With the support of a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, Dr. Courtney Meehan (Washington State University) will undertake a five-year cross-cultural study of the effects of cooperative childcare on child development and health. Because of the intensity and length of human child dependency and the shortness of human birth intervals, human mothers often must provide for multiple dependent children simultaneously. Thus it is likely that throughout evolutionary history, non-maternal care has been necessary for successful reproduction. However, despite recent interest in cooperative childrearing and its implications for the evolution of human childhood and family organization, few studies yet capture the complexity of human childrearing systems. To fill this gap, Meehan will conduct longitudinal field research in two contrasting social groups to test the hypotheses that human childrearing systems are more flexible than described by previous researchers; that multiple non-maternal individuals are sensitive to and respond to child needs; and that the involvement of nonmaternal caretakers is necessary for successful child development.
The field research will be conducted in the Central African Republic among Aka forest foragers and Ngandu farmers. To document children's social networks and non-maternal investment, she and her team will collect quantitative behavioral observations of children and maternal resource exchanges. To explore the effects of non-maternal involvement, they will perform child and family wellness exams to track family health and child development over the five-year period. These quantitative data will be complemented with ethnographic investigations to document cultural variation in child development and child rearing.
This research is important because it will provide data to explore the evolutionary implications of cooperative childrearing for human childhood and families, and will contribute substantially to our understanding of cross-cultural patterns of childhood, and child growth and development, research areas that continue to be dominated by data on Western societies. This project is designed to assess the breadth, diversity, and dynamic nature of childrearing systems. In addition, this project has a significant educational component that will train a diverse body of graduate and undergraduate students. Educational activities include training in the classroom and lab, outreach to underrepresented and undergraduate students, experiential student training in the field, and active student-researcher collaboration. Funding this research also fosters international capacity building and collaboration with students and researchers at the University of Bangui in the Central African Republic.
