Interview: Meet the alloparents

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…