Instant Genius - What we can learn about parenting from the animal kingdom

Episode Date: June 4, 2026

Becoming a parent is undoubtedly one of the biggest events that can occur in any of our lifetimes – suddenly we have a tiny living being to take care of that demands the majority of our thoughts, time and attention. Of course, this can at times feel overwhelming and often leads us to look for help and advice from our parents, grandparents or close friends. But what strategies do parents in the animal kingdom use to raise their young, and is there anything we humans can learn from them? As part of our Nature's Unsung Heroes miniseries, we’re joined by science writer Elizabeth Preston to talk about her latest book, The Creatures’ Guide to Caring – How Animal Parents Teach Us That Humans Were Born to Care. She tells us how orca grandmothers pitch in to help with the raising of their grandchildren, how in some species of monkeys the father takes on most of responsibility for taking care of their offspring, and how we can learn so much more about ourselves as humans by paying deeper attention to the wider world we live in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This spring, denim gets a softer, lighter update. Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg, a new fit that moves with you. It's everything you want denim to feel like for summer. Easy, breathable and effortlessly cool. With a fit that creates natural movement and a wide leg that feels modern, not overwhelming. Plus, that signature, wait, for this price, moment. Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius.

a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you're here world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor, a BBC science focus. Becoming a parent is undoubtedly one of the biggest events that can occur in any of our lifetimes. Suddenly, we have a tiny living being to take care of that demands the majority of our thoughts, time and attention. Of course, this can at times feel overwhelming

and often leads us to look for help and advice from our parents, grandparents or close friends. But what strategies do parents in the animal kingdom use to raise their young? And is there anything we humans can learn from them? In this episode, we're joined by science writer Elizabeth Preston to talk about her latest book, The Creatures Guide to Caring, how animal parents teach us that humans were born to care.

She tells us how Orca Grand Grandkids, mothers pitch in to help with the raising of their grandchildren, how in some species of monkeys, the father takes on most of the responsibility for taking care of their offspring, and how we can learn so much more about ourselves as humans by paying deeper attention to the wider world we live in. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. So today we're talking about your latest book, The Creatures Guide to Caring, How Animal Parents Teachers, that humans are born to care. So that that's a really interesting title.

I think first off, before we get stuck into some of the details, can you explain the basic idea that's running through the book, please? Yeah, as a science journalist and also a parent, I of course have a vested interest in the science of parenting. But what I realized when I became a parent is that most parenting literature approaches parenting as if it's a uniquely human problem. like we invented this problem of having to take care of our kids. And if you look around the world, that's obviously not true. And I love to investigate questions from an evolutionary biology lens and

say, here's this behavior that we're doing. What can we learn from looking at how related or really distantly related species are doing the same thing and dealing with the same problems? Yeah. So let's have a look at that a little bit then. So in the book, you say that humans are cooperative breeders. So let's start with that, you know. What exactly does that mean? That's right. So if you talk to anthropologists or evolutionary biologists today,

they'll generally tell you that we think humans evolved to raise our young cooperatively. This means that if you were to look at our ancient human ancestors, you probably wouldn't see just a mom and a dad raising kids together, a quote unquote nuclear family. you would see something bigger and more flexible. So the mom and the dad would have helpers. And scientists call those helpers allo parents for other parents. And an aloe parent could be an aunt or uncle.

It could be a child's older sibling. It could be a grandparent. It might be a neighbor or a friend. You know, humans are extremely flexible as a species. And just like a family can look countless different ways today, it probably would have looked countless different ways in our history as well. Yeah, so this sort of behavior, I suppose you would call it, you write about. It can also be sort of pinpointed or looked at things that are going on in our brains.

So what do we know about that? That's right. Scientists have done some really interesting research, looking at the brain activity of parents who are playing with their kids or watching videos of themselves playing with their kids. And one takeaway is that there's not a distinct mom versus dad brain, that the general pattern of activity, the general network of areas that are active when we're engaged with our kids is universal across parents. And this is also true when scientists looked at male couples, so not a heterosexual

couple, but two dads together. They're not necessarily genetically related to the child, but they still have that same pattern of brain activation. So this suggests that you can kind of turn on this parenting brain network in two ways, either from the inside out, if you are the parent who births the baby and you have all those hormones happening, or perhaps from the outside in, just from the cues of having a baby or a needy young person around you. Yeah, so let's move on to the animal part, which makes up most of the book. with many different animal species and their behaviors that you talk about. So maybe the best place to start here is,

so we're humans are primates, so we're most closely related to primates. So there are some other primates that show this sort of cooperative parenting behavior. That's right. And if you look at our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, which are the other great apes, so the chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, you don't see this. what you see is a model where the mother is completely in charge of caretaking. So it's very intense for her.

She has to carry this baby around all the time. It usually clings to her fur. She's completely in charge of feeding it and keeping it alive. And that means the mothers have to space their babies out more than humans do because they don't have the resources to care for more than one dependent child at a time. humans, apparently because we evolved to care for our kids cooperatively, we're able to have more than one dependent kid at a time and keep them alive because we are, at least in theory, having that help from others, those other sets of hands available to care for and feed our children.

So the other place you can see this among the primates, which is the apes as well as the monkeys, is when you go all the way over to South America and you look at these little. little tree top monkeys called marmosets and tamarins. These are also cooperatively breeding animals. And what it looks like for them is a mom usually has twins and she can have twins twice a year. So it's a lot of babies. It's a lot of babies, a lot of caretaking that has to be done. She cannot do it herself because she's got to hold these babies. They're up in the tree tops. You know, if one falls, it will die. So she really, really is dependent on help from others. and that means her mate, but also their older children.

They all work together to care for the infants. They pass the infants around constantly to make sure that all the caretakers have enough time to feed themselves and keep themselves alive. So they have the resources to continue caring. Yeah, so let's have a look at some of the other animal species that you discuss in the book. Sticking with this kind of idea of community or communal living, I think if you were to get, you know, a hundred people, let's say in the room and say, well, you know, can you give us an example of animals that live in communities? Probably a good proportion that would say, well, bees, wasps, ants, things like this.

But then I reckon if you push them, they'd say, well, they're so different from humans. You know, what can we possibly learn from observing these social structures in bees, wasps, ants and, you know, insects? That's true. We are very, very, very distantly related to an insect like a bee or a wasp. But one great thing about evolutionary biology is looking at how the same solution to a problem has sometimes arisen more than once, totally independently. So like flight, you know, flight arose in the insects and also in the birds and also in the mammals when you look at bats. And it's not because it just evolved one time and branched out. flight is a really cool solution that evolution came up with multiple times. The same is true of parental care. It arose a whole bunch of times in really different branches of the animal kingdom.

And the kind of social living that the bees and wasps have called U-Ssocial life, where they live in a colony, they have a queen and workers, you see this in bees like honeybees, wasps, ants, but you also see it in a mammal called the Naked Mole Rat. And by comparing these two groups of animals and how they live, you can see the commonalities. And the commonalities start to tell you about how we might have arrived where we are today, why this was a good solution to keep these species thriving in their environments. Yeah, so let's stick with Naked Morats for a moment.

Oh, yes. Personally, I love them. These even have queens, don't they? So how does that work? What's the queen's role and, you know, how do all the other roles feed into this? Yeah, everyone loves naked mulrats. Everyone loves to talk about them. They're a very odd animal.

So they do have a queen. She looks like the other naked mole rats, but she's kind of bigger. In one of the colonies that I visited in the lab, you could tell the queen right away because she was pregnant. And she's kind of almost always pregnant. So the queen is responsible for birthing all of the babies in this colony. and she gets very long and very bulgy with all of these pups inside her. And all of the other naked mulrettes in the colony are her descendants.

And they all work together. They take care of the babies. No one else will nurse the babies. So they do bring them back to the queen when it's time to eat. But they groom the pups. They carry them around. They all work together to get food for the colony, to dig tunnels. They're very, very industrious.

They maintain a separate chamber of their borough for going to the bathroom in. And then when it fills up, they wall it off and they build a new one. They're very organized. And the other thing about the naked mulrats is that they're so social. And this manifests as them being very what looks to us as loving. You'll always find them in a big pile. They like to just pile on top of each other whenever they have the opportunity. And they even are a little bit cool to the touch because they don't make.

their own body temperature all by themselves, they rely on always being in contact with their community to stay warm. This episode is brought to you by Activia. You might already be eating yogurt, but not all yogurts are created equal. Activia contains over one billion probiotics per serving to survive and reach the gut alive. When it comes to gut health, Activia is the number one family doctor-recommended probiotic yogurt brand. Use Activia, feel good from the inside out.

Visitactivia.ca for more details. Are you one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets? Yes? Good. This is for you. Because on Spotify, there's an audience that's different. Locked in, loyal, invested. They're called fans. Fans don't just listen to music.

They feel seen by it like it belongs to them. So when your brand shows up on Spotify, that's who you're talking to. And you're right next to artists like me, Lizzo. So, are you ready to talk to fans? Spotify advertising. You're among fans. Yeah, so in talking about these big communities, these colonies in the book,

the idea of something called a superorganism comes up, you know. So how does that differ from just a group of animals? That's right. Biologists sometimes refer to a colony such as that honeybee hive or that naked mole rat colony as a superorganism. And one feature of that is that these individuals aren't having their own kids. They're not just looking out for their own immediate descendants and their own immediate genes. It's that they're invested in the greater genetic family.

And they're all working toward more or less a common good. They're really working together in a way that no other animal quite does. And you can see that because they're taking. care of these young that are not their own, maybe their nieces and nephews or their siblings, but they're indirectly passing on their genes, and they're so invested in that group that that's a winning evolutionary strategy for them. Yeah, so let's have a look at the kind of the idea of the extended family, which we sort of touched on a bit earlier. But you mentioned the nuclear family, you know, mother, father, children. But, you know, we've always included our

Grandparents, first off in this, you know, a lot of people that I know who've had children actually moved so they were close to their parents so that they could get help with the raising of the children, because obviously it's demanding, especially if you've got two working parents, etc. But in the book, you talk about a really interesting story, specifically about orca grandmothers. So, you know, what's going on there? So humans are interesting because we have menopause, which means female humans well outlived their reproductive years. We stop being fertile in the middle of our lives, and then we stay alive for hopefully decades longer. And scientists think that this is something that evolved so that grandmothers could help ensure the survival of their children and grandchildren. And one piece of evidence we have that this might have been why grandmothers exist, is when we look at, again, another place this solution has arisen completely independently, which is in not a close relative of ours at all, but among

certain whale species. So the orca or killer whale is one of those species. The females, just like a female human, they get to the end of their fertile years, and then they stay alive for decades. And among orcas, these older females are the matriarchs. They're the leaders of their family groups and they have important roles, like helping to lead their family to food or helping to ensure the survival of their adult children and their grandchildren. Also, another thing, interesting thing that you mentioned about grandmothers, brings up the idea that's, you know, not a new idea, but I've been reading more and more about it recently. And that's the sort of importance of intergenerational friendships.

And you talk about a really lovely project in Zimbabwe, involved. in grandmothers. You know, could you tell me what they're doing now? Yeah, this is a really beautiful project that I learned about called The Friendship Bench, where a psychiatrist in Zimbabwe was facing this problem of this extreme shortage of mental health professionals in the country. And he started thinking about where could he recruit other people who aren't necessarily doctors to be mental health workers? And he realized he could turn to grandmothers in the community. And so he started recruiting and training these grandmothers. They already had this deep rootedness in their communities. They already were very comfortable talking to people, listening to people, making people feel heard. And so he started to set up this program where people could sit on a bench and just have a conversation with a grandmother. And the grandmother was trained in how to direct these patients to more care if they needed it or how to just listen to what was going on with them. And they found, that this program was just as effective as a program where people saw actual psychiatrists

or were treated with actual medication. So another thing that you talk about about the influence of our grandparents, which is really fascinating. You know, because in this situation, as we've talked about, maybe grandparents are helping out with childcare and things. But they can also have an influence on them, perhaps even when we've never met them, via something called epigenetics. So what do we know about that? Yes, this is a really interesting and slightly spooky area of science. So epigenetics, the epigenetic

means above. And epigenetic changes are modifications that our bodies make to our DNA that are not at the level of the genetic code itself, but they are above it or on top of it. Kind of like if you think of a book and you kind of scribble your notes in the book, where you fold down and doggier the pages. is these kind of annotations to our genetic code. And we do this all the time naturally as a way to respond to our environment. So depending on what's going on around us, our bodies will dial up or dial down the activity of certain genes so that we can thrive in the environment that we're in. And there's some evidence that some of these epigenetic changes can actually be passed down

through a father's sperm, say, to the next generation. There's been some really interesting studies in mice, suggesting that experiences a father has during his lifetime can travel via epigenetic modifications in his sperm to baby mice who have never met him. So what are some examples of that in humans then? Because you talk about one really interesting one. Yes, there's a famous example called the Dutch Hunger Winter. So this was a really horrific famine that took place in Holland during World War II. And in the generations afterward, scientists discovered that there were these epigenetic modifications to the DNA of the descendants of the people who had survived that famine. And those modifications affected things about their metabolism, how they handle food.

And this suggests that that history, that having been, say, in the womb of a woman who is experiencing famine, can modify our DNA to make. make us potentially better prepared to deal with a situation like that if it happens after we're born. So it's a way for information to maybe travel through generations without needing a genetic change. It's a faster way to send information and to adapt to our environment. So let's shift gears again. And often when we're talking about parenting, unfortunately, people often don't talk about fathers as frequently as they might do. So I think we need to give them a bit of shine as well.

There's one really interesting species that you talk about that I'd never heard about, if I'm pronouncing this correctly, T-T monkeys. That's right. Yeah, how do they differ from, you know, other species of monkey? Yes, the T-T monkeys and their relatives, the owl monkeys, are really interesting because they're kind of the only mammal that I know of, in which the father takes on a more important role than the mother. So mother mammals always have to nurse their babies. That's something we can't really get out of

as a species. It's right there in the name of mammal. They need their mother's milk. But among Titi monkeys, the father pretty much does everything else. And the mother acts almost disinterested in her babies. So the baby will go to the mother to nurse. And then immediately when it's done, it just climbs onto the back of the father. And that's where it spends its time. Plays with him. It hangs out with him. He carries it around and keeps it around and keep it safe. I talked to one researcher who had been making a documentary in the rainforest about these monkeys. And he said when the camera people were aiming their camera lens up into the treetops, it was almost impossible to get the whole family in one frame because the father and the baby would be

in one place and the mother would be someplace totally different, just doing her own thing. But, you know, it's really our mammalian bias that makes us think mothers have to be the most important caretaker. If you look across the animal kingdom, it's not true at all. For example, among fishes, most kinds of fish don't care for their young, but among the ones that do, it's almost always the dad, who's the primary caretaker. So sort of sticking with the monkeys then, even though they have this sort of different way of approaching parenting, they still sort of form what you call pair bonds. So I think that's quite an interesting thing that you talk about in the book. So, you know, what do we mean by that? And, you know, because presumably humans also

form pair bonds. That's right. So I often hear people say, oh, ducks are the only species that mates for life or something like that. And it's not true. There are a lot of species that are monogamous. And it doesn't have to mean they stay with the same partner for their entire life until they die. Sometimes, you know, one animal gets eaten and its partner will go find a new partner. Or monogamy can last for just a season. But you find many, many examples throughout the animal kingdom of mates that are closely bonded to each other. And it occurs in humans and also in other primates and also lots of birds. There are fish that are monogamous, sea horses.

are monogamous. So it's this really common thing to have evolved. And often monogamy goes hand in hand with a father's care among the mammals. So this makes sense. If the father has decided to invest his care in the offspring, it's beneficial for him to stick close to his partner and make sure that, you know, any more kids she has also belonged to him genetically. But you can see this among those teedy monkeys, for example, they're so tightly bonded. They sit together just shoulder to shoulder all the time, and they even, they wrap their tails around each other when their tails hanged on off the branch. It's very cute to see. Yeah, so we've covered like an awful lot there, only a small proportion of what's in the book. But going back to the question where we

started, like the sort of viewpoint where you might think, well, you know, humans are unique in this regard and different and maybe even separate from other animals. But I think we've proven there that that's clearly not the case. So I just, as one final question, I wanted to ask you, you know, as you write about as a mother yourself, after doing the research and writing the book, what sort of feelings were you left with after all of this? One thing that I came away with from writing The Creatures Guide to Caring and that I hope readers come away with too is a sense of being not alone in the world. So I mean that in two senses. One is among the other animals. You know, like I said at the beginning, we're not the only ones who have this

problem, this challenge of keeping our young alive. When we look around the variety of species on earth, we can see all these other creatures who are dealing with the same challenges and coming up with their own solutions. And some of them are so wild and fascinating. And you can see all the different ways that evolution has come up with to deal with the challenge of keeping your young alive. I also think it makes me feel less alone among other humans. Because going back to the idea of cooperative caretaking, because we evolved with this history, this legacy of working together to care for young, it means that every human has to have this equipment in their brain ready to be called on to care for a baby or even another person,

an adult who needs their care. We all have that capacity built into us to care for others. So even people who don't have their own kids are just as much a part of this greater human family. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Elizabeth Preston. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out her book, The Creatures Guide to Caring, How Animal Parents Teach Us, were born to care. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing

to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then why don't check out our YouTube channel at ScienceFocus? The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your app store of choice. You can also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com. You know.