We are meant to distribute caregiving among the many adults in our “band”—our community. In a typical hunter-gatherer clan, for every child under six there were four developmentally more mature individuals who could model, discipline, nurture, and instruct the child. That is a 4:1 ratio: four developmentally mature individuals for each child under six. We now think that one caregiver for four young children (1:4) is “enriched.” That is 1/16th of what our developing social brain is looking for. That is relational poverty.
