Parenting tips obtained from hunter-gatherers in Africa may be the key to bringing up more contented children,researchers have suggested.The idea is based on studies of communities such as the Kung of Botswana,where each child is cared for by many adults.Kung children as young as four will help to look after younger ones and"baby-wearing,"in which infants are carried in slings,is considered the norm.
According to Dr.Nikhil Chaudhary,an evolutionary anthropologist at Cambridge University,these practices,known asalloparenting,could lead to less anxiety for children and parents.Dr.Annie Swanepoel,a child psychiatrist,believes that there are ways to incorporate them into Western life.In Gennany,one scheme has paired an old people's home with a nursery.The residents help to look after the children,an arrangement akin to alloparenting.Another measure could be encouraging friendships between children in different school years to mirror the supervised mixed-age playgroups in hunter-gatherer communities.
In a paper published in the Joumal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry,researchers said that the Western nuclear family was a recent invention that broke with evolutionary history.This abrupt shift to an"intensive mothering narrative,"which suggests that mothers should manage childcare alone,was likely to have been harmful."Such narratives can lead to maternal exhaustion and have dangerous consequences,"they wrote.
By contrast,in hunter-gatherer socicties,adults other than the parents can provide almost half of a childs care.One previous study looked at the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo.It found that infants had an average of 14 all parents a day by the time they were 18 weeks old and were passed between caregivers eight times an hour.
Chaudhary said that parents now had less childcare support from family and social networks than during most of human evolutionary history,but introducing additional caregivers could reduce stress and matemal depression,which could have a"knock-on"benefit to a childs wellbeing.An infant born to a hunter-gatherer society could have more than ten caregivers-this contrasts starkly with nursery settings in the UK where regulation allows for a ratio of one carer to four children aged two to three
While hunter-gatherer children learn and learn from observation and imitation in mixed-age playgroups,researchers said that Western"instructive teaching,"where pupils are asked to sit still,may contribute to conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.Chaudhary said that Britain should explore the possibility that older siblings helping their parents"might also enhance their own social development."
26.According to the first two paragraph,alloparenting refers to the practice of
27.The scheme in Gemany is mentioned to illustrate
28.According to Paragraph 4,the"intensive mothering narrative",
29.According to paragraph 6,what can we learn about nursery in the UK?
30.Which of the following would be the best title?
