London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Tuesday, Oct 07, 2025

Stressed by parenting? Evolution can explain why

Stressed by parenting? Evolution can explain why

What can ants and meerkats teach us about parenting? Evolutionary biologist Nichola Raihani uncovers the ancient social instincts that still shape our families today.

I wrestled the remote control off my children and perched on the sofa, bracing myself for what was coming. It was March 2020, and caseloads of a novel and dangerous coronavirus were rising quickly here in the UK. Our Prime Minister was about to announce a lockdown. Schools and nurseries were going to close. Like millions of other parents, I was about to become my young children's de facto school teacher. The idea filled me with dread.

I wasn't the only one feeling that way. My phone buzzed as messages flooded the school WhatsApp channel, with parents wondering how they were going to fit the demands of their day jobs around fronted adverbials and long division.

Over the months that followed, many parents felt a crushing toll on their mental and physical health. More lockdowns and school closures ensued, along with reports of a worrying increase in levels of parental stress, anxiety and depression. Many asked themselves why this was so hard. Shouldn't we be naturally good at raising our young without outside help? Didn't humans cope without schools and daycare in the past, after all?

As an evolutionary biologist, I do not hold the answers to all pandemic-related family crises, but I can say one thing for certain: as a species, humans are spectacularly ill-equipped to deal with parenting in isolation.

Human families are similar to meerkats in the way they organise themselves


From an evolutionary perspective, it is not surprising that many of us felt so overwhelmed. Despite the common idea that modern family life consists of small, independent units, the reality is that we would often benefit from help from others to raise our offspring. For much of human history, extended families provided that help. In contemporary industrialised societies, where smaller family units are common, teachers, babysitters and other caregivers have allowed us to replicate that ancient support network.

This collaborative way of raising children makes us unique among great apes. Called "cooperative breeding", it is more similar to how seemingly more distant species like meerkats and even ants and bees live – and it has given us crucial evolutionary advantages.

Cooperatively breeding species live in large family groups where individuals work together to raise offspring. Perhaps surprisingly, other apes, such as chimpanzees, do not parent that way. Although humans and chimpanzees both live in complex social groups, comprising kin and non-relatives, a closer inspection reveals some stark differences. Chimp mothers raise their infants alone, with little or no assistance from anyone else, not even the father. The same goes for gorillas, orangutans and bonobos. What's more, female apes do not undergo a physiological menopause, meaning they remain fertile all their lives. As a result, it is quite common for a mother and a daughter to be raising their own offspring at the same time. This limits the potential for ape grandmothers to help with their grandchildren.

As a species, humans are spectacularly ill-equipped to deal with parenting in isolation

Humans, like bees, have evolved to cooperate


We are clearly different. For most of our time on Earth, humans have lived in extended family units, where mothers would have received assistance from many other family members. In many contemporary human societies, this is still the case. Human fathers are often involved in raising offspring, although the extent of paternal investment varies quite a bit across societies. Infants also receive input from a variety of other relatives, including older siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins and, of course, grandparents. Even small children can play a vital role in helping to sustain and protect younger ones. In such a setting, the burden of looking after children very rarely falls onto one person alone.

Abbey Page, a biological anthropologist who has worked extensively with the Agta, a hunter-gatherer society from the Philippines, says we are only beginning to understand the full extent of such traditional support networks. For example, among the Agta, children as young as four are often already productive members of the family.

"The contributions of children have often been overlooked," says Page. In the past, due to strict concepts of what constitutes work and play, researchers tended not to notice that a child could be playing around one moment and grabbing fruit from a bush the next. "Children are definitely subsidising themselves (in such hunter-gatherer societies)," she says.

Agta children also help by protecting their younger siblings from danger. Page recounts a time she was sitting in one of the Agta family huts with a four-year-old boy and his infant sister. All three were sat on the floor when a scorpion entered. Page admits she was flummoxed: "I was not helpful in the slightest." Fortunately, the young boy knew what to do: "He immediately jumped up, got a stick from the fire and bashed the scorpion, and then jumped up and down on it a few times." This simple act potentially saved his sister's life.

Bonobo mothers are solo parents, unlike humans, who have evolved in extended families


The experience prompted Page to reflect on what counts as meaningful childcare. In the West, childcare typically means that a responsible adult, often a parent, not only watches over a young child, but provides intensive engagement and stimulation. When parents are unable to achieve this, for example because they are busy working, they may feel guilty or inadequate. But Page's research uncovered many other ways children can be looked after and thrive, without that intense focus on the parents alone.

In fact, sibling care, with older offspring helping to raise their younger siblings, is a defining characteristic of cooperatively breeding species. Meerkats forage for food that can be shared with youngsters, and babysit younger pups at the burrow. They teach pups how to safely handle dangerous prey items. Females even produce milk to feed their younger siblings. Just like the child who saved his sister from the scorpion, some of the most important forms of care in these cooperative societies also involve protecting younger individuals: keeping them safe from predators and out of trouble.

Orangutans are also closely related to us, but are more used to parenting alone


Cooperative breeding has a crucial advantage over more solitary forms of child-rearing: it can make a species more resilient, and likely evolved as a means to weather adversity.

Many cooperatively breeding species are found in the hottest, driest regions on the planet. Early humans also inhabited harsh regions where food would have been difficult to find, needing to be gathered, scavenged or killed. Collaboration was a pre-requisite for survival in a way that it isn't for contemporary great apes. Our ape cousins all inhabit relatively stable, benign environments – essentially giant salad bowls – where the food they need to sustain themselves and any dependent offspring is much easier to come by.

Humans were apparently the only apes who could survive in such difficult environments: great apes are absent from the fossil record in these regions.

Paradoxically, our cooperative tendency, which allowed us to survive and thrive for so long, may have made the current crisis much harder from a psychological and practical point of view.

During the lockdowns, we were cut off from our support networks: the grandparents, aunts and uncles, but also, the schools, nurseries and playgroups that all helped mimic our ancient human group structures. Not only that, but we were expected to fall back on our small family units as if this was an instinctive thing to do. For many of us, it felt near-impossible, and there was no real explanation for why it felt that way. After all, our Western notion of the family places so much emphasis on maternal care and so little on the contributions of other family members. The expectation was that mothers and fathers, or even mothers alone, would be amply sufficient as caregivers.

However, according to Rebecca Sear, a professor of evolutionary demography at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, this idea of the self-sufficient nuclear family reflects the experiences and worldviews of Western researchers rather than historical reality. The idea of the nuclear family, sustained by a male breadwinner, became particularly entrenched during the post-war period, a time when "academia was full of rich, white, Western men who looked around at their own families and just thought that that was how it's always been", Sear says.

The term "nuclear family" only emerged in the 1920s. The family structure itself, which centres on two parents and a relatively small number of children, is older, and may be linked to the Industrial Revolution, as the shift from farming to manufacturing allowed for more independent lifestyles. An alternative explanation is that policies of the Western Church in the Middle Ages, which banned marriages among cousins and other extended family members, caused family units to shrink. But even though the nuclear family is such an ubiquitous concept in 20th Century Western research and popular culture, including countless novels, films and TV shows, Sear explains that it's actually rather anomalous, even in the West.

"Co-residence of just parents and children is relatively rare worldwide," says Sear. "There is a lot of variation in family structures worldwide, but what is common is that parents get help in raising offspring and that’s true even in the Western middle classes."

When it comes to our family structures, we have more in common with ants than with other great apes


The typical arrangement for humans is not a single pair raising their young in isolation, she explains. Instead, we usually need and receive help when it comes to raising children. Nor is the idea of women as mothers and homemakers as traditional as it is sometimes made out to be. In historical and contemporary subsistence societies, women play a significant role in producing for their families: women are breadwinners, too.

With this different perspective on the human family, perhaps our expectations of parenting during the pandemic would have been different. Instead of assuming that parents, and especially mums, should (and would) carry the burden, we might have acknowledged the crucial role of other family members and caregivers. With an understanding of how much we rely on one another to raise offspring, we might have gone easier on others – and ourselves – when we were struggling.

Expecting humans to parent like chimpanzees is a bit like isolating an ant from her colony: we aren’t necessarily cut out for it – and often it doesn’t go well. Admitting that we need others is not a sign of failure, but is the very thing that makes us human.

Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
A Dollar Coin Featuring Trump’s Portrait Expected to Be Issued Next Year
Australia Orders X to Block Murder Videos, Citing Online Safety and Public Exposure
Three Scientists Awarded Nobel Prize in Medicine for Discovery of Immune Self-Tolerance Mechanism
OpenAI and AMD Forge Landmark AI-Chip Alliance with Equity Option
Munich Airport Reopens After Second Drone Shutdown
France Names New Government Amid Political Crisis
Trump Stands Firm in Shutdown Showdown and Declares War on Drug Cartels — Turning Crisis into Opportunity
Surge of U.S. Billionaires Transforms London’s Peninsula Apartments into Ultra-Luxury Stronghold
Pro Europe and Anti-War Babiš Poised to Return to Power After Czech Parliamentary Vote
Jeff Bezos Calls AI Surge a ‘Good’ Bubble, Urges Focus on Lasting Innovation
Japan’s Ruling Party Chooses Sanae Takaichi, Clearing Path to First Female Prime Minister
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Sentenced to Fifty Months in Prison Following Prostitution Conviction
Taylor Swift’s ‘Showgirl’ Launch Extends Billion-Dollar Empire
Trump Administration Launches “TrumpRx” Plan to Enable Direct Drug Sales at Deep Discounts
Trump Announces Intention to Impose 100 Percent Tariff on Foreign-Made Films
Altman Says GPT-5 Already Outpaces Him, Warns AI Could Automate 40% of Work
Singapore and Hong Kong Vie to Dominate Asia’s Rising Gold Trade
Trump Organization Teams with Saudi Developer on $1 Billion Trump Plaza in Jeddah
Manhattan Sees Surge in Office-to-Housing Conversions, Highest Since 2008
Switzerland and U.S. Issue Joint Assurance Against Currency Manipulation
Electronic Arts to Be Taken Private in Historic $55 Billion Buyout
Thomas Jacob Sanford Named as Suspect in Deadly Michigan Church Shooting and Arson
Russian Research Vessel 'Yantar' Tracked Mapping Europe’s Subsea Cables, Raising Security Alarms
New York Man Arrested After On-Air Confession to 2017 Parents’ Murders
U.S. Defense Chief Orders Sudden Summit of Hundreds of Generals and Admirals
Global Cruise Industry Posts Dramatic Comeback with 34.6 Million Passengers in 2024
Trump Claims FBI Planted 274 Agents at Capitol Riot, Citing Unverified Reports
India: Internet Suspended in Bareilly Amid Communal Clashes Between Muslims and Hindus
Supreme Court Extends Freeze on Nearly $5 Billion in U.S. Foreign Aid at Trump’s Request
Archaeologists Recover Statues and Temples from 2,000-Year-Old Sunken City off Alexandria
China Deploys 2,000 Workers to Spain to Build Major EV Battery Factory, Raising European Dependence
Speed Takes Over: How Drive-Through Coffee Chains Are Rewriting U.S. Coffee Culture
U.S. Demands Brussels Scrutinize Digital Rules to Prevent Bias Against American Tech
Ringo Starr Champions Enduring Beatles Legacy While Debuting Las Vegas Art Show
Private Equity’s Fundraising Surge Triggers Concern of European Market Shake-Out
Colombian President Petro Vows to Mobilize Volunteers for Gaza and Joins List of Fighters
FBI Removes Agents Who Kneeled at 2020 Protest, Citing Breach of Professional Conduct
Trump Alleges ‘Triple Sabotage’ at United Nations After Escalator and Teleprompter Failures
Shock in France: 5 Years in Prison for Former President Nicolas Sarkozy
Tokyo’s Jimbōchō Named World’s Coolest Neighbourhood for 2025
European Officials Fear Trump May Shift Blame for Ukraine War onto EU
BNP Paribas Abandons Ban on 'Controversial Weapons' Financing Amid Europe’s Defence Push
Typhoon Ragasa Leaves Trail of Destruction Across East Asia Before Making Landfall in China
The Personality Rights Challenge in India’s AI Era
Big Banks Rebuild in Hong Kong as Deal Volume Surges
Italy Considers Freezing Retirement Age at 67 to Avert Scheduled Hike
Italian City to Impose Tax on Visiting Dogs Starting in 2026
Arnault Denounces Proposed Wealth Tax as Threat to French Economy
Study Finds No Safe Level of Alcohol for Dementia Risk
Denmark Investigates Drone Incursion, Does Not Rule Out Russian Involvement
×