Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species

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The blurb on the cover of the paperback edition of Sara Blaffer Hardy's 700+ page (including extensive bibliography and footnotes) book accurately calls this "a truly monumental work, as elegant as it is insightful." If you are looking for a fascinating, intelligent, provocative, and well-researched book, you need look no farther. Hardy writes about motherhood, childrearing, instincts, family and cultural influences on development, biology, anthropology—and life!

Her anecdotes are fascinating, her reasoning remarkably clear and rational and her subject matter about as interesting as any imaginable. I have been waiting for years to find as good a book as this on the complicated subject of the biopsychosocial aspects of human development. Don't get me wrong. I don't expect everyone to pick up Mother Nature and say, "Wow, what fun! I can't wait to read this!"

It is a scholarly work that will only please someone who really wants to study the subject. But if you ARE interested, then this is the ultimate book (at least for our current state of research and understanding). Instead of trying to summarize or critique the tome, I'll just throw out a few provocative quotes from various sections.

• Page 116, about maternal love: "... primate females in the right frame of mind find all babies fascinating and attractive. For such females, the most important ingredient for eliciting love is not the molecules producing a particular scent, or genetic relatedness, but physical proximity over time. Whether a new mother will be willing and able to keep her baby close long enough for this old primate magic to work depends on her psychological state, as well as her physical and social circumstances."
  
  
• Page 144, about mammals in general and mice in particular: "The mother, through her behavior, determines which other individuals her developing infants learn to identify as "familiar conspecifics" and therefore come to identify and treat like 'kin.'"
  
  
• Page 155, about new monkey moms: "It seems a miracle that infants born to inexperienced first-time mothers ever survive. That they do is testimony to the initiative as well as hardiness of baby monkeys."
  
  
• Page 179, about infanticide: "Across human societies, murder rates among men are always higher than those among women. Not surprisingly, men tend to murder people they are not related to. But when women cause someone else's death (through sins of omission as well as commission) that person is most likely to be her own newborn baby."
  
  
• Page 190-191, about teen moms: "Like many an American girl who gives birth in her early teens, some sedentary and unusually well-provisioned monkeys also breed early ... To field primatologists, accustomed to the virtues of mother monkeys, the behavior of these "teenage" mothers comes as a shock... [they] are negligent to a degree not seen in the wild. Some failed even to pick their neonates up off the ground... Their infants died at twice the rate of infants born to full-sized mothers..."
  
  
• Page 236, about fathers: "Child homicide in civilized societies is nowhere tolerated, very much against the law, and uncommon. Nevertheless, in North America when the father of offspring under two years of age no longer lives in the home and an unrelated man or step father lives there instead, this rare event is seventy times more likely to occur."
  
  
• Page 370, about daycare: "Societies where infanticide is unthinkable, where infants are never sent to suckle at some hired woman's breasts, nor left in bundles along roadsides, nor swaddled and hung from trees, tend to be societies in which women have some degree of reproductive autonomy and access to some fairly reliable form of birth control. Or else, they are societies where mothers have at their disposal social customs or institutions for delegating some care to allomothers [other caregivers]."
  
  
• Page 529, about empathy: "As with all primates, infants who grow up without social contact, with no one to touch, hold, cuddle, with neither mother nor allomother to reassure them of their commitment to the infant's well-being—these infants fail to proceed along the developmental pathway that is the essential first step for development of this uniquely human sensibility [empathy]. Such people may grow up brimming with analytic abilities, even uncannily able to anticipate what other humans will do. But they lack the capacity to hook up the cognitive and emotional components of human potential."

Hardy's book has a great deal to tell us about what is "normal," what is "natural," and what is human. You will find that it will be especially useful in helping you understand the behaviors and attitudes of some of the highly stressed and poorly supported parents that you may deal with through your work with SFCASA.

—Libby Colman, Ph.D.