Essays
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Childhood - Kramer, Karen L.
Childhood refers to the period of growth and development bracketed by weaning and puberty, roughly ages 3–10. During this important life history stage, the brain rapidly grows and achieves the majority of its adult size, the first permanent molars erupt, and the digestive tract matures. Socially, communication skills are rapidly acquired during childhood, gender identities are established, cooperative norms of behavior develop, and self‐reflection and emotional regulation mature. Cognitively, increasing independence exposes children to a high frequency of new experiences, perpetual learning, experimentation, and change. Childhood development has captured the attention of scholars from diverse disciplines. This review highlights foundational and new research in biological, social, cognitive, and economic aspects of child development. Attention is paid to how childhood is distinct compared to juvenility in other closely related species and the remarkable changes that have occurred during human evolution. This review focuses on childhood in traditional societies where children grow up under energetic, demographic, and social conditions that more closely reflect the selective pressures that shaped childhood. -
Cooperative Breeding and Human Evolution - Kramer, Karen L.
The demographic success of humans compared to other closely related species is one of the remarkable stories of our evolutionary history. This can be attributed both to high fertility and improved chances of survival. But it is also fundamentally shaped by features of human parenting, cooperation, and social organization. The concept and theory of cooperative breeding combines these features and is a useful framework to consider child‐rearing patterns characteristic of humans. Cooperative breeding theory was developed in biology to explain a social system found in relatively few animals in which nonparental members of a social group help to support offspring. In traditional human societies, numerous studies document that a variety of kin and nonkin of different ages and sex help mothers and contribute to infant childcare and provisioning juveniles. Cooperative breeding theory offers a well‐developed theoretic and empirical context in which to evaluate cross‐cultural diversity and to understand why humans cooperate in this way. This review situates humans compared to other species of cooperative breeders by outlining what we share in common and what are distinctly human aspects of parenting and childrearing. Attention is paid to both foundational research and new questions that have more recently surfaced through comparative research. Cooperative breeding is relevant to recent debates concerning the evolution of human life history, sociality, and psychology and has implications to demographic patterns, family formation, and social organization in the past as well as in today's world.