Hovering parents keep human toddlers from behaving as recklessly as chimps
A 4-year-old chimpanzee, a member of the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project in Uganda, falls freely into the forest canopy. Such thrill-seeking behaviors tend to peak during adolescence in humans, but during early childhood in chimpanzees.
Laura MacLatchy/University of Michigan
Toddlers are the daredevils of the chimpanzee world.
Chimpanzees aged 2 to 5 years are more likely than older chimpanzees to freely fall from tree branches in the forest canopy or jump wildly from branch to branch, researchers report January 7. iScience. After the age of 5, those dangerous canopy behaviors declines by about 3 percent each year.
Among humans, teenagers are the real daredevils. They are, for example, more likely than other children to break down and die from their injuries. But human toddlers might behave as recklessly as chimpanzee toddlers if parents and caregivers hadn’t put the kibosh on all the fun — and broken bones, says biologist Lauren Sarringhaus of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. “If humans reduced their surveillance, our children would be much more of a daredevil. »
Humans and chimpanzees exhibit markedly different patterns of care, Sarringhaus and others say. Chimpanzee mothers are largely single parents. Dads don’t help. And usually it doesn’t. grandmothersolder siblings, or other group members. Chimpanzees cling to their mothers for the first five years of their lives, but around age 2, they begin to explore more independently. Moms can’t easily help their children swing in the air.
In comparison, the presence of alloparents, or caregivers beyond parents, is a defining characteristic of human groups, Sarringhaus explains. In modern times, alloparents have come to include teachers and coaches for a multitude of supervised extracurricular activities. Today, many development experts in the Western world denounce the rise of intensive or helicopter parenting in which children spend less time unsupervised and playing outside than those of previous generations.
“This is a really exciting line of research into how caregiving influences risky behavior. There’s not a lot of research on this,” says Lou Haux, a psychologist and primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, who was not involved in the study.
Sarringhaus and his team recorded more than 100 chimpanzees ranging in age from 2 to 65 years old as they swung through the tree canopy. The chimpanzees are part of the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project in Kibale National Park in Uganda. The researchers then quantified how often each limb lost contact with the tree branches, whether by falling onto a lower branch or jumping over a gap to another branch.
Chimpanzees aged 2 to 5 years old were three times more likely than adult chimpanzees (15 years and older) to attempt such death-defying maneuvers. The “adolescent” chimpanzees, aged 10 to 14, were no idiots either, engaging in such behaviors twice as often as adults.
Risky maneuvers in the canopy, however, come with a compromise. About a third of chimpanzees show signs of previous bone fracturesother research shows. But with their malleable bones and lighter weight, smaller chimpanzees – and humans – are less likely to suffer serious injury falls than larger falls, making early childhood an ideal time for dangerous exploration.
“My goal is not for this to lead to parenting advice,” Sarringhaus says.
Instead, Haux says, this type of research helps put the intensive parenting seen today in Western countries in broader perspective. “We are trying to build a very safe space around our children… How has this all evolved?
