Orangutans are a little bit like tradwives. An orangutan mom doesn’t have a partner to make dinner or put on a dress for—orangutans live mostly alone—but she does handle all the homemaking and childcare herself. Her kids may breastfeed until the age of 8. But unlike the tradwife with her gaggle of youngsters underfoot, the orangutan mother sustains this intense caretaking by spacing her kids seven or so years apart.
When it comes to other great apes, the moms also get almost no help in raising their children—from dads, or anyone else—and they space their kids several years apart. Their families look even less like a “traditional” human family: Chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas live in promiscuous groups.
If our closest animal relatives aren’t helpful models, what is a human family supposed to look like? Modern Western parents have been taught that the ideal, natural family means a beleaguered mom plus a partner who may or may not equally share the work of raising kids. If we feel exhausted trying to follow this model, maybe that’s because it isn’t natural to our species at all.
In recent decades, many biologists and anthropologists have come to view Homo sapiens as what’s called a “cooperative breeder.” This means our species parted ways with the other great apes, and evolved for kids to be raised not by one or even two parents, but by parents plus helpers. The helpers could be grandparents, older siblings, or other relatives or community members. Such helpers are called alloparents, for “other” parents. The word was first published by Sarah Hrdy, a primatologist now retired from the University of California, Davis, who argued that this is the only way we could have started birthing our big, needy, slow-developing babies closer together (when we’re not using birth control) than any of our closest animal relatives do. At some point, our ancestors began living in groups that weren’t only companions, but co-parents.
