The following is a note from Dr. Kimmel to a reader asking for the source of his statements about how early mothers treated their children:

To begin with, I do not know how early mothers behaved towards their children. There is no way anyone can know. However, we can speculate. The first mothers I speak of are a product of my imagination. They are my creation based on what I believe, what I have learned and who I am. This does not mean there is no evidence to back up my picture of how the first mothers might have been. There is both hard and soft evidence for my speculations. By hard evidence, I mean that we can be certain that the first mothers nursed their babies and did not feed them formula from a bottle. Softer evidence would, unfortunately, be in the area of your question about hitting and spanking children.

My speculations on the "first mothers" have been derived chiefly from anthropologists' descriptions of the mother-child interaction of so-called primitive peoples. In addition they are backed up by the nature of the biological nurturing process in humans, the physiological changes that occur in mothers after they give birth, the mother-infant interaction of the higher order primates, the history of parenting, and contemporary mothers initial emotional reactions and behavior toward their newborn.

Studies of people living outside civilization usually contain information on how infants and young children are cared for. Although they differ on details, the descriptions are fundamentally similar. The following description by Margaret Mead of the Arapesh people's way of caring for infants in her book, Sex and Temperament In Three Primitive Societies, is typical of many primitive groups:

During its first months, the child is never far from someone's arms. When the mother walks about she carries the baby suspended from her forehead in a special small net bag, or suspended under one breast in a bark-cloth sling... A child's crying is a tragedy to be avoided at any cost: suckled whenever they cry, never left far distant from some woman who can give them the breast if necessary, sleeping usually in close contact with the mother's body, either hung in a thin net bag against her back, crooked in her arm, or curled on her lap as she sits cooking or plaiting, the child has a continuous warm sensation of security.

As regards hitting, I cannot say with any certainty that early mothers or mothers in primitive societies never hit their children. However, I have never heard of, or read of, a primitive society where spanking, hitting or punishing were part of its childcare practices. It has been reported that the American Indian believed that, "The white man was no good because he hit his children." (Unfortunately I can no longer locate the reference to that quotation.) Anthropologists who have lived among primitive people frequently report that children are indulged by their parents and by everyone else.

In general, primitive people believe that children are naturally social and will develop appropriate social behavior without parental imposition. Jean Liedloff who lived among the Yequana people of South America has reported the following in her book, The Continuum Concept:

The Yequana are not unique in their view of child development. Most primitive people do not have a concept of child rearing. They do not seem to need one; apparently because appropriate social behavior is a natural outcome of being nurtured in the human way. Children respond to others as they have been responded to. The following is a passage from a forthcoming book, So That They May Walk the Good Road, subtitled Caring for Children in the Human Way, that I am presently writing.

In our efforts to get children to behave in the ways we want we utilize methods of control, many of which are culturally condoned forms of violence. Based on our long-standing traditional belief that children are a form of property, we treat them as objects to be manipulated and molded in directions that will be comfortable for us. The strangest and most unrealistic part of our child rearing beliefs is that our antisocial and asocial behavior toward them is supposed to make them into loving social beings. We are unable to recognize that our violence (hitting, which includes spanking), sublimated violence (punishment, which includes isolation and the withdrawal of love and affection}, and parental emotional detachment (discipline), all of which are intrinsic to our child rearing methods, become children's model for future relationships. Our children are chiefly influenced in their development by who we are in relation to them, not by who we think we are or who we pretend to be. Children who are reared in our conventional ways (many of which are identical to the ways convicts, prisoners of war, and slaves have been treated throughout history), learn from the way that they are treated by their parents that it is appropriate to harm other people, to be emotionally detached from the pain of others, and that it is perfectly all right to impose one's will on other people. In short they are instructed, by example, how to be a psychopathic personality or at least to behave as one.

I know that a thesis requires documentation. I have found that the best documentation to indicate that there are more caring ways to respond to children than our own is the study of primitive cultures. But be forewarned; you will find that many learned people believe that a child raised in the "primitive" way will not be able to adapt to our culture. They also believe that contemporary mothers would not be willing or able to care for a baby in the way that primitive mothers do, despite the fact that untold numbers of mothers are beginning to do that in the western world. I would still suggest that you study and learn how other cultures, particularly those living outside civilization, have mothered their children. You will discover alternatives to the way children have been and are cared for in western civilization. You will also receive validation of your own nurturing attitude toward children.

It is not really that important if the first mothers I describe in my book were exactly the way I imagined them. What is important to my mind is that there are people who care for children in ways that appear to fulfill children's needs much better than our own. Margaret Mead, in a personal communication to me, reported that she had never seen a psychotic child in a primitive culture. Other authors have also reported the absence of emotionally disturbed children in the primitive cultures that they have studied.

Why did I write the book in the way I did? I have over many years found that it is extremely difficult to convince parents and mental health professionals that our conventional ways of child rearing, which include hitting and humiliating them, are harmful to children's development. My intent in writing the book was to help children to have a better life. I wanted my audience mainly to be parents and I wanted to reach them on an emotional level as well as an intellectual level. I chose to appeal to them by writing the story of how and why the mothering experience all children evolved to have was lost and how it has hurt us all.

I had hoped when I wrote this book that it would be read by parents and children. In some families that has been the case. That is one of the reasons why I wrote it in a somewhat simplistic style. But I also wanted to speak to the reader in language that was conversational and easy to understand.

My speculations on natural human mothering and how humans are supposed to and should respond to their children are based on my studies but also on my life experiences with people of all ages. I am sure that most of the primitive groups that have been studied, based on how they respond to children, would agree that our way of parenting is too harsh. If they and you and I can feel the way we do about children then the first mothers might have had similar feelings. What I am saying is that feeling tenderness toward children and responding to them in a nurturing and protective manner may be intrinsic to being human.

I believe that we evolved to respond to children with tenderness and care and that babies evolved in the way they did to elicit a tender and caring response from other humans. When this is what happens, children cannot help but become caring, social beings. I believe that the imposition of one person on another is the result of learned behavior. I grew up and have lived in a society that believes that parents have the right to physically and psychologically impose themselves on their children. Children are perceived as property, as objects that parents are allowed to manipulate by almost any means to get them to behave in the ways that they, the parents, want. I do not believe this was always so and that it was better for the human species when it wasn't so. I believe mother and child to be parts of a nurturing process that begins at conception and continues for many years after birth. I also believe that the human mother evolved as she did to affirm the life of her child and by so doing establish the child's connection to other humans.

Children do not have to be hit or punished or even disciplined to become a sociable and social person. They are at birth naturally social because they cannot continue to live or develop unless they form a social relationship with their mother (or a mothering person.) To continue their social development, their sociability must be matched by caretakers who are sociable to them, who do not act in ways that will make them turn away from or against those of their kind or make them unable to affirm their own life. I have worked with many children who to survive had removed themselves from people and from life. Some, by providing them with the nurturing experience they had missed out on or lost, were able to come back and join the human species again.

On the other hand, I have known children, including my own, who were nursed for many years, nurtured and indulged for many more years, and who were never hit, spanked, punished or even disciplined. None of them as adults are disturbed, spoiled, asocial, antisocial or criminals.