Childhood

Chances are, the last time you spent meaningful time with a young child, you were one. In much of the world today, with low fertility rates and small families becoming the norm, it’s not uncommon to reach adulthood with little to no experience in childcare. Yet, despite ongoing fertility decline (see demographic transition, in Chapter 22), children remain a sizable proportion of the world population. In 2021, 2.02 billion children were below the age of 15, over a total world population of 7.91 billion (United Nations & Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2022). Interestingly, most animals don’t go through developmental stages comparable to childhood, with its peculiar combination of dependency and autonomy, exploration and learning, somatic and behavioral development. In this chapter, you will learn:- what childhood means and what makes it specific to our species- how it compares to similar stages in our living and extinct relatives- some of the main hypotheses for why childhood evolved in our lineage- how childhood experiences vary across time and space.