Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time

by Brigid Schulte

“The whole idea that mothers stayed at camp and the men went off to hunt? No way! These women were walking thousands of miles every year with their children. Or if it was not safe, they were leaving them back at camp.” She pauses to drive that point home: Sometimes mothers left their children back at camp. The children were with their fathers, older siblings, grandparents, relatives, and other trusted, nurturing adults—people Hrdy calls “alloparents” (“allo” means “other than” in Greek). “It’s natural for mothers to work. It’s natural for mothers to take care of children,” she says. “What’s unnatural is for mothers to be the sole caretaker of children. What’s unnatural is not to have more support for mothers.” And not just mothers who work outside the home. “Moms who stay at home still need and deserve a lot of help,” she says. With so much support from alloparents early in human evolution, mothers’ lives were more integrated between work and home, she says. “What’s different today is that the workplace is no longer compatible with being a mother. It’s as simple as that.”