When did the way we raise children become so different from the way we evolved to survive?

I’ve been thinking about lionesses…more specifically, the way they raise their young.

In a pride, females often live alongside their mothers, sisters, daughters, and other related females. They protect their young collectively, and sometimes even nurse cubs that aren’t biologically their own. There’s something fascinating about that arrangement. Not because I think human beings should be modeling their entire social structure after lions. That would present a few obvious complications.

But because it made me wonder about us…about how we used to live. How we evolved. How we survived long before the concept of the modern nuclear family existed. And how much of what we now consider normal is actually normal at all.

Human beings didn’t evolve in isolated households with two parents, a mortgage, and a carefully coordinated childcare schedule. For much of our evolutionary history, we lived in social groups where survival depended on cooperation. Food was shared. Resources were shared. Knowledge was passed between generations. Children grew up surrounded by adults and older children who contributed to their care.

Anthropologists have a term for this: alloparenting. Essentially, caring for offspring that aren’t biologically your own.

And humans are particularly interesting in this regard because our children are extraordinarily dependent for an extraordinarily long time.

Think about it. A newborn human cannot walk, feed itself, escape danger, or survive independently. Even years later, human children require considerable attention, protection, and resources. From an evolutionary perspective, that’s an enormous investment for one individual.

So how did we manage it? In many societies, through cooperation.

Mothers, grandmothers, siblings, fathers, relatives, and other members of the community contributed to raising the next generation. Not necessarily because everyone subscribed to some beautiful philosophy of communal parenting…but because survival often required it. THAT makes me wonder whether we’ve underestimated just how deeply cooperation is woven into the human experience.

Here’s where my brain took another turn. Have you ever heard that women who live together eventually synchronize their menstrual cycles? I have. And for years, I found the idea fascinating. Imagine the evolutionary implications.

Women living closely together, their reproductive rhythms gradually aligning. Could that have allowed pregnancies, births, or nursing periods to overlap? Could it have created opportunities for women to help nourish one another’s children? It’s an intriguing thought.

Unfortunately for my beautifully constructed evolutionary theory, science has a habit of being inconvenient. The menstrual synchrony hypothesis became popular after research published in 1971, but subsequent studies have failed to consistently demonstrate that women living together actually synchronize their cycles. And there’s no established evidence that menstrual synchrony evolved to coordinate childbirth or shared nursing.

So perhaps biology didn’t arrange our reproductive calendars quite as neatly as I imagined…but the question that led me there still matters.

Why are human beings so capable of cooperative caregiving, yet sometimes so uncomfortable with certain expressions of it? We don’t need synchronized menstrual cycles to recognize that multiple women can be pregnant, give birth, or breastfeed during overlapping periods, and historically, some women did nurse children who weren’t their own.

Which brings me to something else I’ve been thinking about.

Wet nursing…an actual practice with a long and complicated history. For thousands of years, women have breastfed children who weren’t biologically theirs. Sometimes because a mother died during childbirth. Sometimes because she couldn’t produce sufficient milk. Sometimes because illness, work, social expectations, or economic circumstances made nursing difficult or undesirable.

In some societies, wet nursing was an established occupation. In others, shared infant feeding occurred through family and community relationships. It wasn’t universally accepted, and it certainly wasn’t always an arrangement built on equality or compassion. There were class divisions, exploitation, medical concerns, and complicated expectations surrounding women’s bodies.

But the practice existed. And it existed for a very long time.

So what changed?

There wasn’t one defining moment when humanity collectively decided another woman breastfeeding a child was suddenly unacceptable…Instead, a series of changes gradually reshaped infant feeding.

Industrialization altered where people lived and worked. Urbanization changed family networks. Medical authority increasingly influenced decisions about infant care. Bottles, commercially produced infant formula, and eventually organized human milk banking offered alternatives to direct nursing.

In the United States, wet nursing declined substantially during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What had once been a practical solution in certain circumstances became less common as technology, medicine, economics, and cultural expectations changed. And here’s where I find the sociology particularly interesting.

When a practice becomes less common, does it eventually become strange simply because we no longer see it? And when something becomes strange, how long before we start treating it as inappropriate?

Consider modern donor milk.

We recognize that breast milk from another woman can be valuable, particularly for medically vulnerable infants. We have systems for collecting it, screening donors, processing it, and distributing it. There are legitimate reasons for those safeguards. Infectious diseases, medications, and other exposures can affect the safety of shared human milk.

But there’s an interesting social distinction here. Milk from another woman’s body can become acceptable when it’s expressed, screened, packaged, and delivered through an established system. Yet the image of another woman directly breastfeeding a baby may provoke an entirely different emotional response.

Why? Is it the physical intimacy? The association between breastfeeding and maternal bonding? The concern that another woman might occupy a role we’ve come to consider exclusively maternal?..Or is it simply that one arrangement feels familiar and medically regulated while the other challenges our expectations?

I suspect the answer is complicated. And I don’t think discomfort automatically means someone is wrong. But I do think discomfort is worth examining. Especially when it influences what we consider acceptable.

We say it takes a village. And in many ways, we still believe that. We welcome grandparents who help raise grandchildren. We appreciate relatives who step in when parents are overwhelmed. We celebrate teachers, caregivers, and trusted adults who positively influence children’s lives.

But the closer another person gets to what we consider the intimate responsibilities of motherhood, the more complicated our feelings can become. There’s a difference between watching someone’s child for an afternoon and participating in the deeply personal acts of nurturing that child. I understand that…nevertheless I’m curious about where those boundaries originate.

How much comes from genuine concerns about safety, consent, and attachment? How much comes from cultural expectations? And how much comes from the idea that motherhood is not merely a relationship, but an identity that must be protected from intrusion?

I don’t think those questions have simple answers either. Nor do I believe that communal caregiving should mean parents surrendering their authority or their right to decide who cares for their children. But I wonder whether we’ve become so accustomed to defining motherhood through individual responsibility that we’ve lost sight of some of its historically collective dimensions.

What fascinates me about lionesses isn’t that they have discovered some perfect system of motherhood. Nature isn’t particularly interested in our definitions of fairness, morality, or emotional fulfillment. Lion prides have their own conflicts, hierarchies, dangers, and reproductive strategies. But their behavior reminds me that the boundaries surrounding caregiving aren’t universal.

Different species organize the survival of their young in different ways. And even within our own species, cultures have developed remarkably different approaches to family, kinship, and raising children. Perhaps that’s what interests me most.

Not whether communal motherhood is inherently better. Not whether another woman should breastfeed someone else’s child. Not whether we should abandon the structures we’ve built…but why we sometimes confuse the structures we’re familiar with for the only structures that make sense.

Because human beings have always been shaped by both biology and culture. We inherit bodies shaped by evolution and minds shaped by the societies around us. Somewhere between those two forces, we develop ideas about what’s natural, what’s appropriate, and what’s unthinkable.

I keep coming back to one question.

If we evolved with the capacity to raise children together, how much of our discomfort with sharing that responsibility comes from nature, and how much comes from the rules we’ve created around it?

I don’t know..but I think it’s worth asking, because perhaps the most interesting thing about human nature isn’t simply how we behave.

It’s how confidently we assume our particular way of behaving is the natural one.