Primates of Park Avenue (6 page)

It was also an anxiety-provoking way of living, parenting, and being, because it meant you could never let your guard down and relax about
anything at all
. When these moms shook their heads upon hearing that my kid “took music” at the pedestrian Gymboree, I could not help but think of Jane Goodall’s matriarchal chimp Flo, the entrepreneurial dynast whose canny advocacy, sheer ambition, and skillful coalition building on behalf of her offspring Fifi, Figan, and Faben catapulted them to the top of the dominance hierarchy of their troop in Gombe, Tanzania, making the family’s reign something previously unheard of: an intergenerational affair. Just getting by up here, it seemed, required Flo-like perseverance, cleverness, forethought, and strategy.

Other times, as they imparted information to me, these women seemed to sprout the darkened feathers and sharp beaks and compassionless, glinty eyes of birds. David Lack’s bird
mothers
, to be specific. Lack, a British ornithologist, blew apart our cherished assumptions about motherhood and maternal love in his post-WWII study of brooding behavior among birds in the English countryside. He noticed that some bird moms were better than others, fledging more chicks who then went on to fledge chicks themselves, and wanted to get to the bottom of it. Why did some bird moms succeed where others failed? Lack wondered. The birdbrained mothers, he eventually discovered, were the ones who went all-out every time, laying and tending to as many eggs as they could, going gung-ho for each and every hatchling, in every breeding season, depleting themselves in the process. Tired and worn down by their efforts, with bigger broods to defend and provision, they were more likely to die—and so were their chicks. These “selfless” avian mums didn’t have nearly as much success as the cooler, more calculating bird dames who ran the numbers
before
they threw themselves into hatching and provisioning their young. “Looks like it’s going to be a crappy, cold, late spring, probably very few worms. Should I hatch these eggs, or let them go, and lay more next time around, when ecological conditions might be better? Or just hatch a couple?” Once the chicks were hatched, the game of playing the odds, Lack discovered, went on. A not-so-wise mother bird would feed her whole brood. A smarter one
might
do the same. But depending on circumstances, she might just as easily let the biggest chick push the littler ones out. Or peck its younger sibs to death. Or, she might fly the coop entirely, calculating that she could do better next time around, in another breeding season with more potential mates and more abundant berries. Such “retrenchments in maternal care,” Lack discovered, were as important to being a successful mother as the willingness to nurture and sacrifice. Smart bird moms played the odds and made informed “maternal tradeoffs” every day. It didn’t take long for evolutionary thinkers and primatologists like Sarah Hrdy to figure out that primates—both the human and non-human variety—do exactly the same thing.

Sure, with the advent of birth control, and in this environment of affluence and extreme ecological release, these moms on the Upper East Side were utterly unlike bird mothers in that they could afford each and every child and could lavish them
all
with food, attention, and clothing from Bonpoint. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t strategy in their game. One example: the matter of conception. Do you like the idea of having your baby in warm, lazy summer, when Dad can more easily take a paternity leave? Does a yearly outdoor kiddy birthday party with cake at the picnic table sound nice?
Not
up here, sister!
Summer birthdays, it turned out, were just no good. Especially if you had a boy. Boys, the thinking went, were more rambunctious, less compliant, and slower to develop fine motor skills—hence they needed to be “older” once they started school. In the South, such “red-shirting” had begun so that boys would be bigger for sports teams. But in New York, it was for brains and development and that killer cognitive edge. Schools wanted boys to start each grade having had their birthdays not later than August, they said. In which case my son, born in July, barely made the cutoff. But they
actually
meant May, my sister-in-law explained. And they would prefer, say, an October birthday. Moms who became pregnant in January, February, or March won the Flo prize. And, if all else went well, the coveted school spots. The rest of us had kids who went through life and the Manhattan private school system with the black mark of a June, July, or August birthday. A friend joked that Upper East Side IVF clinics should post warnings in September, October, and November:
Skip this cycle.

So, it dawned on me, not only was I slow on the preschool application uptake; I had conceived a child of the wrong gender at the wrong time. “Oh no, you didn’t even apply yet and he also has a
bad birthday
?” the moms I was getting to know exclaimed without fail when I appealed for advice. One said it in front of my son at the playground and he began to sob. “What’s bad about my birthday, Mommy?” “Nothing, honey,” I comforted him. But I was lying. I had moved us to a place where birthdays could, in fact, be “bad.” The gist of it was that I had to get on the phone
right
now
. So here I was.

“I’m sorry,” the woman told me now. She had picked up the line again with an alarming clatter and didn’t sound sorry at all. “There are no more applications.” She hung up without a goodbye, before I could thank her. Presumably, she was in a hurry.

We could just buck all this nonsense, I thought, putting the phone down as calmly as I could. It was stressful and silly. Who cared where our son went to nursery school, or if he even went at all? Weren’t kids all over the world doing just fine without nursery school? I hadn’t gone, I reasoned, and I was okay. But the Upper East Side was not West Africa or the Amazon basin or Grand Rapids. No, I couldn’t check out of this game if my child’s future was even potentially at stake. What kind of mother would that make me?

Thus began my disorienting slide from bystander to total buy-in: with fear. I had been seized by the culturally specific and culturally universal anxiety of not being a good enough mommy, of being a mommy who does less than enough for her children.

Prolonged childhood sets us primates apart. While other mammals go from newborn to weaned juvenile to sexually mature adults with startling (to us) speed, we humans and our closest relatives take our time. Primatologist and St. Louis University associate professor of anthropology Katherine C. MacKinnon observes that “most primate species spend 25–35% of their lifespan in a period of juvenility.” She cites the example of orangutans, who are classified as “infants” for the first five years of their lives, and juveniles for ten to twelve or so years. “A prolonged juvenility, relative to overall lifespan and body size is true for all apes and most monkeys,” she says.

It’s a gradient, she points out. But of all primates, we are born the most dependent, and stay that way for the longest. It begins when we enter the world essentially as fetuses, half-baked, neurologically unfinished, uniquely needy and dependent. Unlike nonhuman primates, we can’t even cling at birth; others have to hold us. That’s just for starters: “altricial” or highly dependent offspring, and neoteny, the retention of youthful traits for a prolonged period, impact parents and kids in many and profound ways, for many years. As anthropologist Meredith Small observes, “Human childhood makes human parenthood longer and more complicated.” We are physically and psychologically entwined with our offspring, and they with us, often for a lifetime. We clothe, feed, and pay for the education of our kids into adulthood. At that point we may underwrite the cost of their housing and eventually contribute emotionally and financially to
their
kids’ well-being. How can we, as a species, justify this costly, never-ending investment in our children?

As it turns out, for many millennia, we
couldn’t
. Our early ancestors, it seems, did not likely tarry between infancy and independence as we do now, but rather got right down to the business of becoming sexually mature. And then, as science writer Chip Walter puts it, “around a million years ago, the forces of evolution inserted an extra six years between infancy and pre-adolescence—a childhood—into the life of our species.” Why? For decades experts believed that this change came about because young, early hominins needed an additional period to learn skills like language and tool use. Childhood, in this view, got stretched like taffy in order for us to impart all the necessary lessons of humanity. Being so special, we needed something special—a childhood.

There were flaws in the theory, though. Natural selection would not likely favor the emergence of an idyll period that was burdensome for parents and risky for parents, dependent offspring, and entire groups alike, just so some kids could learn to start fires and talk pretty. In order to figure out the
real
reason for childhood, thinkers had to stop presuming that childhood had always been the way it is now. Maybe it
wasn’t
originally a time of playing and learning at all. Maybe childhood evolved not for children but for
adults
, and was
beneficial for
them
. Indeed, the only scenario that makes sense, anthropologists such as Barry Bogin, Kristen Hawkes, and Anne Zeller say, is that childhood came about to shift the burdens of reproduction off reproducing adults, so they could reproduce again. They suggest that kids were helpers, babysitters who allowed their mothers to rest and get nourished, which in turn allowed them to provision the kids they had, and have more. It was kids, not male partners, who turned us into “cooperative breeders,” helping us thrive where other
Homos
bit the dust. Childhood was about work, not play.

The proof is in the contemporary human pudding. In most cultures, children are net contributors to their households by age seven. They tend livestock, clean the kitchen and fetch firewood; they cook, do laundry, and sell stuff in markets. But mostly, they are babysitters for their younger sibs and sometimes, their cousins. In fact, in a survey of 186 societies worldwide, UCLA anthropologist Thomas Weisner found that, in most places, mothers are
not
the principal caretakers or companions of younger children. Older children are. Kids, those who study them tell us, are wired to help out, to spend their day in multi-age groups of other kids, caring for each other, absorbing and passing along the skills they have learned from observing and working alongside adults.

This order of things seems to work well for everybody, especially in contexts of low-skill work where children’s contributions are meaningful. In traditional Mayan villages in Mexico, for example, kids essentially run households and market stalls. These children, anthropologist Karen Kramer found, have high levels of self confidence: they know exactly what they’re supposed to do, master it, and feel important. And their parents do not report stress, depression, or fatigue as so many parents in the industrialized West do. In West African countries where children begin helping out as early as age three, people often say, “A man with children can never be poor.” Children are assets, loved and valued as such. Kids, in these contexts, bring real joy because they really contribute. They make their parents rich.

But in the industrialized West, we have turned childhood on its head. Our children are expected to do next to nothing until late in the game. They are taken care of and tended to. Rather than hanging out in language- and skill-rich multi-age groups with lots of older and younger sibs and cousins, where they learn to talk and contribute to the home economy, they go to school, sometimes as early as age two. There, they are sequestered from the rest of society with kids their own age (the most efficient way to create groups of kids when birthrates are low) and unrelated adult strangers called teachers, who may or may not have their best interests at heart. Deprived of a group of older relatives who can teach them practical skills, and simply impart language by speaking all around them all day long, they have to learn it in a labor-intensive dyad (“Da da da da” we say, and “cat cat cat,” over and over). This is just one example of how, in our world, kids are
work
, and our lives are arranged around their needs, rather than the reverse. You can feel it every time you make your child’s bed or tidy up the kitchen after making her a special, kid-friendly meal. Or pay someone else to.

Meredith Small has famously observed that children of the Anthropocene, our current geological era, are “priceless but useless.” We value them in our own way, practicing what we might think of as “descendent worship,” the same ways other cultures practice ancestor worship. But we also complain that kids are terribly costly and tiring, which they are—because they do very little to earn their keep. This reversal of the evolutionary order of things creates unique ecological, economic, and social circumstances for
mothers
. If the idea that childhood is a carefree idyll is a modern Western invention that comes from affluence, so too is the notion that mothers should be their children’s principle caregivers and companions, mainly, if not solely, responsible for not just their survival through infancy but also their well-being over the course of their entire childhood, even their success over a lifetime. In changing childhood, we have changed motherhood as well, until it is virtually unrecognizable compared to what it used to be, and what it is elsewhere.