Mustard – mothers and others

The question of support for mothers and their family structures goes back to Hrdy’s book: Mothers and Others, in which she tries to give the history of the human species over the last 200 thousand years. Recognize that the human infant is the most vulnerable of the newborns of the mammalian species, and therefore, it needs enormous support to develop effectively. That means, therefore, that if you’re looking at your society, what are the mothers and others really like? Well in the hunter and gatherer societies, the male went off, males went off hunting, and the mothers collectively ran their community in which they were raising children etc. so the mothers had other mothers and others in the community that helped look after each other, and that’s probably one of the reasons we’ve survived from that period of development.

And so, there was a natural “mothers and others” network there, males of course, did their thing, but they weren’t around a lot and perhaps they were just sleeping most of the time when they came back into the cluster. When you move to the agricultural society, ten thousand years ago, farming families needed children to be able to farm effectively, we didn’t have a lot of machinery, and those nuclear families, the mother was the master of the household: she mastered the early child development, the children learned to work with the farm to work in the gardens, but in addition she would have had the support of all the relatives – the aunts and uncles etc. that were in the area because people didn’t move around very much. And so that was a different kind of mothers and others format.

When you come to the industrial revolution, we became more urbanized as populations and perhaps didn’t have as good “mothers and others” units, but we did a couple of very important things. We realized that people should have clean water. We realized we should have good sanitation. And we realized that we should enhance the ability of people to be nourished by getting a speck (?) of food production at a cost people could afford. So that got into the survival aspect of the infant, and with some support from the system, but it wasn’t the perfect “mothers and others” kind of structure.

The churches helped to build that but it was a more varied. And now we move into what people call the post-modern society with these huge condominiums and whatnot where people are located and people move around and go everywhere – there’s a huge movement structure, the “mothers and others” base has been weakened in terms of the traditional patterns that we’ve had. And so one of the ways to build a “mothers and others” program for the future is think of early development as human development, make it part of your ministry of education, and then put in place with each of your primary school, programs for mothers and their children so you create a “mothers and others” climate for the mothers to come to with their children to take part in. You can do home visits with this of course.

And in the countries which are successful in getting high development, high quality development of their children, that’s what, in effect, they’ve done. They’ve great programs for mothers with young children which are hubbed in a centre in the area where they live, which are basically part of the primary school system and they allocate, the Scandinavian countries, allocate some efficient resources to put these structures into place. And it’s important to realize that the Scandinavians countries spend, per infant/toddler young child in the 0-six domain, $16,000 US annually per infant, child etc. in the program. They only spend $10,500 on children in the formal education system because structures change with parental leave isn’t as important as it is in the early period.