Parenting tips from the animal kingdom

How poison dart frogs deal with their kids asking for snacks, and other parenting inspiration from the animal kingdom.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Flora Lichtman?

  Hey, it's Flora and you're listening to Science Friday. I don't need to tell you that parenting is hard. If you've ever been a child, had a child, or seen a child face down in a Target screaming, you know what I mean. But of course, humans aren't the only ones raising their young. So how do animals deal with babies that don't follow directions, or little ones that are constantly begging for snacks? And what can we learn from them? To find out, we called parent and science journalist Elizabeth Preston, who wrote the book, "The Creature's Guide to Caring: How Animal Parents Teach Us That Humans Were Born to Care." Hey, Elizabeth, welcome to Science Friday.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Hi, I'm so happy to be here.

• 0:44Flora Lichtman?

  We're happy to have you. Are there animals that make parenting look easy?

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Hmm, well, a lot of animals have to do it all the time with no breaks. So they make it look automatic, if not easy. So I'm thinking of like the, you know, opossum mom with the whole row of kids on her back, or the gorilla who has to carry the baby clinging to her chest all the time. You know, for them, it looks like something they don't even have to think about. But the truth is that when the mom does all the work like that, it's very intensive, and it uses up a lot of her resources. So it's actually, it's actually hard, even if it looks natural.

• 1:26Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah, I mean, I wanted to ask you about this because I think there's this kind of toxic metaphor in human mom culture that, like, we give everything to our kids. But I wondered, is that not a metaphor in, in some animal species?

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Totally. There are some mothers that give their body to feed their children, not just in the sense of like making milk, like we mammals do, but there are spider moms whose hatchlings will eat them alive, for example.

• 1:58Flora Lichtman?

  That's too real, you know?

• 2:01Speaker 01

  It's too real. I know, it's taking the metaphor too far. There's also a really strange amphibian called a Sicilian. It's kind of like a salamander with no legs, and she grows this kind of thick, extra fatty skin when she has babies. And then the babies are born with these specialized sharp teeth and they peel pieces of her skin, like, I want to say like a banana, not to be too disgusting, and they eat her skin. She survives, but it is horrifying.

• 2:31Flora Lichtman?

  Oh my god, that's what we come from. That's the legacy that we're working off of.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 2:38Flora Lichtman?

  We asked our listeners what parenting problems they needed help with, and I want to play you one.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Hi, Flora. My name is Blythe. I am calling from the podcast Science Versus, but also I am calling from upstate New York, the beautiful Catskills, in response to your parenting question. We cannot solve the bedtime pop-out. It is every night.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  We're down, we do the song, we do the book, we do the tea, we do the routine, and then the kid still pops out, nice and cozy in there, pops out. Sometimes it's like, yeah, sure, I have to pee. Sometimes it's like, oh, I need some water. But the other night I was like, hey, I'm lonely. And sometimes it's like, oh, yeah, I forgot to show you the picture I drew at school. And then sometimes it's like, I forgot. I forgot why I'm not at bed. So if your expert has any advice on reducing the number of pop-outs, I would love to hear it. Thank you.

• 3:40Flora Lichtman?

  Bedtime, classic. Do you have any advice for Blythe?

• 3:44Speaker 01

  I think my only advice is maybe some reassurance that humans are not alone with the problem of trying to get our kids to go to sleep by themselves. I'm thinking of gorillas, for example. When gorillas are babies, their mothers are completely responsible for childcare. But when it's older, the other gorillas in the group interact with it more, including the silverback male gorilla, who's the older dominant gorilla in the group. These silverbacks are really tolerant of the younger gorillas, and they will play with them, hang out with them, and they'll even let the juvenile gorillas share their nest at night. They'll let the juveniles kind of cuddle up with them. So, you know,

• 4:25Speaker 01

  wanting to be close to an adult is not only a human kid issue.

• 4:31Flora Lichtman?

  Co-sleeping. Gorillas do it. You know, another common theme we had from our callers was... Like, screen addiction, which is hard to find an analog for in the animal kingdom, because, you know, most animals don't have iPads or

• 4:45Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 4:46Flora Lichtman?

  Even opposable thumbs, so.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  No.

• 4:48Flora Lichtman?

  But can you think of an analogy?

• 4:51Speaker 01

  So lots of animals like to play, and the good news about humans, and this speaks to something that was actually a major theme in The Creature's Guide to Caring, which is, backing up a little bit, if you look at our human ancestors, the earliest humans, anthropologists and biologists believe today that we evolved to raise our kids cooperatively. So our ancestors wouldn't have had just the mom and the dad alone in the cave or whatever, taking care of the kids all by themselves, slogging through it. They would have been part of kind of a team of caretakers, and that team might have included older siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, maybe even neighbors and friends.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  But so one thing I learned is that in a lot of other species that raise their children cooperatively, like human ancestors did, the older siblings are an important caretaker. So often, older siblings who are still at home and don't necessarily need a parent's care, hang out for a little while, and they help care for their younger siblings. I'm thinking of animals like a meerkat or some birds do this. And so with humans, too, there's this idea that older kids are kind of part of the childcare team. And you can see this if you look at some small-scale traditional societies around the world, you'll see these groups of kids of mixed ages running around together, and it's

• 6:21Speaker 01

  kind of like their school. They learn from the older kids, they practice doing adult things. And so their entertainment is really a way of learning and practicing to be an adult.

• 6:31Flora Lichtman?

  Hmm, I mean, what about grandparents? How many animals do the grandparent thing?

• 6:37Speaker 01

  That's a really interesting question, and one of the signature things about our species is menopause, right? So this idea that older females stick around when we're not fertile anymore.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  And it seems to be not that we turn off our fertility in the middle of life, but rather that we live decades beyond when our fertility naturally stops. So if you look at, for example, a chimpanzee, she also peters out in her ability to have kids, maybe around age 50, but that's also around when she would die naturally. We have kind of tacked on these decades of useful life after the end of our fertile period. And scientists think that that's because evolutionarily, grandmothers were helping to keep their kids and their grandkids alive and pass on their genes.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  And when you look across the animal kingdom, the only other place where you see menopause having evolved is not even in a close human relative at all. It's in certain whales. So for example, in killer whales, they have these matriarchal groups where older female whales who have stopped being fertile lead their families, they help them find food, and they help their children and their grandchildren whales to stay alive.

• 8:00Flora Lichtman?

  They're there for date night and.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:04Flora Lichtman?

  Um, speaking of grandparents, we got a call from a grandparent. This is Lisa in Santa Cruz.

• 8:09Speaker 03

  My under one-year-old granddaughter makes a wonderful little sound when she wants attention. She goes,

• 8:17Speaker 03

  but then for no apparent reason, like she's sitting quietly on her lap, she will come out with the loudest sound you've ever heard. And everyone can hear it for the entire house. And we don't know how to help her not make that sound. Any ideas?

• 8:36Flora Lichtman?

  Any ideas? Is this a thing in the animal kingdom?

• 8:40Speaker 01

  So this is a really interesting question. If you look at, again, I've, I've given the example before of the baby gorilla, but this is a good parallel, I think, because it's a great ape. It's a close relative, but it's very different from a human baby. And one of the ways it's different is that the baby gorilla does not make loud sounds. But this makes sense when you think about that history I mentioned earlier of cooperative caretaking. So if the human baby has evolved to be cared for by many different people, it might be getting passed around all day long. It needs a way to let its mom know, or let its caretakers know that it's hungry and it needs to go back and nurse. Or maybe say, you know, my cousin put me down in a pile of leaves and now I'm cold.

• 9:24Flora Lichtman?

  Help, help.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Help. Exactly. It needs to be able to get attention. Whereas that baby gorilla who's clinging to its mother's fur all day, it doesn't need to tell anyone anything. It can just move its head and get milk when it needs to. So, human infants do have a reason to make noise more than our relatives. Another interesting thing is that when you look across all of the primates, so the apes and the monkeys, you do find some other cooperatively breeding animals. They're not close relatives of ours. They're monkeys called marmosets and tamarins, and they live in South America in the treetops. They're these small monkeys.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  And the mothers have twins usually, and it's a ton of work to take care of these twins. And so they rely on their family groups to cooperate and care for these babies, and they pass them around all day long. But one interesting thing about the marmosets and tamarins is that this is the only other primate where you see babbling.

• 10:24Flora Lichtman?

  Hmm.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  So you can hypothesize that in our evolutionary past, our babies had to evolve to get an adult's attention, to be charming and engaging, because it's in the baby's interest for caretakers around it to want to hold it and want to cuddle it and want to share their food, right? And so perhaps this need to engage with the caretakers around it caused both our babies and the marmoset and tamarin babies to evolve this cute babbling behavior. It's not only practicing speech, but maybe just a way to be adorable.

• 11:01Flora Lichtman?

  Hmm. I've, I've heard that bats do baby talk.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't know about that, but that sounds interesting.

• 11:07Flora Lichtman?

  Well, let's fact check me. Okay, we have to take a break, but when we come back, how do animal parents cope with hanger?

• 11:20Speaker 04

  And from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, working to enhance public understanding of science, technology, and economics in the modern world.

• 11:35Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, another classic parenting whoa. Anyone who's a parent will have heard this before. Can I have a snack? Do animals have to deal with this?

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Definitely. All kids want snacks all the time. At least that's true in my house. But one species where this actually has been studied a lot is among the poison frogs. So there are a lot of types of poison frogs. They live in Central and South America. They're these colorful frogs in the rainforest. And they've evolved to be really attentive parents. The reason that they have to be attentive parents is that unlike the frogs you might be more familiar with in your own neighborhood, those frogs lay their eggs in a pond. And when the eggs hatch, they become tadpoles, which are basically a fish. And they're already in a pond, so it's fine. But the poison frogs live in the rainforest.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  And so when their eggs hatch, now you have a fish in the forest, and this is bad. So they need to move those tadpoles as soon as they hatch to a pool of water. And usually, it's the dad frog who does this. He will crouch down among the tadpoles, get them to wriggle up onto his back. And then he hops around and he transports them to a small pool of water, maybe a little bit of rainwater, cupped in a leaf, and then that's where they live. But then, among some of these poison frog species, the caretaking goes even further. There's a species where the dad has to put each tadpole into its own little pool of water. The reason is that the tadpoles are cannibals. Speaking of snacking.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  They will eat each other if you put them with their siblings. So he has to move them all to different pools. And then he will go around every day. He'll remember where those pools are. He'll hop to each one. And he'll get into the water. And the tadpole does this little vibrating dance, which communicates hunger, or at least communicates that it wants a snack. And so the dad, if he observes this and goes, I think it's hungry. Okay. He starts singing. He calls to his mate and his mate hears this song and she hops over. But she doesn't take their word for it. She gets in. She observes the vibrating dance and she decides and she might go, no, you had enough, enough snacks already today. You can wait till tomorrow.

• 13:55Flora Lichtman?

  Someone's got to hold the boundary.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Exactly. But if she decides it really is time for a meal, she'll turn around and she'll lay an unfertilized egg into the pool and the tadpole will eat that.

• 14:09Flora Lichtman?

  Amazing. I mean, I, let's talk about dads because this is kind of annoying to me. I'm just going to admit male seahorses get so much love.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 14:19Flora Lichtman?

  Online because they gestate the babies, right? Are they truly the outliers of the animal kingdom?

• 14:28Speaker 01

  No, not at all. And you're right. Male seahorses do get a lot of credit for what's ultimately not that much effort. Because they do, you know, get impregnated by the female and they do grow the babies inside them in their belly. But then after they birth the babies, their job is totally done. They will go off, you know, very shortly thereafter and start courting their mate again. And they're ready to just start over.

• 14:54Flora Lichtman?

  So it's not taking a lot out of them is what I'm hearing.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  It's, it's a minimal effort and they get a lot of credit, which actually does have some parallels to humans, I would say.

• 15:04Flora Lichtman?

  Look at that dad babysitting.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 15:07Flora Lichtman?

  His own children.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  How cute.

• 15:09Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, let's take another call.

• 15:11Speaker 05

  Hi, my name is Anne. I'm calling from the state of New York. And this is my parenting pickle. Have a preteen son who is a real FOMO kid, scared of missing out. And when it's time to leave and go somewhere, we can tell him it's time to go, time to get ready. He says, okay. And then, pretty soon, he's not ready and we're walking out the door. We say, we're gonna be late. You're gonna miss the thing that we're doing. And he has a meltdown. Not quite sure if there's some strategies we can use to help bridge that gap between no sense of urgency to, oh, my gosh, we're having a meltdown. So, thanks so much. Love the show.

• 15:49Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, Elizabeth, I wanted to ask you about this because this is like the center of my algorithm. There are these just videos of like, mother bears trying to get their baby bears across a road and like, they're not compliant. And it does feel familiar.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Yes, definitely.

• 16:07Flora Lichtman?

  What would you say to this caller?

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know that I have advice because this is such a universal problem, right? We, as adults, know what the kid needs and the kid relies on us. The reason that we have parental care is because our kids need our help. They need our help not to walk into the street or to get out of the river and cross to where there is food. And that's, you know, that's our job.

• 16:36Flora Lichtman?

  And what's the strategy that animals use? Is it just move them?

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, there's always the pick them up by the nape of the neck. I don't know if your caller has tried that. In the poison frogs I was talking about earlier, you know, the dad gets the babies to wriggle up onto his back for a ride. And there is definitely urgency there because if they don't do it in a timely manner, they'll desiccate and, you know, die. So maybe the caller could suggest that to their child. You know, you don't want to dry out. And then sometimes the babies don't want to get off the dad's back. And so he will use one of his legs to kind of flick the baby tadpole off into its pool.

• 17:19Flora Lichtman?

  Sometimes you've just got to take matters into your own

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 17:22Flora Lichtman?

  webbed fins, whatever.

• 17:25Flora Lichtman?

  What animals should we not emulate for parenting?

• 17:29Speaker 01

  There are a lot of bird species that have a strategy called an insurance egg. One example is the blue-footed booby, which a lot of people are probably familiar with. They have those blue feet, looks kind of like a seagull. And the idea is that in a good season with a lot of resources, the parents might have the ability to raise two chicks. But if it turns out that there's not quite as many resources available as they thought, they're only planning on raising one. And so, you know, in some species, this means the parents will have to actively toss the chick out of the nest. In the blue-footed booby, what they do is let the siblings kind of duke it out. And so, they do, they wait the fight unfairly by having one of the eggs

• 18:14Speaker 01

  a little bit sooner than its sibling. So, one of the birds hatches before the other one, and it is bigger. And so, that sibling has an advantage. And if there isn't enough food to go around, the bigger sibling will just bully the littler one until it dies.

• 18:29Flora Lichtman?

  Oh, man, too dark.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:33Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, so you wrote this book. You're also a parent?

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Yes, I have two kids. They are nine and six.

• 18:40Flora Lichtman?

  Did you change anything about your parenting approach after working on this book?

• 18:45Speaker 01

  I would like to say that I learned from researching the book about our history of cooperative caretaking, and I started to ask for more help and really rely on my village more and embrace my evolutionary past as a cooperative caretaker. But it's actually very hard. It's hard to stop, you know, doing everything yourself, not everything myself. It's hard to stop relying on myself rather than reaching out for help when I need it. And that's something I'm always trying to do. Now that I've written this book, I'm always thinking, you know, it's only natural, it's only human for me to rely on a group

• 19:26Speaker 01

  and to ask my siblings and my parents and my in-laws to do things to help out our family.

• 19:34Flora Lichtman?

  You've got to internalize it, though.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  I do. I do have to internalize it. And it's hard because I live in Western society. And there's this idea that the mom is supposed to be the supermom. And the parents are supposed to be this nuclear family unit raising the kids. And when we look at our evolutionary past, that's really not what's natural for a human.

• 19:55Flora Lichtman?

  Elizabeth Preston is a science journalist and author of the new book, The Creature's Guide to Caring: How Animal Parents Teach Us That Humans Were Born to Care. Thanks, Elizabeth.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 20:06Flora Lichtman?

  And you can read an excerpt from the book at sciencefriday.com/parents. This episode was produced by Charles Berkquist. And thank you to everyone who called us with your parenting pickles. If you have a pickle of another sort, we're here. 8774 Sci-Fri is our number. We are wrapping up Science Friday's fiscal year on June 30. And we could use your support. We're aiming to raise $100,000 to close out our budget. And with your help, I know we can do it. If Science Friday is valuable to you, if you rely on our reporting to make sense of the world, or even just to give you your daily dose of joy and wonder, please consider going to sciencefriday.com/donate to make a donation. It's fast, easy, and secure.

• 20:50Flora Lichtman?

  And any amount you can swing will help to sustain us in this critical moment. You know, I know I've said it before, but I really mean it. Science Friday can only continue with your support. Thank you for listening. I'm Flora Lichten.