“There is a high degree of physical contact and an immediate response to crying,” she says, resulting in shorter crying bouts compared to Western babies.Īnd Paleolithic mothers probably shared the parenting load. Hadza mothers, Crittenden has observed, often carry their babies in cloth slings for most of the day from birth through weaning (usually 2-3 years). Because the Hadza are isolated and mostly unaffected by modern industrial life, Crittenden says, they are a good model for what Paleolithic parents may have been like.įor example, caretakers probably carried babies much more than modern parents do in the developed world. A growing repertoire of books, blogs, and workshops advise parents to feed their kids a Paleo diet, set their sleep cycles to the sun, nurse babies on demand, sleep next to them, and carry them around throughout the day.īut did Paleolithic peoples actually do these things? And are there benefits? “There is really good science to back up claims made by people in the Paleo parenting movement,” says Alyssa Crittenden, an anthropologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who studies the Hadza, a group of contemporary hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. We can raise healthier and happier children, they argue, if we rear them more like early humans did 12,000 years ago. She and Wolf belong to a subgroup of moms and dads who practice what they call “Paleo parenting.” Just as Paleo dieters assume a mismatch between human biology and the food culture of the postindustrial West, Paleo parents believe that modern parenting habits don’t support healthy child development. They discuss which items are okay to eat: yes to meats and veggies, no to grains and processed foods-a diet, Starkman says, that is more in line with what our Paleolithic ancestors ate.īut did Paleolithic peoples actually do these things? Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, New York, Elyssa Starkman and her 5-year-old daughter read the public-school lunch menu together every morning. and awake before dawn, as Wolf imagines our ancestors were millennia ago, before artificial light interrupted our “normal circadian rhythms.” Armstrong Roberts / ClassicStockĮvery evening as the sun sets, Robb Wolf begins his nightly ritual: While his two daughters play, he slowly dims the lights, just a few lumens every 20 to 30 minutes, until the house, in Reno, Nevada, is dark. Just as Paleo dieters assume a mismatch between human biology and the food culture of the postindustrial West, Paleo parents believe that modern parenting habits don’t support healthy child development.