Poster #181 - Why and when do Hadza and Mbendjele hunter-gatherer parents forage with children?

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Race, Ethnicity, Culture, Context

Integrative Statement

Forager parents face trade-offs when deciding to forage with their children; on the one hand, parents may prefer to forage with children because children help with food-getting tasks, and foraging with children may also provide parents with opportunities to teach their children essential survival skills. On the other hand, children can also interfere with food-getting tasks, such as by scaring off prey while hunting, or being too small to walk far enough to a resource patch. Children may also face dangers that parents would prefer they avoid, such as wild animals, or a lack of water. Finally, parents may also have beliefs over whether they should enroll their children in subsistence labor. Based on 954 interviews of 73 Hadza and 52 Mbendjele forager adults from Tanzania and Congo respectively, the present poster seeks to investigate how culture norms around child-rearing, and especially, child autonomy, and differing environmental dangers influence parental decision-making with regards to foraging with children. The results reveal that though Hadza and Mbendjele adults forage with children at similar frequencies (approx. 30% of foraging days), Mbendjele adults were more likely to report foraging with their own children than the Hadza. The most cited reason for not foraging with children among the Hadza was distance; more specifically, that children were too small to walk far enough to find resources, while the Mbendjele most often cited autonomy; more specifically, that children refused to forage with them. The most cited for foraging with children among the Hadza was for help working, such as carrying baobab, starting fires, making pegs for honey harvesting, while Mbendjele parents most often cited foraging with their children in order to teach them foraging tasks. For both the Hadza and the Mbendjele, men and women reported teaching skills particular to the sexual division of labor in their respective societies. These results suggest that parents make decisions over whether or not to forage with children based on a variety of factors, including environmental hazards, beliefs about children’s autonomy, and child the degree to which children help and interference with work. These findings are also consistent with previous work on forager children’s learning which suggest that children often learn foraging skills from other children, and not from adults. This poster adds to the existing literature on parental decision making, which to-date has excluded foragers.

Group Authors

Forager Studies Group

Authors

• Sheina Lew-Levy, University of Cambridge
  Presenting Author

• Adam Boyette, Duke University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alyssa Crittenden, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
  Non-Presenting Author

• Barry Hewlett, Washington State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Michael Lamb, University of Cambridge
  Non-Presenting Author