Elizabeth Preston

I'm thinking of gorillas, for example.

When gorillas are babies, their mothers are completely responsible for childcare.

But when it's older, the other gorillas in the group...

interact with it more, including the silverback male gorilla, who's the older dominant gorilla in the group.

These silverbacks are really tolerant of the younger gorillas and they will play with them, hang out with them.

And they'll even let the juvenile gorillas share their nest at night.

They'll let the juveniles kind of cuddle up with them.

So, you know, wanting to be close to an adult is not only a human kid issue.

So lots of animals like to play.

And the good news about humans, and this speaks to something that was actually a major theme in The Creature's Guide to Caring, which is backing up a little bit.

If you look at our human ancestors, the earliest humans...

Anthropologists and biologists believe today that we evolved to raise our kids cooperatively.

So our ancestors wouldn't have had just the mom and the dad alone in the cave or whatever, taking care of the kids all by themselves, slogging through it.

They would have been part of kind of a team of caretakers.

And that team might have included older siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, maybe even neighbors and friends.

But so one thing I learned is that in a lot of other species that raise their children cooperatively, like human ancestors did, the older siblings are an important caretaker.

So often older siblings who are still at home and don't necessarily need a parent's care hang out for a little while and they help care for their younger siblings.

I'm thinking of animals like a meerkat or some birds do this.

And so with humans, too, there's this idea that older kids are kind of part of the child care team.

And you can see this if you look at some small scale traditional societies around the world.