Take note, helicopter parents

Public Release: 8-Feb-2016
Innate teaching skills 'part of human nature'
Take note, helicopter parents
Washington State University

Some 40 years ago, Washington State University anthropologist Barry Hewlett noticed that when the Aka pygmies stopped to rest between hunts, parents would give their infants small axes, digging sticks and knives.

To parents living in the developed world, this could be seen as irresponsible. But in all the intervening years, Hewlett has never seen an infant cut him- or herself. He has, however, seen the exercise as part of the Aka way of teaching, an activity that most researchers - from anthropologists to psychologists to biologists - consider rare or non-existent in such small-scale cultures.

He has completed a small but novel study of the Aka, concluding that, "teaching is part of the human genome."

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The Aka are among the last of the world's hunter-gatherers, but their way of life accounts for 99 percent of human history. That they teach, and how they teach, offers new insight into who we are as humans and how we might best learn.

Clearly, the Aka are not helicopter parents who would shudder at the thought of giving sharp objects to any children, let alone 1-year-olds. Rather, the Aka place a high value on individual autonomy, in addition to sharing and egalitarianism, so they're unlikely to intervene with one another's behavior.

"One does not coerce or tell others what to do, including children," Hewlett and co-author Casey Roulette write in Royal Society Open Science, an open-access journal by the world's oldest scientific publisher, The Royal Society of London.

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Hewlett said he was surprised to see how frequently the Aka teach their infants. More than 40 percent of the time, infants imitated skills to which they were exposed. On average, for less than four minutes average of teaching, they practiced skills for more than nine minutes.

The teaching interventions were brief and subtle, and Hewlett came to appreciate the value of letting the child learn as much as possible on his or her own.

"We know learning can be very rapid when it is self-motivated," he said. "When you take away the autonomy of the child, that impacts the self-motivation of the child."

The technique gives the child more choices and serves as an alternative to helicopter parents who hover over an infant and say, "go do this, go do that, you need to do this, you need to do that."

"This way steps backward in the other direction," he said, as in, "I need to provide advice here or there but I don't have all the right answers for my child."