Parenting Across the Ages: What Early Hominins Can Teach Us About Raising Children Today

Imagine what it might have been like to be a parent 1.8 million years ago. There were no cribs, no baby monitors, and no parenting books. Yet, the task of caring for and raising children was just as important then as it is today. While we often think of things like stone tools, fire, and hunting as key to our ancestors’ survival, what about the family unit? What was it like to be a parent during the dawn of humanity?

Parenting back then wasn’t just about doing a job—it was about ensuring survival, building resilience, and creating connections in a way that influenced the course of human evolution. Keeping infants safe required creativity, adaptability, and a strong community. By looking at how early hominins approached parenting, we can see how many of the instincts and behaviors they used still influence how we raise our children today.

**Early Hominin Childcare: A Community Effort**:

Research shows that early hominin parenting was probably more community-based than the isolated parenting models we often see today. Anthropologists believe that Homo erectus and even earlier hominins raised their children within cooperative groups. Unlike today’s nuclear families, care wasn’t just provided by the parents but by an extended family network—grandmothers, older siblings, and even non-relatives. This idea is called **”cooperative breeding”** and made survival a shared responsibility.

One example of this is the “Grandmother Hypothesis,” which suggests that post-menopausal women played an important role in helping raise grandchildren, giving Homo sapiens an evolutionary edge. This practice of “alloparenting” allowed mothers to have more children while ensuring that more young survived. Parenting wasn’t just about individual effort but was a community task that helped our species succeed.

This cooperative approach also allowed the sharing of knowledge and experience. Grandmothers and other older members of the group could pass on valuable skills to younger generations—not just in raising children but also in food gathering, survival techniques, and social behaviors. This sharing of experience helped strengthen social bonds and allowed early human culture to develop.

**Mother-Infant Bond and Physical Contact**:

Imagine early hominin mothers—always carrying their babies. There were no strollers or cradles; instead, infants were likely kept close at all times. This constant physical contact provided warmth and protection and also helped build emotional bonds. The reliance on skin-to-skin contact shows that **attachment and physical closeness** were key parts of early child-rearing.

In modern parenting, practices like “babywearing” and co-sleeping can be seen as alternative or even controversial. But they are likely reflections of ancient behaviors that helped infants survive in harsh and unpredictable environments. By keeping infants close, early hominins could respond quickly to danger and provide comfort and nourishment, leading to secure attachment patterns that helped develop emotional stability.

There is also evidence that constant carrying and holding helped infants develop motor skills early on. The movements involved in being carried allowed young hominins to develop physical coordination and balance. What might seem today like a simple comfort actually had a big impact on both physical and emotional growth.

**Hormonal and Sympathetic Changes in Fathers**:

It wasn’t only mothers who experienced physical changes when raising children. Early hominin fathers likely went through significant hormonal shifts too, much like modern human fathers do. Studies show that fathers experience drops in testosterone and increases in oxytocin and prolactin—hormones that encourage bonding and caregiving. These hormonal changes help fathers become more nurturing, suggesting that early hominin fathers played a more active role in parenting than we often assume.

Additionally, many fathers experience **couvade syndrome**, where they develop sympathetic symptoms during their partner’s pregnancy, like nausea, weight gain, or sleep problems. This means that even in our evolutionary past, fatherhood involved both biological and emotional transformations. These changes helped build bonds between fathers and infants, making parenting more of a shared effort.

These hormonal changes also helped fathers engage more deeply with their families, increasing cooperation and strengthening family bonds. By responding to their own hormonal cues, early hominin fathers supported the survival of their young, highlighting that fatherhood played an important evolutionary role.

**Learning Through Play in the Pleistocene**:

Think about how children learned back then. Play was almost certainly the main way they developed the skills they needed to become capable group members. Unlike today’s structured education, early hominin children learned through **imitative play**—watching adults and copying what they did, like tool-making, gathering food, or social interactions. This kind of learning taught children resilience, creativity, and cooperation.

It’s a reminder to us today about how valuable it is to let children explore and learn at their own pace. Play isn’t just fun—it’s an important mechanism for learning that’s hardwired into us. By exploring their surroundings, early children developed diverse skills, allowing them to adapt to changing environments. Play was also crucial for social learning, teaching children group norms, empathy, and cooperation.

Bringing more of this kind of play into our children’s lives today can help build resilience, adaptability, and a sense of wonder. By encouraging unstructured play, parents can tap into an ancient, deeply human way of nurturing growth.

**Shared Risks and Emotional Resilience**:

Parenting in the Pleistocene meant dealing with predators, harsh weather, and food shortages. These challenges fostered a unique kind of emotional resilience, one that was spread across the group. Parents knew that their child’s well-being depended not only on their actions but also on the support of the whole community. In tough times, everyone helped feed and protect the young, making emotional bonds essential.

This idea of **shared risk and reward** encouraged cooperation and resilience, which were crucial for survival. We can see echoes of this in modern communities that stress the importance of social support systems to reduce parental stress and improve child outcomes. The lessons from early humans show that when we embrace community-based child-rearing, we help both our children and ourselves.

Early hominin communities also likely used shared rituals and social activities to strengthen bonds. These activities helped manage stress and build emotional resilience among adults and children. Emotional resilience wasn’t just about facing challenges but also about having support and knowing that survival was a shared goal. By looking at these early practices, we can understand how important community ties and emotional intelligence are for modern parenting.

**Lessons for Modern Parenting**:

What lessons can we learn from the parenting strategies of our ancestors? One major lesson is the importance of community. In today’s world, many parents are isolated and expected to do everything on their own. But our biology tells a different story—one in which child-rearing was a shared responsibility. Whether it’s reaching out to friends, involving extended family, or building connections in the community, it’s clear that parenting was never meant to be a solo effort.

Another takeaway is the value of physical closeness and responsive caregiving. Our ancestors didn’t leave their babies alone, and they responded quickly to their cries—not because they read a book on parenting, but because in a dangerous world, attending to an infant’s needs immediately was essential. Today, attachment science shows that responding to babies helps them form secure bonds and thrive.

Creating support systems—whether through extended family, friends, or community groups—can help modern parents manage stress and provide better outcomes for their children. Recognizing that parenting is not meant to be done alone can also help reduce the stigma around asking for help and remind us of the very real need for community that has shaped human parenting for millions of years.

**Sources and References**:

1. Hrdy, S. B. (2009). *Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding*. Harvard University Press.

2. Hawkes, K., O’Connell, J. F., & Blurton Jones, N. G. (1997). “Hadza Women’s Time Allocation, Offspring Provisioning, and the Evolution of Long Postmenopausal Life Spans.” *Current Anthropology*, 38(4), 551-577.

3. Gray, P. B., & Anderson, K. G. (2010). *Fatherhood: Evolution and Human Paternal Behavior*. Harvard University Press.

4. Konner, M. (2010). *The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind*. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

5. Hrdy, S. B. (2005). “Cooperative Breeders with an Ace in the Hole.” In *Grandmotherhood: The Evolutionary Significance of the Second Half of Female Life* (pp. 295-317). Rutgers University Press.

6. Gettler, L. T. (2014). “Applying Socioendocrinology to Evolutionary Models: Fatherhood and Physiology.” *Hormones and Behavior*, 68, 59-69.