Dr Paul Turke is a pediatrician, evolutionary anthropologist, and an author. How did humans raise kids 1,000 years ago? Today’s parenting is all routines, data-driven insights and what the latest research says. But what can ancient wisdom teach us about parenting, and where might it call our modern methods into question? Expect to learn how child rearing might look different if parents were educated in evolutionary theory, what the evolutionary role of grandparents are, and why it matters for raising kids today, Where babies would have slept ancestrally, why toddlers wake up at night, throw food, or act out and why might those be smart behaviors, what parents should know about “normal” child development from an evolutionary view, what we can we learn from cultures that co-sleep, breastfeed longer, and parent together and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://gym.sh/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM10) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: How might child rearing differ with evolutionary education?
How might child rearing look different if parents were educated in evolutionary theory? Well, I think quite a few ways.
Probably the biggest one is in one of the big themes in my book is that we used to live embedded in kinship networks. Um, so we had lots of different, uh, helpers contributors, uh, helping us to raise our children that, you know, there are situations now where one parent, usually a mother gets stuck with three kids in a, in a home. And, um,
It's very different from how things used to work back in the day. And it puts a lot of stress on everybody, children, but parents, parents also. So that's a big thing. Kids, when they would go out to play and run around, they would... be in sort of mixed age groups.
So they would have, if you were a three-year-old, you'd have a seven-year-old there to learn from, and you might be helping a two-year-old. And so the sort of the independent child stuff would be different. So those are two of the big ways that we've lived in. We live now sort of in a mismatched environment.
What does that say about broken homes or un-intact homes increasing, single parents, step-parents? What are the implications of that when it comes to child development?
Yeah, I think it puts a lot of stress on children. It also... You know, the human brain, the child's brain, is very malleable, very undeveloped when baby first appears on the scene. And when we change the environment, the early environment— that children are reared under, we sort of miss, I think some of the cues that lead to, uh, uh, normal development.
Now humans, if anything, we're, you know, we're, we're flexible. We, we can adapt to a lot of different things. So it's not, uh, uh, the end of the world, but if we're, but if we're trying to optimize, you know, we're, we're sort of off the optimum if we're, um, uh, Under those sorts of stressful situations.
And I think that has implications for happiness and healthiness and, you know, just emotional well-being, that sort of thing. And even things like ADHD, potentially depression. the more spectrum-y things on the altruism spectrum, all of that can be affected, I think, by, uh, this mismatch, uh, environment, stressful, broken homes, the step-parents, like you say. Um, so, um, I, I,
I don't know if you want to go into it, but there was a group of evolutionary psychologists, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, who did early work on step-parenting, and they found that... step-parents tend to be, I mean, most step-parents are great.
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Chapter 2: What are the implications of modern family structures on child development?
But if it's just a broken home and just one mom or one dad, you know, that can increase the amount of abuse and things like that that go on. So, yeah. That was very influential early work in evolutionary psychology, and some people got upset about it where they're saying, oh, my God, because it's natural, does that mean it's okay for step-parents to abuse kids?
And, you know, of course, that doesn't make sense. That's the naturalistic fallacy. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's almost the opposite. It's the idea that, you know, hey, if you're going to be a stepparent, just be forewarned that there's some going to be emotional challenges for you. And it could be a little bit harder than, you know, and that sort of thing.
So we would hope that would remedy the situation, not excuse it.
yeah it's uh be extra vigilant if you're a step parent you know this is going to be tough raising kids is tough and one of the ways that the toughness of raising kids gets ameliorated is by them being your genetic progeny so you're like they're crying again for the seventh night in a row but it's my cry so but if it's just the person that you're in love with's
progenies cry there's a lot less motivation to be there and you might get more frustrated so on and so forth and yeah i think it's a 100x increase in child mortality when there's a one non-biological parent in the household so some of some of the outcomes i mean the base rate for that's quite let's not saying that it's making a massive difference but it's a sufficiently uh significant difference that's something everyone should be aware of you mentioned there about grandparents
Uh, what's the evolutionary role of grandparents or what, why does it matter for raising kids back then? And sort of what's the implication for today? Yeah, well, I mean, I think it's huge.
Uh, grandparents, uh, Well, first of all, we used to live about as long as the other apes, you know, up to about 6 million years ago. And the way we sort of extended our reproductive viability, most likely, especially for grandmothers, if menopause was ancient as we think it was, it was by caring for children.
So reproducing indirectly, taking care of the kids we've already reproduced and helping them. And one of the big ways we help them is by taking care of their children. And so there's been this long running history of reproducing. grandparents and babies and children and grandchildren interacting and helping one another. And I think it's good for both sets.
When I was younger doing field work, I was interested in what the grandparents were doing and how they were helping and, and that sort of thing. And, uh, as I got older and became a grandparent, I was, I still was interested in the other stuff, but I became more interested in why we do it.
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Chapter 3: What is the evolutionary role of grandparents in child rearing?
Uh, you know, we have a lot of problems that the, the world faces, the planet faces and so on. And it's, it's not going to be, um, your dog, I mean, I love dogs, don't get me wrong, but it's not going to be the dog who's going to figure out new ways to, you know, solve global warming problems or whatever. It's going to be our children.
So, and the problem with it is, is you make that decision in your 30s and 40s and then you're 50 and you might start to say, oops, and then it's kind of late, you know, but one of the good things is that Natural selection never had to be more specific than it needed to be to solve the problem.
So because we were embedded in these kinship networks and people like sex and when babies came, they tended to be pretty, you know, sensitive. willing to care for them and love them and want to nurture them, that led naturally to reproductive success. But very few of us just walked around back in the places scene saying, I want to have children. I want to have children because we...
those other two things led to having children. And so I don't think early on as young people, we think those things. So it's easy sort of to be led off track and say, yeah, I don't want to have kids. It's not a good thing to have kids for various reasons. And whatever, and then suddenly think, oh, it's too late. Maybe I should have gone in the other direction.
So I worry about some of the younger generation doing that. But what I was starting to get at, though, is because natural selection is not all that specific is You can probably make yourself happier and build a fulfilling life even after you've not had your own children and grandchildren just by helping. Because we feel good about helping. We feel good about being relevant.
So I would encourage people out there to help. even if they don't have children to, you know, to maybe, uh, do something that's helpful for them. And I think they'll feel happier, happier for it. And maybe that's the pediatrician coming out in need.
Okay. So, uh, one big, uh, mismatch, um, uh, pan-generational uh alloparenting um and then the sort of inclusion of of grandparents is this in your opinion does this explain the grandmother hypothesis why it is that uh humans exist after they're able to continue reproducing specifically uh mothers or grandmothers yeah i i do i i think um
I think there's reason to believe that menopause is pretty ancient, that it started to happen right after the split from the other hominoid apes. So basically, selection stayed stronger for longer because we were doing things helpful, increasing our reproductive viability later in life. But selection, for some reason, didn't push... ovulatory function to later and later ages.
And I think the reason is, is because it was more adaptive to stop at a certain age because children were becoming, you know, more helpless, more altricial is the word. And, uh, their, their, their period of dependency lasted a lot longer.
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Chapter 4: How does co-sleeping affect child development?
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How is modern child rearing and the environment that kids are brought up in potentially predisposing the anxiety, the ADHD, the teenage angst in a way that would have not occurred ancestrally? What are some of the contributing elements to that?
Yeah, well, I think that it is having very supportive kin who love you all around that can sort of take you aside and say, all right, that's not that awful of a situation and explain things to you. But I'm always struck by... And it's not always a bad thing, but I'm struck by the wide range of options that our teenagers face now.
When I was doing field work on EFOLIC, which is not a hunter-gatherer society, it was a horticultural society, but it was pretty primitive, pretty isolated in a technological sense. And those kids growing up knew what they were going to do.
You were going to be, you were going to fish, you were going to build canoes, you were going to, you know, weave mats to build roofs for the house and you were going to take care of kids. And, you know, that was about it. There weren't just this huge range of options. And again, I think it's great that we have this huge range of options. You know, you and I wouldn't be able to do what we do if,
we were living in that situation. But it also presents so much uncertainty to these kids. They sometimes just don't know where to go. And then they retreat into a virtual world and they don't know who to... You know, they don't have people around all day that they can talk to about it. They don't have older kids who have been through it necessarily to model after and so on.
So it's pretty disruptive. ADHD, I think, is a little different from anxiety. I think what I tell kids, and I may not be completely capturing the whole spectrum of it, but I tell kids that I was 5'6 back in the day, and I've since shrunk, and if the whole world were a basketball court, I wouldn't be very well adapted to it. And now in school, when we send kids to school,
we funnel them all through, you know, through the same funnel. And so we, we kids who are, you know, a little bit shy, quiet, they're not active, active learners. They pay, they're good at paying attention, that kind of thing. They get overvalued, but the kid who's a more active learner who would rather run around outside and learn things that way, they, they're not quite as able to.
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Chapter 5: Why do toddlers act out and how is it adaptive?
Talk to me about the transport response in infants. The what? Transport response. I don't know what that is. When babies, they seem like they fall asleep more easily when they're being walked whilst carried. Oh, yeah. That was Rob Henderson and me were talking about it earlier on. Yeah.
And if you want to put a baby to sleep, you put them in one of those, I guess, rocking, you know, it's like an automaton thing. And you're thinking, okay, so what are you trying to simulate there? You're trying to simulate being carried, right?
Carried, exactly. Yeah, yeah. I know. I just spent a week off with the grandchildren, one of them six months, and I just kept saying to myself, why won't you let me sit down?
They just don't. They want you up. What's the adaptive explanation for that? Why would that be the case? Is that safer? If baby's being carried and moved, it's less likely to be eaten?
I think probably it has something to do with that. I mean, certainly being carried and being in close proximity, I think babies feel anxious when naturally just feel anxious when they, when they don't have that proximity. I'm not quite as sure about, uh, you know, why, why they want us to be expending the maximum amount of calories carrying them about and rocking and bouncing. But, uh,
Um, you know, what, what you just hypothesized there or speculated is that they, that's sending them signals that they're being held, that they're being cared for, you know, that, uh, that could, it could be something as straightforward as that.
There are a meal on wheels as opposed to a TV dinner. And, uh, it's, it's harder to catch the meal on wheels, especially if the wheels are mom or dad. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So what about some explanations for why toddlers might wake up at night or throw food or act out? Why might those be smart behaviors in some way?
Yeah, well, toddlers wake up at night because they want to check in with mom and dad, I think. And they don't have as much incentive to, they don't have to get up and do anything in the morning. And so they're free to satisfy their whims that way. As far as throwing food and tantrums if they don't get their way, Well, there are a couple of things.
Throwing food, especially vegetables and new foods. I think that... toddlers, once you're mobile, you have this natural aversion to just putting anything in your mouth. Unlike when you're, you know, four months old, you'll put anything in your mouth.
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Chapter 6: What is the impact of daycare on child development?
That's interesting. What about C-sections?
Yeah, I mean, I think C-sections obviously can be life-saving and are necessary in some circumstances. But I just think that in some birthing centers, they're just a little bit too cavalier about it. You know, mom's got something coming up or the doctor's got a vacation. You know, it's just... You know, you're at 40 weeks now. Let's not let it go too long.
Let's just do a C-section, that kind of thing. Or let's induce, same sort of thing. So mom and baby have evolved a really good communication system for when baby is supposed to come. And we're not always really good at estimating what the exact conception date is. We know that because, you know, some babies are conceived now through artificial insemination.
And we know then when they are conceived. And we know that we're a little bit off when we're estimating using ultrasounds and when mom thinks her last period was and so on. So I think they're overdone, basically, is the short answer there. They're life-saving, wonderful interventions, if done appropriately and much more sparingly than they are done now. Same with inductions. I agree.
just don't love to hear ah you're you're 41 weeks and uh everything looks good but uh maybe we should just induce you right now well well if everything looks good i i always want to wait a few more days you know so um have you got a have you got a perspective on uh epidurals is there any insight there
I'm not a real expert in that, but what I've been told by my moms and people that have them is it can interfere a little bit with pushing and getting the baby out. And so then that increase your risk of some doctor saying, oh, we better do a C-section here, that kind of thing.
Is there such a thing as a part epidural? Can you reduce down sensitivity by 50% or something like that? Do you know if they can tolerate it?
You know, that's a good question. I don't know the answer to that. You would think that would be a good idea. I mean, it's easy for me to say, you know, don't do epidurals. But, I mean, my daughter and daughter-in-law were able to do it. And, yeah, I guess they're pretty tough, but probably no tougher than the average. Do C-sections interrupt lactation?
I think so because, again, there's this fine-tuned timing mechanism between when baby should come and when nursing should start, but also mom's sore. I mean, it's a surgery, and mom doesn't feel quite as good, and it's just harder for mom to get things going and be quite as committed and diligent to it when you're recovering from a surgery. I mean, I could see...
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Chapter 7: How does breastfeeding influence a child's future health?
Well, the big one that I worked on has to do with food allergies, childhood food allergies. Back in the 90s, And it was officially codified by the American Pediatric Society in 2000 or 2001, I think it was, that you delay, delay, delay when it comes to the introduction of the eight or nine most allergenic foods.
And I mean, first of all, that evolution aside, that just never made sense from an immunological point of view. It just, I don't know how they came up with that idea because once the immune system is able to cause destruction, which starts in utero and is present in a big way, even shortly after birth, you have to have proper tolerance mechanisms.
It's not like you can wait until you're three years old to learn not to attack your own liver. So, why they thought waiting until you're three years old to introduce peanuts is really beyond me. But the evolutionary angle there, if they had been more attuned to how we lived during the Pleistocene and before that, we were immobile pretty much as a species. We didn't. We grew up in...
and died in the same ecosystem, basically, generation after generation. So what that meant was that while you were inside mom and she was eating, you were getting exposed to food antigens. When she was breastfeeding you, you were getting exposed to food antigens. When you first started eating foods yourself, you were getting exposed to food antigens.
And those food antigens were the very same ones that you were going to get exposed to for the rest of your life. And so they eventually learned Not through thinking about it theoretically in any way, but just by going, oh, my goodness, food allergies are soaring. And, oh, look, they're not allergic to peanuts in Israel because they feed children early on.
They call them bambas, which are peanut butter containing nuts. And so people started looking, well, maybe we made a mistake here. Maybe we should introduce things early. And so they eventually did some studies and found out that that was true.
But if you thought about the way people always ate, you would be introduced to all the foods you would ever eat, all the allergens, all the antigens that you would ever encounter early on. And your immune system would learn to tolerate them. And so it never made sense to say, let's not introduce things until you're older. So I think evolution-mindedness could have helped us to avoid that problem.
But I mean, I think there are others. I think... evolution, mind in this can help us to understand what's a healthy diet. It can contribute to that. I mean, I know from listening to you, you're interested in that. It turns out there's a Really cool study that was done with fruit flies by Michael Rose and his group. Grant Rutledge was a grad student or a fellow who worked with him.
And what they did was they changed up the diet that the fruit flies had evolved to eat. They had been eating for thousands of generations. They had been eating apple rot. And then they brought them from that area, which I think was on the East Coast, to Michael Rose's lab in UC Irvine. And they didn't have rotten apples, I guess, so they fed them bananas doused in high fructose corn syrup.
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