What Mother Nature Teaches Us About Motherhood

With squalling infants in tow, she works back-breaking shifts--as long as 17 hours a day--to feed her growing family. Then she drags herself home, where she is greeted by her equally demanding older children, who expect her to referee their squabbles as they roughhouse and play. When the kids finally fall asleep, she has only a few hours to eat, clean up and grab some shut-eye before the sun rises and she must do it all again.

Typical working mom? No, a wild baboon living on the plains of Kenya. But in ways that are deeper and more resonant than most people realize, female baboons and other nonhuman primates are typical working moms. They struggle with the same challenges that human mothers face and work out surprisingly similar solutions. Tamarin mothers in the Amazon Basin rely on aunts and grandmothers to tend the young while the mothers forage for food. Moms and dads among Brazil's titi monkeys take turns minding the kids and bringing home the bacon, just as in any well-adjusted two-income human family.

And it is not just primates whose parenting strategies echo our own. More and more, scientists have come to realize that among creatures as diverse as mice and seals, birds and spiders, mothering is a surprisingly consistent, remarkably familiar business. If there is a Mother's Day message in all this, it's that the more we understand the animals' behavior, the better we can understand our own.

For scientists studying the business of parenting, parting the curtain on the animal world helps explain not only how mothering strategies work but also how they sometimes break down. Confused teens aren't the only mothers who abandon their babies; other mammals do it too. Parents may recoil when a Susan Smith drowns her sons in a South Carolina pond, but scientists routinely observe infanticidal animals--apparently driven by similarly dark demons--committing similarly black acts.

Certainly, not everyone is pleased with this new research. Looking to animals to study something as complex as motherhood, critics say, is little more than anthropology by analogy, relying on the worst kind of scientific reductionism to explain the highest kind of human impulses. But anthropologists view matters differently, seeing in animal and human mothers a striking commonness of purpose--and a striking commonness of grace. "All mothers face similar dilemmas," says anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy of the University of California at Davis, "no matter what their ambitions or circumstances."

There are few challenges the animal families of Africa or the Amazon face that the Banzer family of Houston, wouldn't understand. Stephanie Banzer, 31, is a marketing manager for Compaq Computers as well as the mother of 19-month-old Matthew. When Stephanie gave birth, she and her husband knew they would need her income to keep the household running. Full-time mothering was thus not an option--and full-time baby-sitters were too expensive. Instead, she turned to a team of child-care providers she knew could do the job: her mother and two aunts. The three older women look after Matthew when Banzer and her husband are at work, returning the toddler well cared for at the end of the day. "These are the women who raised me," Banzer says. "He is in very loving hands."

While the Banzers may think of the work Matthew's grandmother and great-aunts do as mere baby-sitting, anthropologists know it is part of a far more primal practice called alloparenting. In all manner of animals, including bees, elephants, lions, lemurs, bats and birds, creatures with no parental investment in offspring routinely expend enormous amounts of energy caring for their relatives' young. Alloparents are not unconditional caretakers; they won't devote scarce resources to other offspring at the expense of their own. But when conditions allow an alloparenting deal to be made, it's a good bargain all around, with adults protecting their genetic legacy and the infant getting a team of surrogate moms in return. "Babies can learn to be quite satisfied with any of a select group of caretakers," says Hrdy, whose book Mother Nature is the most notable and artful of a flock of new studies re-examining motherhood.

Of course, even with a parade of alloparents, offspring will have little chance of reaching maturity if there isn't sufficient food to keep them nourished. In the game of survival, there is nothing more critical than keeping babies' bellies full, and mothers go to great lengths to get the job done. After one type of Australian spider lays her eggs, she lives barely long enough to see her young mature. Then she positions herself among them and slowly liquefies, transforming herself into an edible goo that gives her babies a nutritional kick start in life. The very idea of mammalian metabolism is a subtler case of maternal self-sacrifice. An organism taking in precious calories and then giving them away in the form of milk directly defies the me-first rule of all animal survival, yet mammal mothers do it willingly.