How Much Does Family Matter? Cooperative Breeding and the Demographic Transition

Abstract

Hillary Clinton may have popularized the proverb “it takes a village to raise a child ” in her 1996 book, but interest in who raises children had been widespread among both demographers and anthropologists for some time by the late 1990s. Part of this interest stems from the potential effects of childrearing patterns on fertility rates. Women who can rely on others for support in caring for children during their reproductive years can spare more time and energy for giving birth to additional children. Support from others may therefore be critical for high fertility rates. While both demographers and anthropologists have acknowledged this fact, the two disciplines have tended to focus on different helpers. The contribution of older children to the household economy has long been of interest to the demographic community, arising particularly from Caldwell’s influential wealth flows hypothesis. He argued that when children contribute to the household economy, fertility is high; but fertility falls as modernization results in children becoming an economic burden (Caldwell 1978). Research in the 1970s demonstrated that children contribute substantial labor to the household economy in high-fertility societies (Cain 1977). More recent research on this topic convincingly argued that parents may only be able to sustain high fertility rates by making use of the labor of older children, even though each child is a net drain on the household economy (Lee and Kramer 2002; Kramer 2005). Evolutionary anthropologists, taking a comparative cross-species perspective, were typically more interested in men, and for a long time argued that contributions from fathers are the key factor that distinguishes human childrearing from that of closely related primate species (Lovejoy 1981). More