Into the parenting jungle
Wild animals have a great deal to teach us about raising our children well
Bottlenose dolphin mothers whistle continuously when they deliver their babies. Why? As the newborn emerges to swim amid a sea of dolphins, each with its own whistle, it will be better able to locate its mom. This is just one of the fascinating observations animal behaviourist Jennifer L. Verdolin discovered in her work learning about the parenting habits of wild animals and how they compare to human conduct.
Verdolin, a biologist and adjunct professor at Duke University, shares her knowledge in her coming book, Raised by Animals: The Surprising New Science of Animal Family Dynamics (The Experiment, 2017).
Q: How did you choose which animals to focus on?
A: I looked at what research has been done and wanted to find animals that might seem unexpected to people. For example, the breastfeeding, legless reptiles, caecilians, which are a snakelike amphibian, but smaller. I chose them because they are not considered similar.
We all have to feed our offspring and we can do it in different ways ... In caecilians, the mom lays eggs and the babies hatch but in the meantime she is thickening her skin with very similar proteins found in human breast milk. So when her babies hatch they have tiny teeth and they eat the outer layer of her skin.
In the wild, you say, animal parents typically ignore tantrums.
Prairie dogs start throwing tantrums when they don’t want to be weaned. Just like our kids they throw themselves to the ground, they yell, they scream and cry. For a prairie dog (mother) who was not keen on continuing to nurse, the mom was having none of it. She started walking away with the youngster attached to her, bouncing upside down on the ground.
What surprised you the most in your research?
... The patience animals have and how they are so careful to never be physically aggressive with their offspring unless there is something wrong with the parent or to protect the child.
Would you explain this more?
The Barbary macaques — they can have a tantrum, and it’s usually around weaning, and the parents pretty much deal with it by basically ignoring them. They don’t get into a fuss about it.
But they are not physically aggressive.
It doesn’t make sense to physically harm your child. It’s relatively rare for an animal to physically reprimand their offspring. It’s pretty common in humans. For animal parents, there are many steps before they ever get to a physical correction ...
What does this say about human parents?
We underestimate the degree of patience that is required to raise a child without physical or verbal aggression.
What do animals seem to know about parenting that humans don’t quite get?
They know that everything about their life is to devote everything they do to raising kids that will go on to be successful adults. We underestimate how much it really takes of our attention and focus.
Such as?
If it is an elephant, they are in close physical contact 24/7 between the infant and its mom up until a certain point. And we have created situations where we expect infants to cope with being alone, and we are not built for that. We are wired as infants to have adults close to us all the time.