How industrialization changed childhood | Dorsa Amir | TEDxCambridge

You may think your childhood was normal: you had friends your age, attended school to learn from teachers, and maybe even slept in your own bedroom. Evolutionary anthropologist Dorsa Amir shows that these everyday occurrences in Western cultures are actually strange new experiences in human history that may have significant consequences for child development. Learn more at http://www.tedxcambridge.com

Dorsa Amir is an evolutionary anthropologist interested in how differing cultural and ecological environments shape the developing mind. She is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Psychology at Boston College and received her PhD in Anthropology from Yale University. Her research adopts a cross-cultural and developmental perspective to explore the role of the local environment in adaptively shaping behavior and preferences. She is currently investigating cross-cultural variation in the development of risk and time preferences, early life socioeconomic effects on behavior, and the role of scarcity in cognitive development.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

When I was in graduate school,

one thing I often heard
was that the goal of anthropology

is to make the strange familiar
and the familiar strange.

I thought I knew what that meant,
but I didn't really understand it

until the first time
I conducted fieldwork.

In my first year of graduate school,

I traveled to South America
to work with the Shuar,

an indigenous population
in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

I was studying how children develop
across different cultures.

I had a number of expectations
for what that trip would be like.

I knew I was going to get
a lot of bug bites - I did.

I knew I'd ride a canoe down
the winding rivers of the jungle - I did.

And I knew I'd learn something
I didn't know before - and I did.

I learned what childhood was like
in a small scale society.

I saw independent young kids
climbing trees to gather papayas

when they were hungry.

I saw them starting fires,

preparing food
for themselves and their siblings

and even using machetes
quite confidently, I might add.

(Laughter)

The thing I didn't expect

was the culture shock
of coming back to the United States.

The strangeness of the Shuar
was becoming more familiar to me,

but suddenly, the familiarity of home
started to feel strange.

Being a child in a foraging society

is very different than being a child
in a Western society.

In societies like the Shuar,

children are much more independent
or as we like to call it "free-range."

(Laughter)

If you grew up in the era
before cellphones,

that might be what your own
childhood was like too.

But for the newest generation of kids,
this independance is quickly fading away.

And that's because childhood has changed
very recently and very rapidly.

For virtually all of our time
on this planet,

for hundreds of thousands of years,

our species lived in small bands
of hunter-gatherers,

more similar to how the Shuar live now
than how the average American lives.

Then just a few thousand years ago,

most of our environment
started to change a lot.

In fact, they changed
so quickly and so drastically

that many anthropologists believe

we are now in a state
of evolutionary mismatch.

This means that the environment
has changed too quickly

for some of our genes to keep up.

Cultural evolution is much faster
than genetic evolution.

And what this means
is that our minds and bodies

might be optimized for a world
that most of us no longer live in.

So what did this
past environment look like?

Well, it's impossible to perfectly
answer this question:

bones fossilize, behavior doesn't.

But we can learn a lot by looking
at current day societies like the Shuar.

And I want to clarify here:

the Shuar are not a prehistoric people
or windows into the past;

they are modern people.

But their way of life may give us a clue
about what childhood was like in the past.

And what we know

from looking across a large number
of these small-scale societies

is that there are a lot
of common patterns.

For instance, in virtually
all of these societies,

women give natural birth,

mothers breastfeed frequently
and for long periods of time,

parents sleep in the same
room as their kids

and children are constantly
in physical contact with other people.

These patterns have started to change
in our Western societies:

here C-sections are more prevalent,
as is formula feeding.

Kids often sleep
in their own little rooms,

and we don't want people

in physical contact with us
or our children.

We value personal space.

But let's go back to the idea of mismatch.

The practices in yellow have marked
the human experience

for 99% of our time on this planet.

The stuff in blue
is just 1% of human history.

These massive changes
have happened so quickly

that they may be out of whack
with the world we are born expecting.

And we think there are consequences
for these changes, both good and bad.

For instance, C-sections save lives,

but they also shape the bacteria
in our gut and our immune system

in ways that might
have negative consequences.

But as an anthropoligst
who studies behavior,

one shared feature of these societies
that I want to focus on

and one that I've been able to see
for myself is this:

in small scale societies,
alongside the adult community,

is a complex mini-community of children,
an alternate society.

This child society is made up
of kids of all ages and genders.

It has its own unique culture and leaders.

It has drama and a surprising amount
of political intrigue.

To understand why this child society
is so important for development,

it helps to keep in mind
a curious fact about humans,

and that is to become
a successful adult in any culture,

children have to learn an enormous
number of complicated skills.

These include both technical skills,
like building a fire,

and social skills,
like maintaining friendships.

And to perfect these skills,
which take decades,

children also develop foundational skills,

like creativity, determination
and problem solving.

Like, one day, when the Shuar adults
were playing a soccer game,

I saw a group of kids set up their own
soccer game right next to the adults.

When they called me over,

I got really excited because I thought
they wanted me to play with them,

but they were like,
actually, you just keep score,

so all of us can play.

(Laughter)

Problem solved.

Shuar kids, like kids everywhere,
spend a lot of time observing adults

and incorporating
their behaviors into their play.

In fact, this is one of the reasons
the play itself has evolved

as a way to practice these skills
in ways that are low-cost.

No one has to encourage kids to do this.

They do it on their own

because through unstructured play,
children learn how to become adults.

Another important benefit
to this mixed-age society

is that kids teach to
and learn from one another.

Younger kids benefit
by learning from older kids

who are only slightly better than them.

And through teaching,
older kids strengthen their own skills,

as you may have experienced yourself -
teaching helps you learn.

It's hard to find these patterns
in our Western societies.

Kids here spend the majority
of their development

in a room with other kids
their own age by design.

Adults are totally in charge

of the content and structure
of their time.

They determine when kids eat.
They determine when kids play.

They even determine
when kids can go to the bathroom.

And the unstrucutred play time of recess

is now quickly becoming
a structured activity.

A strange byproduct
of all this micro-managing

is that we're teaching kids things
that don't even need to be taught.

Kids don't need to be taught how to play.

They don't even need
to be taught how to talk, really.

You don't have to point
to an apple and say, "This is an apple."

Kids can also learn through exposure,

like hearing you ask your husband
for an apple and him handing you one.

"Apples." - done.

And the idea that it is a parent's duty

to constantly craft and monitor
their children's experiences

causes a lot of unnecessary anxiety
and may, in fact, be detrimental.

When we take away mixed-aged play groups,
when we take away unstructured play,

we are in fact taking away
the training wheels to adulthood

that children have had for millennia.

We are contributing to an increasingly
mismatch environment.

What's more,

instead of letting kids develop
foundational skills like problem solving,

we're flipping to the back of the book
to show them the answers.

But that leaves them unprepared for all
the new problems they're going to face.

This might be one of the reasons

why the transition to college
is so difficult for kids here,

or why choosing a career path
can feel so daunting.

There's been very little space to explore.

The lesson is not that we should
go back to living like foragers

or think whatever is natural
is what we should do.

That's the naturalistic fallacy.

But we would benefit
from taking a broader perspective

and understanding
how our evolutionary history

has shaped the way our minds develop.

We all want the best for our kids.

We want them to be independent,
confident, problem solvers.

We want them to be happy.

But paradoxically,

our cultural practices in the West
might be undermining children's abilities

to develop these skills.

It's hard to study the long-term
consequences of these changes,

especially because
they're happening so quickly.

But there are some tried-and-true
methods to raising kids

that we've been using for millennia.

In fact, we've been using them for so long

that children minds might actually
be expecting them.

Some of these methods
you can start using now.

Set up more mixed-age
play dates for your kids.

Give them the room
they need to make mistakes.

Give them more unstructured playtime.

In fact, this is not just an idea

that's relevant for those
who are raising kids

because even as adults,
we are still developing.

These lessons are applicable to you too.

Allow yourself to make mistakes.

Spend time with older family
and younger friends.

Give yourself some unstructured playtime.

And perhaps recognize
that the familiar culture all around you

is, in fact, very strange.

Thank you.

(Applause)