry for kids when they're crying. I empathize so much. I see the mom struggling with the crying baby, and I'm like, oh, she must be stressed out. You grow up and down, and the baby's ears are having trouble. Yeah, it's a whole thing. Yeah. I'm curious, do you have any thoughts about microplastics and the effect on fertility and

breastfeeding? I think that's a really interesting question. I don't know anything about it except, you know, that this, that our recognition of microplastics in the last, what, two years or something like that is frightening. I remember buying soap in high school with microplastics in the soap. Did you ever see this? It's like a scrubby or something? They were literally selling it like soap with like microbial beads. Oh, yeah, that's right.

I'm not really just pieces of plastic. It's just scary and disgusting. And that was sold. Like, this is lead paint. It's insane. It's hard to imagine that it is not affecting breast milk and, you know. They've done research where they found microplastics in breast milk. And they found it at the bottom of Marianas Trench and they found it in the stomachs of the fishweed and it's just all over.

It's horrible. You're eating a credit card of plastic every. a couple months or something like that. Oh, dear God. Yeah, I've read exactly the statistic. One of the congressmen said it at a hearing recently. And it's, yeah, it's a little stressful. We really are the worst species on Earth.

We're also the best. It goes both ways. The good with the bad, right, Meredith? We're destroying our own nest. Yeah. But we built an awesome nest. We did build an awesome nest. Humans do awesome things.

We also do crazy awful. The worst shit. Yeah. But we're pretty cool when we're not doing that stuff. Yeah, this is true. This is true. Okay, that's a great question from Jonathan. I appreciate you asking. Oh, I'm curious. Do you know anything about ancient Egypt? I know you're well versed on Venetian history, but someone asked about Egyptian children. I really don't. I was, as I said, I'm writing this book about family. And I, the only thing I just heard recently was about an origin myth about, you know, two gods who then made it and they had twins. And then those twins had twins. But that's a mythological thing. But no, I really don't know anything. But I think it's an interesting. question. Interesting question. And then last question before we move on to talking about primates.

Resources for parents in the next three to five years. I have one, Our Babies Ourselves, by Meredith Small, an excellent book that I recommend everyone read. But are there other resources people to check out? Well, there's this book that came after that. It's about after kids start walking and talking. And it's called Kids, my title. So that's sort of the companion book to our babies ourselves. And it has a lot of cross-cultural stuff in it. Like, I went to Dominica and followed this anthropologist named Mark Flynn, and I mean followed him around. And he's been studying this one village for about now 40 years. And he's actually a cultural anthropologist.

And so he's lived with these people forever. And he also has integrated physiological studies, especially levels of cortisol. So as we were walking in this very hilly part of Dominica, he would just stop the kids on the way to work and they know him and they're talking to him. And as they're talking to him, an older woman came up. She's actually the matriarch of the village. And they're talking about other things like, how are your mom and dad? What are they doing? Blah, blah, blah.

And this elderly woman dressed just beautifully is helping Mark as he's handing her a test tube and then swabbing inside of a kid's cheek and then sticking in, she's holding the test tube, to put a test tube on top because he's been doing this forever. And so he has cortisol levels, and I'll give you the bottom line of his study, which is fantastic, which I write about in kids and also wrote about for Discover magazine, a new scientist a long time ago. The bottom line is kids are not stressed by poverty, which can be a big stressor, or things at school or soccer practice, they are stressed by family dynamics. For example, when dad hits mom, he hears about it and he runs into that kid, he tests them, their cortisol spikes. And the other important, there it is, and the other kids who are in families that experience a lot of trauma like that,

or dad is going off to work on another island to make money, and then he comes back and he's gone and he's back, and they're living with their grandmothers and everything. And kids who have either very high levels of consistent cortisol are very low, they have behavioral issues. And as Mark said to me, and it's better in Dominica than it is in America because these kids are surrounded by their relatives.

And I was there and I was there and I watched it. You know, at one point, people were yelling across these hollows. Where's the American girl, you know, and the person next to me goes, she's next to me. And everybody knows everybody's business and life is lived outdoors. As Mark said, that's why he could do this work because life is lived outdoors. But kids respond to family trauma and it changes them physically. biologically and behaviorally when that happens. So there are other, in that book, I write about other researchers who are, you know,

working on young children, kids. Now, when you say kids don't get stressed by what happens at school or soccer practice, is that in relationship to the trauma of some type of family dynamic gone awry? Can be, can be. So not to say that kids don't get stressed by school. Right, but that's not the major thing. I see. And it's really whatever is going on in the family.

And he only has privy to that because he knows them all so well. And he's lived there. And he's brought his own kids there. And, you know, he's very integrated in the community. The photos are pretty great. His tall skin guy walking down the street and all these kids running around him. And, you know, then he'll just put a – has researches and they put a scale down outside the school. The kids come out and they jump on it.

I mean, it's an amazing piece of anthropology. Yeah, it's just great. Another element as far as early childhood development, I've read that children playing in mixed-aged groups is the single best sort of agent or catalyst for healthy adjustment into adulthood. That's absolutely right. And that's in that book, too. Can you explain what that means? Well, let's think of it in a way Americans can understand in the sense that remember the one-room schoolhouse, okay, that, you know, a long time ago. And so the older kids, sometimes we're helping the younger kids, not just even in socialization, but learning things.

And in big families, you have that. You have the older kids interacting with the younger kids. But because of the drop in the birth rate and the fact that we divide our schools by age. the kids don't have the resource of the older kids as examples or mentors or people who actually teach them things and all the research shows that they learn better they do better in mixed age group situations so that would be an easy fix actually you know what would be the best solution for that just schools yeah school so how would that work though you would put kids of different ages in different classes?

Yeah, like kindergarten first and second grade altogether. Ah. You know? And you just have several classes of them because you'd have some kids. I mean, up until second grade, I mean, what are you even doing in school? Playing. Right? Like, yeah.

You know? Yeah. And I guess how old are you in kindergarten? You're five, four or five? Mostly four. And a five-year-old could play with a seven-year-old. They're not that disparate. Sure.

Interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think about my childhood, again, having six siblings. Yeah. I was constantly playing with all. older kids. I was constantly catching up to try to, you know, keep on pace with what, you know, my siblings were doing. And I certainly feel like that benefited me, you know, even in sports that, like, you know, I was playing soccer with kids my age, but I had been playing with my sister and my brother that were three, four years, five years older than me. And you learn how to resolve

conflicts, too. You fight. Right. And you resolve those conflicts. Yeah. You know, and you put up with people that you don't like. And you're going to have to do that when you're an adult. That's such another interesting element about sort of how children learn through play, which is really the only way it seems like, again, I don't have any degree, but it seems like any type of animal, primate mammal learns from a young age is through play. Like if you look at even like lion cubs, the way that they play with their mom or their dad is them hunting. They'll do these sort of like simulated hunt type things where like they'll creep up on their mom and then the mom will turn. around and like they again they're not laughing they're not emoting i don't want to like sort of anthropomorphize these animals but they are playing and learning how to hunt through play and i look at human beings and i say oh we certainly learn how to be functional adults through play absolutely um but one of the

interesting things that i found is that oftentimes parents can be uh sort of too eager to intervene in early childhood play uh that for an example you know let's say there's a group of eight kids that are going to play some type of capture the flag game or they're going to play war or some type of make-believe game. And the kids will argue for an hour before the game, I'm not sure what this is here, the kids will argue for like an hour before the game setting up the rules. And parents sometimes will see this and be sort of annoyed or, and they step in. And they step in because they're well-meaning, they're eager to sort of perpetuate and sort of get the play going. And instead, what they've actually done is they've removed the ability to

resolve conflicts and to create rules and boundaries with their peers. And so as a result, these parents come in, well-meaning, saying, oh, get on with the playing. Here are the rules. You guys do this. You guys do this. Now go on. But the learning doesn't come necessarily from the play outright. It comes from the formation of the play rules. And again, it's another thing that in my mind, I'm like, oh, I would definitely be the parent to intervene because I'm so eager to help the kids when the best thing to do for the kids is to leave them alone. Give them the box of play close and walk away. Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah, which is another thing. I just think culturally gets lost a little bit. Right. It's simultaneously, you know,

like being, like, so eager to help the kids that you're constantly playing with them and you're doing too much for them, but then you get so exhausted that you get burnt out.

Yeah. Just leave the kids. I'll tell you two stories about, about my daughter that I find really hilarious. One is we had a gravel yard and I don't know,

remember how old she was. Six, seven, eight, I don't know. and I hear some noise and she's out on the driveway and it was perfectly safe and she's got a big rock and she's smacking the other rocks and I came out and I said what are you doing she goes I'm making stone tools when I went after the end of the apologies I swear I never used the word stone tools in my house ever in my life and I thought this is and you know they were good too they were like really sharp and everything I thought that was pretty awesome Like one of these? Yeah, like one of these.

Well, it wasn't this good, you know, but it was decent. Yeah, I was looking over at those. This is probably what made me think of that. Yeah, my friend Donnie Dust, he's a flintnapper. Oh, those are really nice. Yeah, he made these. They're quarters. You can take courses in anthropology that will teach you how to do that.

Oh, yeah. It's pretty great. And the other time I came home and there was a giant box in the dining room. I think we'd gotten a new dishwasher or something. I don't remember. And there was a little flat. on it and a little flap goes like this and then I see written on the outside of the box so she could write stress shop and and she's not talking she's not saying anything and then there were

instructions you write down your question and you put it through the slot and the stress shop will respond to you so I wrote down something like how can I get my students to really like me or something like that and I put it in and then out came a little Ziploc bag and of shells and a message of, I don't remember what the message said, but there was some message, like, here, you can play with these shells and that'll be good. And I thought to myself, oh my God, is this what I've done to this child? She thinks that what she invents is a stress shop? Like, is that how she sees her household, you know? But she did that. And because she was an only child, it was important to me that she had friends, you know, so we would always try to get

people to come over and, you know, and I'd walk out of the room and just let them do what they want and they would, you know, play veterinarian with the stuffed animals and stuff like that. Yeah. No, it's, it is, there are moments of great hilarity. Oh, I can't wait. I'm so curious. I don't know if this might be a little bit outside of your purview or your professional expertise, so feel free to. Doesn't mean I can't talk about it. Now we're talking. So many academics are afraid. I'll speak to professor and they go, ah, I don't know. Well, quantum physics. I have nothing to say. Well, I was going to ask you about the double slitt. experiment, but we can move past that.

I'm curious, do primates, like monkeys, macaques, do they cry? Do they cry? Do they cry? You mean like tears coming out of their eyes? I guess just whining in the way that Oh, yes. Oh, absolutely. They whine. Oh, yes. They whine. Oh, yes, they whine. And how do...

Somebody picks them up. You know, it could be anybody. Just pick them up. And then they stop. And they stop. Yeah. But no, when you say that, I have this vision of Barbary macaques, you know, like one of these little macaques just sitting there going, you know, and eventually somebody comes up and picks them up. Interesting. There's so many little things I feel like we can learn from studying macaques and other primates

that haven't lost sort of that instinctual maternal characteristic. And the question is always, does that tell us anything about human behavior? I mean, many different kinds of people watch primates, non-human primates, psychologists, animal behaviorists, veterinarians, but anthropologists do it to see, is there anything there that you can equate to the evolution of human behavior? And I would say attention to kin. They know who their kin are. And we have the same sort of thing.

Yeah, that's interesting. I'm sure you've seen this experiment that was done with capuchin monkeys, I believe. There's been a couple that are fascinating. They're too smart. It scares me. I'm like they're almost, they're too much like it from like this freak out. But they basically put a little baby Capuchin and they scare it. They have this little robot scary thing.

Yeah. And they have two mothers that are, you know, available for the Capuchin to go get comfort from. And one of them is the real mother? Are they just two female adults? Two fake mothers. Oh, two fake mothers. Yeah. And it might be possible if you want to pull this up.

You can search, I guess, Capuchin mother experiment. and one of them is wiry. Oh, I think these are not compugens. These are rhesus monkeys. Oh, that's what it is. Yeah, it's Harry Harlow's work. Yes. Okay, can you finish the explanation?

Yes, so this is Harlow's work from the University of Madison, Wisconsin, and there's actually a fabulous book by Deborah Blum. Maybe look that up, because I can't remember the name, but I used to make my students read it all. So this is Harry Harlow, the nature of affection. And so they take the babies away from the real mothers. They give them one is the wire one, which you see there with the big eyes, and the other one is a cloth one. And the wire one has a bottle in it.

And the bottom line is the baby will go to the wire mother to eat and immediately back to the cloth mother. And Harlow's work, no, not monkey wars. And not the poison one. Not monkey wars. Not sex on the rain. She's Pulitzer Prize winning writer, Deborah, but love at Goon Park. Love at Goon Park. It's that one right there. Fabulous book.

And Deborah Blum got a job at University of Wisconsin, and then she got into this. And she said to me once, because I knew her from her Monkey Wars book that got Animal Rights, and she got a Pulitzer Prize for that. And I was at a meeting, and she was there, and she turned to me. and she said, we were in the line for the bathroom, and she said, I just realized this whole book is about attachment. I wouldn't, right. And it's fabulous.

It's written for the popular press, and it explains the development that we finally understand about attachment theory. And Harlow's work, it was brutal, you know, because it's hard to watch because he's pulling these baby monkeys away. Can you look up the video of the Harlow experiment? of the two Rhesus monkeys. The video is just like... They're cute.

They're so cute. They're adorable. So there are, just to give listeners to some background, there are about 22 species of macaques. They're actually the most ecologically widespread

primate after humans. So if you've ever seen the Japanese macaques in the hot tubs in Japan, they're macaques. I've studied four different species of macaques. And

And Harlow, if you read her book, Harlow was a real jerk. But these experiments are amazing. And the little monkeys that were taken away from their mothers became crazy, really crazy. And his next experiment, there they go. Right. So you can see the eat something. The monkey here, you get a snack. That monkey's about six months old.

And then boom. time to go to the nurturing comforting. Yeah. And this work changed the way hospital births happen. The reason you get to be with your son right away is because of this work, because it was so convincing that baby humans needed physical attachment. Yeah, I mean, there was a time in America not that long ago where babies were born, immediately separated from the mother, put into a sort of warm kind of incubation place,

and put into a room and you might not see your baby until the next day. That's right. I'm sure that happened to me. But Harlow's work was instrumental, and it went in for a very long time, and people have done, you know, built on that. But the basic idea is that physical touch is just as important as nutrition. And this speaks to our conversation about baby wearing and sleeping with your baby. It's all part of that. And I don't think. anybody can read that work and not be changed by it because it's so striking. So then what they did after they had these crazy young ones, I mean, they were really

crazy. They did some really bad experiments, sticking them into a thing called the Pit of Despair, it was like a funnel on the baby, a little monkey was all by itself, and to see if it would go crazy. But then they tried to fix them by giving them little therapists, and they put in the cage with the crazy monkey, an older monkey, still a juvenile, that had been brought up correctly, who was affectionate, and it worked. So that monkey influenced the one that was crazy, and the idea was you can change this, you can fix it. And that's what he showed. Wow. So if you have a child

who, let's say, was adopted under terrible, you know, conditions like back in Romania, and that if you work hard enough that hopefully you can change whatever mental illness that has infused that poor creature from not getting any touch. But no touch at all. It breaks my heart. No, I can't even look at it. Yeah, it's so sad. And I'm curious if there's someone that's listening to this program, maybe they just had a baby

and they have the sort of social or economic means to do some of the things that you've outlined of the book, you know, wearing your baby frequently, sleeping with your child, having your baby on their back, breastfeeding frequently from the boob, things like that. And let's say they have one more objection and they say, Meredith, I just don't want to create an overly dependent baby. Like kind of the thing we've been alluding to throughout the conversation. I don't want my baby to be too independent. I want them to be independent and sort of well-adjusted and flourishing on their own. What would be your response to that? My response is the study that Jim McKinnett told me about, about the kids in kindergarten who had, they used co-sleeping, but Jim said,

it's not just one thing. You know, it's really a suite of things. If somebody is co-sleeping, they're more likely to be breastfeeding, they're more likely to carry their baby. He said, so that's not parsed out very well, but those kids were really independent. And I don't know, I just hold up my daughter as the perfect example. It was completely independent and self-reliant. You know, I just think that shouldn't be something to worry about. That will happen naturally because the rest of the culture is all about that. And it's just part of growing up as a human, pretty, you know, at some point, even if you're living in a multi-generational extended family place,

you're still going out and tending to the cows or, you know, pulling up the plants and you're marrying somebody and maybe moving to a different village. And, you know, those things still happen. There is no evidence that doing, that I know of that doing that brings up a dependent adult. And what does that mean to be a dependent adult actually, you know? Does that mean you live with your parents? Or like, and what's so bad about that, really? If you were Italian, you'd be living with your parents.

I had some, I had lots of Italian friends, but one explained to me, she was in her 20s, and she and her sister still lived with her parents in Milan. And she said, we talked about this. I said, you know, it's very different from America. You know, when I was growing up, my parents said when I was 18 to each of their four children, you know, basically get out and call when you get a job. You know, there was nothing. And I described this to her. And she said, well, what Americans don't understand is that we also separate from our parents.

we just do it when we're living with them because the economics are such that nobody can afford to have a separate apartment when they're 20 or whatever and so you know college doesn't really cost anything but you have to have someplace to live for example my Italian teacher

when he finished he has a master's degree and he went back and lived with his parents and Puglia but he was running a language of business which has turned into a huge business He had rented an office, and he said, it's nothing. You know, he has his independent life. He just eats dinner with his parents, and he talks to them. He's completely independent financially.

He helps supporting his sister. It's lovely to see, really lovely. Yeah, we do have such an interesting notion that if you are too close to your parents, that there's some type of parapheria. It's pathological. We think it's pathologically dependent. Everybody, you know, all these Italians I know, it's not like that at all. When I said to him, I hadn't seen one of my sisters for 23 years, he said to me, I don't even understand that.

Like, I can't even comprehend it. He'd be like never looking in the mirror. So it's like such a strange notion. He just couldn't absorb it at all. Yeah. And, you know, I would say to him, and for good reason, but, you know, really, it's weird. Yeah. You know, and it's nice to be exposed to families that are functional and supportive, but not intrusive at the same time.

His parents don't tell him what to do, you know, and he's one of the most mature, independent people I know. Yeah. You know, so I think it's something that Americans worry about him. Maybe they shouldn't so much. I mean, of course, one would think about it, but maybe not worry so much. Can you nurture your babies too much? Can you love them too much? Can you fall prey to manipulation? Can they trick you? Can they coerce you? Okay. Manipulation, that's a good one because people do think that. They think they're crying is manipulation.

And Ron Barr would say crying is a signal. You know, they're trying to tell you something. Now, if someone, you know, is a red light manipulating you? You could say, yeah, it's manipulating me to stop the car. Right. It's changing your behavior, perhaps. It's queuing what you're doing. When you're hungry, is your body manipulating you? It's giving you a signal.

And so maybe the good idea is going to move away from the idea of manipulation and just think of these things as a signal. Does that change at a certain point if your kid's like five or six and is like, if you don't give me candy, I hate you. You know, then hate me. Grow a back. You know, it's like, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know any parents like that, but, you know, I'm sure they're out there that they feel insulted or manipulated. And certainly teenagers try to manipulate you, but you just have to stand strong. Yeah, yeah, that'll be a fun test. It's hard to even imagine my kid becoming a teenager. You can't, you just can't predict. Yeah. I was a really good teenager.

Oh, really? Yeah, one of my sisters, we were great. What does that mean? Why were you a good teenager? Oh, we never argued with her parents. We didn't do anything bad. We didn't sneak around. No, no, we were just, we were good. Because you had no breast milk.

That's what it was. You had no attachment. So you were just like, this is just my roommate. What am I going to do with my parents? Right. There's just some lady I know. So maybe there are some benefits. Yeah, maybe we've got to go back.

That's right. That's right. Meredith, this has been awesome. I'm such a fan of you and your writing and your book. And I'm excited to read kids and I'm excited to read this family book that's going to come out. So far, it's called together, but I don't know. Now that the Surgeon General last spring, I just realized his book was called together. So I don't know if I get to call it that.

Yeah. Oh, did you see? The last thing. Okay. We're going to wrap up soon, but there's one more thing I read, though. I thought it was so interesting. That apparently helicopter parenting. Yes.

And what about snowplow parenting? Or is that just an Ithaca thing? What is that? That's even worse. That's even people who are more extreme than helicopter parent. They're there with the snowplow. Oh, wow. Yeah.

That apparently has been diagnosed by the surgeon general as being potentially psychologically damaging the children. Oh, I would think so. I had a friend who's not my friend anymore, so I think I can say this. Her son went off to college and she said I have to go with him, drop him off because I have to show him how to make a bed. I said he's 18 and he's never made a bed and then she got embarrassed. and then he called her up from the drugstore and talked to her about which shampoo you could buy. And she also tried to tell him what courses to take. And also she was looking for an apartment in his third year.

And when she was looking at courses, I just kept saying to her, stop it. You're not, you know, I'm the professor. I'm like, they're his courses, not yours. Well, he has to have these. I said, back off. And when the apartment things, came, I turned around to my 15-year-old and said, if you wanted to get an apartment, what would

you do? And she just went, well, I'd look in the local, you know, paper, and then I would look here, and then I would talk to these people, and I went, oh, thank God, you know, because, you know, I never sat and taught her how to do that, but she picked up on it. But this kid, nothing. A funny dichotomy, right, that you might have a parent that, and again, this is a generalization. I don't know if this is a specific person, but you might have a parent that, you know, puts their maybe in a different room. And then when they're 16, 17, they're all over them. That's right. That's right. And they're the ones that are on top of them. And it's this push.

Or you, you sleep with your kid and you nurture them from, you know, zero to eight. And then you'll leave them alone. You leave them alone. And you watch, you watch, because you've got to be safety is the thing. But, and they, you know, they do learn. And they learn from their friends. and they learn from other people's parents and they learn from you. Helicopter parents, I personally find them really annoying. Mostly because I'm a professor

and I have to deal with them in college and that would take a whole other podcast for me to tell you about interfering parents in college. Well, that's not the next one we're going to do. The next one we're going to do, we're going to talk about Venice. Oh, yes, yes. Yeah, I can talk a lot about that.

I can talk a lot about that. But we will save that for a different day. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. This is fabulous. And yeah, I'm excited to do this again. Yeah, sounds great. Thank you, everybody that watched at home.

I appreciate the questions. And as always, I appreciate you guys tuning in. I'm really enjoying doing these live. I think they're so fun. I feel like there's more of like an energy. It's fun to see you guys' feedback in real time. So we'll continue to do, you know, versions of these. And I'm really enjoying the rate that we're putting out episodes.

I think it's so fun. This is our third one this week. So we are cooking. We got more merch on the way. We got T-shirts. A bunch of people have been hitting me up. We have awesome shirts,

hats, all sorts of stuff that I spent a lot of time working on. And I'm doing all the fulfillment packaging myself. Everyone that you order will come with a signed letter from me just expressing my gratitude because I'm so grateful for every person

that listens to the show that asks questions that's willing to open their mind and think about the world in a different way. We got some more episodes coming out this week that are awesome. Tony Hernandez

will probably drop tomorrow talking about the mafia, the Costa Nostra, the Italian mob, the Venetian mob, maybe, in New York City. And his experience growing up around that. And just a bunch of more episodes coming out this year and in January that I think you guys are really going to enjoy. So as always, thank you so much for being a part of the show, for making it possible. And see you next time here at camp. Good night.