Attachment Parenting motherhood never felt instinctive to me. I wasn’t skilled at interpreting my babies’ needs or decoding their different cries, something other parents seemed to grasp effortlessly. “She’s just sleepy,” they’d say. Or: “That sound means he’s hungry.” I couldn’t tell the difference, and it left me feeling inadequate.

Worse still, I didn’t enjoy the constant closeness of having my baby attached to me. Breastfeeding brought mixed feelings – I didn’t despise it, and there were moments I liked it, but I also felt weighed down by the relentless demands of caring for a child.

Everyone says Attachment Parenting is challenging, but even more exhausting is the judgment from others – whether they have children or not. When I shared my experiences in articles and blog posts, one label kept appearing for mothers like me: “unnatural.

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Today’s dominant Attachment Parenting philosophies often urge us to raise our children the way other primates, like chimpanzees or gorillas, or our hunter-gatherer ancestors do – as practiced by certain present-day tribes. Advocates, drawing from evolution, psychology, and neuroscience, argue that we should “mirror biological processes” to give our kids the best start.

But what does that really mean? Picture a chimp mother and her baby, peacefully inseparable, the baby clinging to her back as she swings through branches in search of food. They rely solely on each other. They don’t need outside help. It’s the two of them against the world – quite literally. Many researchers and Attachment Parenting gurus point to this as the gold standard: pure, instinct-driven, untouched by culture. They claim humans once parented like this, and that we should return to it, or risk raising children who are unbonded and emotionally detached.

Among the most influential voices on parent–child bonds was British psychologist John Bowlby, who worked with orphans after World War II. Bowlby argued that children require a secure emotional connection to a primary caregiver – usually the mother – or else face severe consequences, from social difficulties to mental health problems.

To study attachment styles globally, American-Canadian psychologist Mary Ainsworth created the “Strange Situation” experiment in 1970. In it, a mother and baby spend time in a room until a stranger enters and asks the mother to step out. The baby’s reaction upon her return reveals the attachment type. A “secure” baby cries when the mother leaves, can be soothed by the stranger, and is happy when the mother returns. “Insecure” attachment comes in two forms: “anxious-avoidant,” where the baby shows little reaction to either the stranger or the mother’s return, and “anxious-resistant,” marked by extreme distress and clinginess.

In the early 1980s, American pediatrician William Sears was influenced by Jean Liedloff’s 1975 book The Continuum Concept, which expanded on Bowlby’s ideas. Liedloff observed that indigenous babies in Venezuela were constantly carried and seemed to cry less than Western infants. She concluded that modern Western parents were too detached from their babies, and recommended babywearing, breastfeeding on demand, and immediate responsiveness.

Sears built what became “attachment parenting” around these principles, encouraging drug-free childbirth, round-the-clock breastfeeding, and constant physical contact. He claimed this was not just the ideal approach, but the way humans have always parented – a return to our Stone Age roots.

The image is romantic: a hunter-gatherer mother with her baby in a sling, a recently weaned four-year-old chatting with a nearby grandmother. Children are never scolded, even when they misbehave – a rare occurrence. They’re gently indulged by all. The community, 20–200 people strong, is egalitarian across gender and age, sharing resources and responsibilities. Everyone helps provide food and shelter, whether by gathering fruit, hunting game, or making tools. To some, this is our ancestral legacy – a time when families slept together, children nursed until age four, and birth happened without medical intervention.

But for me, it’s difficult to accept this ideal at face value. Is Attachment Parenting truly hardwired by nature into a single universal model for humans, as it might be for apes? Or is it – like romance, family structures, and partnership – a cultural creation, shaped by our surroundings, circumstances, and as varied as human society itself?

Although chimpanzees may be our closest living relatives in evolutionary terms, our approach to raising children is quite different — in fact, it resembles that of birds more than other apes. To explore this idea, I reached out to American primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who stirred controversy in the scientific world back in 2001 when she proposed that the traditional nuclear family has never been the dominant human model. Scheduling our conversation proved tricky, mainly because of the time difference (she’s in California, I’m in the Netherlands) and my hectic schedule as a mother of three running my own business while my husband also works. Eventually, though, we found a time to talk.

When we finally connected, Blaffer Hrdy explained that human infants arrive with exceptionally large brains, fragile bodies, and no real ability to care for themselves. Because our babies require such intensive care, she argues, it would have been impossible for a single mother to raise one alone. Instead, humans evolved as “cooperative breeders” — a term borrowed from ornithology — meaning that, throughout history, mothers have always received help from others in raising their young. She further believes that this habit of sharing child-rearing duties among emotionally connected humans was a key factor in the evolution of our large brains.

As she often puts it, “Brains depend on care more than care depends on brains.” In her view, the image of a solitary mother and child is misleading — there have always been, as the title of her 2009 book says, Mothers and Others.

According to Blaffer Hrdy, while humans share over 95 percent of their DNA with chimpanzees, our parenting style is closer to that of other cooperative primates such as baboons, marmosets, tamarins, or bonobos. And this reliance on help wasn’t just beneficial — it was essential for survival. Among marmosets, for example, “If a mother doesn’t receive assistance, she may reject her infant,” Blaffer Hrdy notes. And for a marmoset infant who is rejected, the prospects are grim.

Similarly, in humans, one potential contributor to postpartum depression is a lack of perceived support for new mothers. Importantly, it’s not necessarily the actual quantity of assistance she receives, but rather her own sense of being supported that can have a significant impact. “Even a small gesture of help can be meaningful because it signals social support,” notes Blaffer Hrdy.

The practice of sharing childcare not only helped human mothers ensure their infants survived but also enabled them to continue playing an active role in their communities. For Blaffer Hrdy, the stereotypical image of the father hunting while the mother stays behind caring for children and awaiting his return with meat simply doesn’t hold up.

In reality, in many hunter-gatherer groups, women – mothers included – often provided the bulk of the community’s daily calorie intake. Meat was rare, and hunting carried a high risk of injury or death for men. Consequently, women couldn’t depend solely on male providers to feed and care for everyone. They needed to make their own arrangements, whether that meant relying on female relatives for childcare or placing children in the care of extended family members when no other help was available.

This understanding led Blaffer Hrdy to revise John Bowlby’s theory of attachment. She argued that children could form secure bonds with multiple caregivers throughout their upbringing without suffering from increased anxiety or psychological harm. She also highlights one advantage of modern parenting seen in parts of Europe: affordable childcare services. She asks about my own experiences, and I enthusiastically describe how my three children thrived in Dutch daycare. I share her view – I couldn’t have managed alone. Alloparents, whether they are extended family members or professional carers, are important, though they’re not the entire picture.

Even in societies where children are cherished and treated kindly, there’s a harsher truth that often goes unspoken because it challenges the “natural equals good” idea. A mother’s affection can be conditional. In some traditional societies, newborns faced a probationary period. Babies born with health problems, deformities, or traits deemed undesirable – sometimes as trivial as excessive crying or unusual hair – were quietly and swiftly abandoned or killed.

David F. Lancy, emeritus professor of anthropology at Utah State University, points out that the practice of isolating mother and child after birth served not only to provide rest and privacy but also to allow the mother for Attachment Parenting to decide whether to keep her baby. Blaffer Hrdy even cautioned me not to write about this, warning that it would upset readers.

Infanticide, though disturbing, has been alarmingly prevalent across the globe, including in Europe’s past. In The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings (2008), Lancy estimates that 80 percent of human societies practiced it. It also occurs in other mammals such as rabbits, and even chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. In this light, abandoning newborns is no less “natural” than feeding them.

To explore this further, I arranged a video call with Lancy, having found great comfort in his book. During our conversation, my son repeatedly popped into the camera frame while my daughters complained of boredom in the background.

“You’re combining paid work with motherhood – a very common reality,” Lancy observed, noting that the idea of the stay-at-home mother still dominates in the U.S., according to a 2012 Pew Research Center poll. But such an arrangement has rarely existed. Women have always worked, often while raising children. “It’s actually unusual to find a society where mothers aren’t both caring for children and simultaneously gathering food, weaving, or earning a living,” he explained.

That conversation made me stop and think. Nature is not inherently good. Maternal attachment can be conditional. Working mothers are the historical reality. In truth, there has never been one single “normal” way to parent.