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In the modern world, bringing up baby has become a minefield. Individual ambitions sit uneasily with reproductive ambitions. In a pressured age, high-quality child rearing turns out to be a time-consuming, complex business. We still expect mothers and childcare facilities to pull off the trick, with help from the father and not much from the wider community. Worst of all, according to primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, we are finding out that the collective rearing practices of our evolutionary past might have nurtured our capacity for empathy, which we may now be in danger of losing. Liz Else asked Hrdy if it is time to listen to ancestral voices and change our ways

What鈥檚 the problem with the way we live today?

There is an irreconcilable tension that often occurs between ambition and motherhood. If you think in an evolutionary context, in the distant past any woman fat enough to ovulate was going to get pregnant and give birth. As we pursued social status goals, pregnancy went along with the territory. In our distant past, to be ambitious and to strive for social status, to get access to the resources needed to rear children, or to dragoon others into helping you rear your children 鈥� these things were synonymous with being a good mother. Today these things are pulling in opposite directions and for women this has been an incredibly painful transition.

So its modern ambition that causes conflict?

Yes. The tension between the gross individualism especially fostered by the west is at odds with the collectivism in child rearing that is clearly our evolutionary legacy. The way we are now rearing our children is actually changing the emotional and cognitive tenor of the human species.

In what ways is this changing us?

I think that we are becoming less empathetic. We know that the emergence of empathy comes from both inherited traits and specific rearing practises. Empathy is probably one of the things that allows us to be so hyper-social and cooperative. One of the things we know about empathy is that the potential is only expressed under certain rearing conditions. The danger is that if you suppress or eliminate those conditions, no matter how beneficial it is to be empathetic and hyper-social, natural selection cannot favour it. Traits that aren鈥檛 used can be lost forever.

What are we doing wrong?

We fool ourselves if we think we can break from our past and not be affected by it. Instead of living among alloparents 鈥� other women, men, children and especially grandparents 鈥� who can help care for their infants, fewer and fewer people live in extended families. Policy- makers imagine that nuclear families epitomise the 鈥済olden age鈥�, but in terms of the deep history of the human family, it is unusual for children to be reared by only their mothers or fathers. Children accustomed to nurturing from others view their social world as a benign place and respond accordingly. For children at risk of neglect, it is amazing how much difference alloparental interventions, say, from a grandparent can make. This is not to minimise the importance of mothers, but to stress that we evolved in a context where mothers had much more social support. Infants need this social engagement to develop their full human potential.

Has this affected you and your children?

I have three children, the youngest is a 19-year-old son, and I find these particularly treacherous times to be raising him. I keep wishing that there were younger children in my household or an extended family because my son loves children. Research show us that the testosterone of men who spend time around infants goes down and their prolactin goes up. You have these high-risk young males who have this tremendous exposure to all this testosterone-elevating violent stuff, and at the other end we are taking away the influence from living in an extended family, which is testosterone-lowering.

Was alloparenting the norm in the past?

There is an emerging consensus that humans must have been cooperative breeders, with childcare shared between different members of the society. Many traditional societies still live this way. Child-rearing is expensive. For hunter-gatherer societies, it takes 18 million calories to raise a child from birth to age 18 or 19. This is incredibly costly for mothers, who are likely to get pregnant before the existing child is independent. She cannot possibly rear them by herself.

But where calories are plentiful, why does alloparenting matter?

We have changed the rules of existence. For example, there is an epidemic of obesity in the west which means that girls have earlier puberty and can get pregnant earlier than ever. In our past, it is remotely possible that some girls got pregnant quite young, but by definition they must have been fat enough to ovulate and so must have had parents and alloparents caring for them enough to provide all this food. Today, girls can ovulate very early even without social support, so they can get pregnant in an unsupported way.

鈥淭oday girls ovulate early so get pregnant in an unsupported way鈥�

So what happens then?

What we have to recognise is that, in our past, an infant who was not in constant contact with a carer, a mother or an alloparent, was not going to survive. It would starve, get dehydrated or be eaten. These days, you can leave your child in a crib in a dark room all day and come back, yet the baby will be there. In the modern world, children can experience all kinds of neglect and still survive.

But what kind of survival?

That is where our problem lies. A recent study by Mary Ann Mason at the University of California, Berkeley, found that in the US 50 per cent of tenured female academics in the sciences and 62 per cent in the humanities (compared to 30 per cent and 39 per cent respectively for men) are childless. Many, I suspect, simply felt they did not have enough social support to make rearing children feasible. Others went ahead even without alloparental support. In such cases, I worry that it is the children who bear the cost. I can remember once wishing that a child of a colleague would act up more 鈥� even beat his head against the walls or something just to signal to his mother who was totally engrossed in her own ambitions, that he just wasn鈥檛 getting what he needed.

What about child-rearing today?

Young people frequently ask me how they can have a career with a family, and I throw out suggestions such as try to find another couple with whom you are really compatible and live with them in an artificially constructed extended family. That is a practical suggestion until you look at housing which is not set up for anything like the communal living arrangements that are actually incredibly wholesome for children.

What about day or nursery care?

I would like social policy towards childcare and infant needs that is much more guided by science. Most research focuses on the model that childcare has to be either mother-only care or day care. This creates a false dichotomy because often these studies look at day care facilities with poorly paid employees who aren鈥檛 going to stay in their jobs and have too many charges for the number of carers.

How can this change?

I nearly wept at a 2003 Dahlem Workshop in Berlin 鈥� on attachment and bonding 鈥� because there was a whole section on day care, focusing on what children need. I have never before been to a scientific conference that linked neuro-physiological aspects and evolutionary considerations with the day-care needs of children and mothers. It marks a watershed. Instead of focusing on the socially prescriptive approach which dictates the mother should be the exclusive caretaker of her child, the focus was on what infants need to feel secure. Whatever happens, we are going to have to investigate the best way to operate day care. It is an option that is not going away because mothers will continue to go out to work.

What are you working on now?

A book I think of as a deep history of the human family, called The Origins of the Ties That Bind. It is about the implications of descending from the only apes who reared their young communally. I want to explore how this changed the developmental context in which infants grew up.