Sedentarisation and maternal childcare networks: role of risk, gender and demography

Abstract

Worldwide mothers receive help with childcare from a diverse range of individuals (allomothers). Nonetheless, little exploration has occurred into why we see such diversity, such as different strategies used to buffer risk. Wide maternal childcare networks may be a consequence of situations of little material wealth and food storage - as is common in mobile hunter-gatherers - where households rely on the pooling of risk in informal insurance networks. In contrast, when households settle and accumulate wealth and food, they are able to retain the risk by absorbing losses within the household. Thus, the size and composition of mothers’ childcare networks may depend on whether households pool or retain risk, as captured by mobile and settled households in the Agta, a diverse Philippine foraging population. From in-depth observational data on 78 children, we find that childcare from grandmothers and sisters was higher in settled camps, while childcare from male kin was lower. Our findings offer little support for risk buffering, and additional analyses demonstrated that girls’ workloads were increased in settled camps, unlike boys, while grandmothers had fewer dependent children, increasing their availability as allomothers. These results point to gender-specific changes associated with shifting demographics as camps become larger and more settled.

Shodagor women cooperate across domains of work and childcare to solve an adaptive problem

“…These results are consistent with the data that Starkweather et al [33] reported, in which mother and father account for 84.45% of all childcare, with their parents, older children and others accounting for a larger proportion of care than in fishing families. These results-in which women rely on childcare help from large, diverse networks of alloparents, who include non-kin-are also consistent with patterns of alloparenting across three groups in Sub-Saharan Africa [71] and with Agta women's alloparenting networks in the Philippines [72]. Finally, while our model result does not show a conclusive result about whether traders overlap work and childcare ties with kinship or not, it does generally suggest that traders are not favouring related trading partners as potential alloparents.…”

“…Despite the possibility that many Shodagor alloparents are engaged in less-intensive childcare tasks (e.g. [72]), their care is important. Shodagor women who have more alloparents available and also have a husband who provides childcare during the dry season are more likely to have reported currently working as traders [34], and children who receive care from both fathers and alloparents during the season when mothers trade experience better growth outcomes than children whose fathers provide care alone [33].…”

“…Shodagor women who have more alloparents available and also have a husband who provides childcare during the dry season are more likely to have reported currently working as traders [34], and children who receive care from both fathers and alloparents during the season when mothers trade experience better growth outcomes than children whose fathers provide care alone [33]. Page et al [72] similarly show that Agta women who live in settled camps have more alloparents who provide low investment types of care than do women living in mobile camps. So, when alloparents are important, but also provide slightly less-intensive types of care, mothers may be motivated to create networks with more potential alloparents in them who are drawn from different pools of mothers' relationships, including unrelated or distantly related individuals.…”

New perspectives on the evolution of women's cooperation

“…In this issue, authors tested several novel predictions about how women's cooperation is influenced by socioecological context. For example, Page and colleagues ( [114], in this issue) hypothesized that women's childcare networks respond to major livelihood transitions. They predicted that in the shift from mobile to sedentary residence, childcare networks should decrease in size since wealth accumulates with sedentarism, reducing the need to rely on large networks of cooperators.…”

Wealth, health and inequality in Agta foragers

“…In the Agta it appears that settlement does not have a simple, negative, relationship with cooperation. In terms of cooperation in childcare, a recent analysis highlighted that mothers' had the same or larger childcare networks (depending on the metric used to measure childcare) in settled camps compared to mobile camps, indicating little change in the amount of childcare support received (Page et al, 2021). Furthermore, more stable, settled camps were also associated with greater levels of reciprocal sharing in an experimental game, likely aided by the increase likelihood of future interactions between dyads (Smith et al, 2016).…”