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Chapter 1: What challenges do parents face according to the host?
Hey, it's Flora, and you're listening to Science Friday. I don't need to tell you that parenting is hard. If you've ever been a child, had a child, or seen a child face down in a Target screaming, you know what I mean. But of course, humans aren't the only ones raising their young.
So how do animals deal with babies that don't follow directions or little ones that are constantly begging for snacks? And what can we learn from them? To find out, we called parent and science journalist Elizabeth Preston, who wrote the book The Creature's Guide to Caring, How Animal Parents Teach Us That Humans Were Born to Care. Hey, Elizabeth, welcome to Science Friday.
Hi, I'm so happy to be here. We're happy to have you. Are there animals that make parenting look easy?
Well, a lot of animals have to do it all the time with no breaks. So they make it look automatic, if not easy. So I'm thinking of like the, you know, opossum mom with the whole row of kids on her back, or the gorilla who has to carry the baby clinging to her chest all the time. For them, it looks like something they don't even have to think about.
But the truth is that when the mom does all the work like that, it's very intensive and it uses up a lot of her resources. So it's actually hard, even if it looks natural.
Yeah. I mean, I wanted to ask you about this because I think there's this kind of toxic metaphor in human mom culture that, like, we give everything to our kids. But I wondered, is that not a metaphor in some animal species?
Yeah.
Totally. There are some mothers that give their body to feed their children, not just in the sense of like making milk like we mammals do, but there are spider moms whose hatchlings will eat them alive, for example. Yeah. That's too real. It's too real. I know it's taking the metaphor too far. There's also a really strange amphibian called a Sicilian. It's kind of like a salamander with no legs.
And she grows this kind of thick, extra fatty skin when she has babies. And then the babies are born with these specialized sharp teeth and they peel pieces of her skin. Like, I want to say like a banana, not to be too disgusting. And they eat her skin. She survives, but it is horrifying.
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Chapter 2: How do animal parents make parenting look easy?
Hi, Flora.
My name is Blythe. I am calling from the podcast Science Versus, but also I am calling from upstate New York, the beautiful Catskills, in response to your parenting question. We cannot solve the bedtime pop-out. It is every night. We're down, we do the song, we do the book, we do the tea, we do the routine, and then the kid still pops out. Nice and cozy in there, pops out. Sometimes it's like,
Yeah, sure, I have to pee. Sometimes it's like, oh, I need some water. But the other night it was like, hey, I'm lonely. And sometimes it's like, oh, yeah, I forgot to show you the picture I drew at school. And then sometimes it's like, I forgot. I forgot why I'm out of bed. So if your expert has any advice on reducing the number of pop-outs, I would love to hear it.
Thank you. Bedtime. Classic. Do you have any advice for Blythe?
I think my only advice is maybe some reassurance that humans are not alone with the problem of trying to get our kids to go to sleep by themselves. 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.
Co-sleeping. Gorillas do it. You know, another common theme we had from our callers was like screen addiction, which is hard to find an analog for in the animal kingdom because, you know, most animals don't have iPads or even a postable thumb. But can you think of an analogy?
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.
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Chapter 3: What metaphors in human parenting culture are explored?
And so their entertainment is really a way of learning and practicing to be an adult.
Hmm. I mean, what about grandparents? How many animals do the grandparent thing?
That's a really interesting question. And one of the signature things about our species is menopause. So this idea that older females stick around when we're not fertile anymore. And it seems to be not that we turn off our fertility in the middle of life, but rather that we live decades beyond when our fertility naturally stops. So if you look at, for example, a chimpanzee,
she also peters out in her ability to have kids, maybe around age 50, but that's also around when she would die naturally. We have kind of tacked on these decades of useful life after the end of our fertile period. And scientists think that that's because evolutionarily, grandmothers were helping to keep their kids and their grandkids alive and pass on their genes.
And when you look across the animal kingdom, the only other place where you see menopause having evolved is not even in a close human relative at all. It's in certain whales. So, for example, in killer whales, they have these matriarchal groups where older female whales who have stopped being fertile lead their families.
They help them find food and they help their children and their grandchildren whales to stay alive.
They're there for date night. Yeah. Speaking of grandparents, we got a call from a grandparent. This is Lisa in Santa Cruz.
My under one-year-old granddaughter makes a wonderful little sound when she wants attention. She goes, but then for no apparent reason, like she's sitting quietly on her lap, she will come out with the loudest sound you've ever heard. And everyone can hear it for the entire house. And we don't know how to help her not make that sound. Any ideas?
Any ideas. Is this a thing in the animal kingdom?
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Chapter 4: How do cooperative care practices compare between humans and animals?
So there are a lot of types of poison frogs. They live in Central and South America. They're these colorful frogs in the rainforest. And they've evolved to be really attentive parents. The reason that they have to be attentive parents is that unlike the frogs you might be more familiar with in your own neighborhood, those frogs lay their eggs in a pond.
And when the eggs hatch, they become tadpoles, which are basically a fish. And they're already in a pond, so it's fine. But the poison frogs live in the rainforest. And so when their eggs hatch, now you have a fish in the forest. And this is bad. So they need to move those tadpoles as soon as they hatch to a pool of water. And usually it's the dad frog who does this.
He will crouch down among the tadpoles, get them to wriggle up onto his back, and then he hops around and he transports them to a small pool of water, maybe a little bit of rainwater, cupped in a leaf, and then that's where they live. But then among some of these poison frog species, the caretaking goes even further.
There's a species where the dad has to put each tadpole into its own little pool of water. The reason is that the tadpoles are cannibals. Speaking of snacking, they will eat each other if you put them with their siblings. So he has to move them all to different pools. And then he will go around every day. He'll remember where those pools are. He'll hop to each one.
And he'll get into the water and the tadpole does this little vibrating dance, which communicates hunger, or at least communicates that it wants a snack. And so the dad, if he observes this and goes, I think it's hungry. Okay. He starts singing. He calls to his mate and his mate hears this song and she hops over, but she doesn't take their word for it. She gets in.
She observes the vibrating dance and she decides and she might go, no, you had enough. Enough snacks already today. You can wait till tomorrow. Someone's got to hold the boundary. Exactly. But if she decides it really is time for a meal, she'll turn around and she'll lay an unfertilized egg into the pool and the tadpole will eat that. Amazing.
I mean, let's talk about dads because this is kind of annoying to me. I'm just going to admit male seahorses get so much love online because they gestate the babies, right? Are they truly the outliers of the animal kingdom?
No, not at all. And you're right. Male seahorses do get a lot of credit for what's ultimately not that much effort because they do get impregnated by the female and they do grow the babies inside them in their belly. But then after they birth the babies, their job is totally done. They will go off very shortly thereafter and start courting their mate again and they're ready to just start over.
So it's not taking a lot out of them, is what I'm hearing.
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Chapter 5: What strategies do animals use for managing bedtime issues?
What would you say to this caller?
Yeah, I don't know that I have advice because this is such a universal problem, right? We as adults know what the kid needs and the kid relies on us. The reason that we have parental care is because our kids need our help. They need our help not to walk into the street or to get out of the river and cross to where there is food. And that's, you know, that's our job.
And what's the strategy that animals use? Is it just...
move them? Yes. I mean, there's always the pick them up by the nape of the neck. I don't know if your collar has tried that. In the poison frogs I was talking about earlier, you know, the dad gets the babies to wriggle up onto his back for a ride. And there is definitely urgency there because if they don't do it in a timely manner, they'll desiccate and, you know, die.
So maybe the collar could suggest that to their child. You know, you don't want to dry out.
Yeah.
And then sometimes the babies don't want to get off the dad's back. And so he will use one of his legs to kind of flick the baby tadpole off into its pool.
Sometimes you just got to take matters into your own. Exactly. Webbed fins, whatever. What animals should we not emulate for parenting?
There are a lot of bird species that have a strategy called an insurance egg. One example is the blue-footed booby. which a lot of people are probably familiar with. They have those blue feet, looks kind of like a seagull. And the idea is that in a good season with a lot of resources, the parents might have the ability to raise two chicks.
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