The History of Communal Childcare: From Nannies to Modern Daycare

In the early 1980s, anthropologist Barry Hewlett was living among the Aka Pygmy people in the rainforests of Central Africa. What he observed upended Western assumptions about childcare. A newborn was passed around the campfire, changing hands an average of eight times per hour. Grandmothers, aunts, twelve-year-old sisters, even fathers — an Aka infant at four months old had an average of seven to eight caregivers.^[1] Contrary to the popular belief that mothers raising children alone is “natural,” humans were never designed to raise children in isolation.

Evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy called this “cooperative breeding.” Among the great apes, humans are the only species in which individuals other than the mother actively participate in childcare — and without this arrangement, human infants, with their large brains and prolonged period of helplessness, could never have survived.^[2] Raising children together was not an invention of civilization; it was the survival strategy of the human species itself.

Primordial Communal Childcare — Alloparenting in Hunter-Gatherer Societies

“Alloparenting” refers to caregiving behavior by individuals other than the biological parents. In humans, this is a universal phenomenon, though its specific forms vary across cultures.^[3]

The Aka: A Society Where Fathers Hold Their Babies the Most

The Aka Pygmy people of the Central African Republic are the society with the highest recorded level of paternal care in human history. Aka fathers spend a significant portion of the day in physical contact with their infants and even carry them along on net-hunting expeditions.^[1] From the moment of birth, babies are passed around the campfire, receiving kisses and songs, and they spend more time in the arms of “alloparents” than with their own mothers.

The Hadza: Grandmothers Whose Foraging Feeds Their Grandchildren

Among the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania, the role of grandmothers stands out. Hadza grandmothers are dedicated foragers, and the intensity of their effort directly correlates with the nutritional status of their grandchildren.^[4] The so-called “grandmother hypothesis” seeks to explain why human women survive long past menopause precisely through this role. Even after ceasing to reproduce, helping grandchildren survive offers an evolutionary advantage in passing on one’s genes.^[2]

The Efe: Fourteen Caregivers

Among the Efe Pygmy people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a four-month-old infant has an average of fourteen caregivers.^[1] This is a striking example that nuclear-family childcare is not humanity’s “default setting.” Infants grow up surrounded by the attention and care of the entire community, and in the process, social bonds and mutual trust are formed.

Wet Nurses in Ancient Civilizations — Childcare Division Codified by Law

If communal childcare in hunter-gatherer societies was a matter of voluntary, community-wide participation, the rise of urban civilizations transformed the outsourcing of childcare into something more systematic — and at times, more ruthless.

The Wet Nurse Clause in the Code of Hammurabi

Around 1750 BCE, the Code of Hammurabi in Babylonia included specific provisions regarding wet nurses. Law 194 is remarkably harsh: if a man entrusted his child to a wet nurse and the child died in her care, and it was discovered that the wet nurse had secretly nursed another child, her breast was to be cut off.^[5] This brutal punishment followed the Code of Hammurabi’s characteristic principle of punishing the offending body part, but it also reveals that the wet nurse system was already so widespread that legal regulation had become necessary.

Ancient Egypt: The Privileges of Royal Wet Nurses

In ancient Egypt, wet nurses were far more than mere servants. Maia, the wet nurse of Tutankhamun, enjoyed such high status that she was granted her own tomb in the royal necropolis. Sitre In, the wet nurse of Queen Hatshepsut, was buried in the Valley of the Kings (KV60) despite not being a member of the royal family.^[6] Wet nurses were regarded as quasi-family members, bound to the pharaoh through a “bond of milk.”

Ancient Greece and Rome: Class-Driven Division of Childcare

By around 950 BCE in Greece, it was common for upper-class women to employ wet nurses.^[6] In Rome, slaves or freedwomen from wealthy households served as wet nurses, though professional wet nurses also existed, and the Roman Digest even contains records of wage disputes involving wet nurses.^[6] Hiring a wet nurse was not simply a matter of convenience. The upper classes believed that breastfeeding harmed a mother’s health and appearance, and employing a wet nurse was a strategic choice to enable quicker subsequent pregnancies.

The Industrial Revolution and the Birth of Daycare — A New Problem Created by the Factory

The Industrial Revolution brought a fundamental turning point in the history of childcare. For millennia, home and workplace had been the same space. Once women left the home to work in factories, the question of “who will care for the children?” emerged as an unprecedented social problem.

The Improvised Solutions of Factory Mothers

In 19th-century British textile mills, working mothers were remarkably creative. Some brought their babies to the factory in baskets, warmed their children’s lunch pies on the surface of steam engines, and stopped work at feeding time to breastfeed.^[7] In 1865, factory mothers in Yorkshire testified that they “brought the child in the basket to the mill until it was weaned.”^[7] This was a vestige of pre-industrial custom — the “right” to bring children to the workplace — but as increasingly dangerous machinery filled the factories, this practice could not last.

Robert Owen’s Infant School (1816)

The first person to address this problem systematically was Scottish industrialist Robert Owen. In 1816, he established an infant school at his New Lanark textile mill. This school, which accepted workers’ children from ages one to six, remarkably did not teach from books. Owen instructed that young children should “not be annoyed with books, but should be conversed with about objects around them, stimulating their curiosity.”^[8]

This was no mere daycare facility. It was one of the earliest attempts to combine education with childcare, and it became the starting point for the infant school movement that would spread throughout Britain, across Europe, and into the United States. In 1818, another infant school opened in Westminster, London, where teacher James Buchanan, who had worked at New Lanark, applied the same methodology.^[8]

The First Crèche in Paris (1844)

In France, a different approach emerged. On November 14, 1844, in the Chaillot district of Paris, lawyer and philanthropist Jean-Baptiste Firmin Marbeau opened the first crèche.^[9] It was quite different in character from Owen’s infant school. Rather than emphasizing education, it served more as a safe “holding facility” where working-class mothers could leave their infants while they worked in factories. Marbeau laid out the case for this institution in his 1845 book Des Crèches, and by 1846 the Société des Crèches had been established, spreading the model throughout France.^[9] This concept would go on to influence the development of daycare in North America as well.

The Birth of the Kindergarten — Fröbel’s “Garden of Children”

If Owen’s infant school was a practical solution for workers’ children, Friedrich Fröbel’s kindergarten sprang from an entirely different philosophy.

Fröbel’s Radical Claim: Children Must Play

Born in Thuringia in 1782, Fröbel was influenced by the educational thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, but he took one decisive step further. His central claim was radical for its time: children learn best through play, and subjecting them to academic instruction before the age of seven is harmful.^[10]

In 1837, Fröbel established the “Play and Activity Institute” in Bad Blankenburg, Germany. In 1840, he gave it the name Kindergarten — literally, “children’s garden.”^[10] The name, comparing children to plants and teachers to gardeners, encapsulated his entire educational philosophy.

Fröbel’s Gifts: The World’s First Educational Toys

Fröbel developed educational playthings he called “Gifts” (Gabe). Starting with simple geometric forms — spheres, cylinders, cubes — and progressing to sets of wooden blocks in various sizes and colors, these materials were designed so that children would naturally absorb mathematical and spatial concepts through hands-on manipulation.^[10] “Occupations” referred to specific activities using these materials.

The influence of Fröbel’s Gifts extended well beyond education. Frank Lloyd Wright later recalled that playing with Fröbel’s Gifts as a child had a decisive influence on his architectural philosophy.^[10]

The Spread — and Suppression — of the Kindergarten

The kindergarten spread rapidly across Europe, but it also met with unexpected resistance. In 1851, the Prussian government banned kindergartens. Fröbel’s nephew Karl Fröbel had been involved in socialist activities, and the authorities branded the entire kindergarten movement as “an institution for spreading atheism and socialism.”^[10] The ban lasted until 1860, and paradoxically, it drove many of Fröbel’s followers abroad, accelerating the global spread of the kindergarten concept.

In the United States, Margarethe Schurz opened a German-language kindergarten in Watertown, Wisconsin, in 1856, and in 1873, Susan Blow established the first public kindergarten in St. Louis.^[10]

The Victorian Nanny — Professional Caregivers in Place of Parents

While Fröbel’s kindergarten was spreading across continental Europe, an entirely different childcare system was taking shape in Britain.

In upper- and middle-class households of the Victorian era (1837–1901), parents were not expected to be directly involved in childcare. After birth, a child was handed to a wet nurse, then to a nanny, and from ages five to seven, to a governess.^[11] In many cases, parents saw their children for about an hour a day, during a scheduled visit in the drawing room.

The Nanny: Emotional Mother, Social Servant

The nanny was a senior domestic employee who presided over the nursery of a large household, and many remained with the same family for decades. Ironically, it was the nanny, not the parents, who formed the deepest emotional bond with the children.^[11]

The Governess: A Woman Who Belonged Nowhere

The governess occupied the most socially awkward position in the household. She was an educated woman of middle-class origins, yet she was a paid servant. It was common for her to eat alone, unable to dine with either the family or the other servants.^[12] In 1851, more than 25,000 women in Britain earned their living as governesses.^[11]

The Professionalization of the Nanny: Norland College

In 1892, Emily Ward founded Norland College, elevating the nanny to a recognized profession.^[11] With systematic training and formal qualifications, “Norland Nannies” continue to serve the British Royal Family and other elite households to this day. The college marked a turning point, transforming nannies from informal caregivers into child development professionals.

The Kibbutz Experiment — The Most Radical Form of Communal Childcare

In the 20th century, a deliberate attempt emerged to recreate the communal childcare of ancient hunter-gatherer societies.

The Children’s House (Beit Yeladim)

From the 1920s onward, Israeli kibbutzim adopted communal sleeping arrangements. Children lived apart from their parents. Groups of same-age children lived together in a “children’s house,” where professional caregivers called metaplot (singular: metapelet) handled day-to-day care.^[13] Children saw their biological parents for only a few hours each day.

When Ideology Meets Reality

The ideological basis of this system was equality — freeing women from the constraints of motherhood so they could participate equally in the community’s labor.^[13] But reality proved complicated. In 1977, psychologist Nathan Fox’s research showed that kibbutz children displayed anxiety responses when separated from both their mothers and their metaplot.^[13] The children had formed attachment bonds with two different caregiving figures.

Follow-up studies of adults who grew up in kibbutzim revealed both the strengths and weaknesses of the system. Strong peer bonds and independence were cited as advantages, but some individuals reported emotional distance from their parents and insecure attachment patterns.^[13]

The End of the Experiment

The communal sleeping arrangement was maintained for roughly 60 to 70 years before being abolished in the 1990s — by the kibbutz members themselves.^[13] Children went back to sleeping with their parents. However, daytime communal childcare programs continued in most kibbutzim, forming the foundation for Israel’s high level of childcare accessibility today.

The Formation of Modern Childcare Systems — The State Steps In

From the mid-20th century onward, communal childcare was no longer a matter of voluntary community practice or private employment arrangements; it entered the domain of national policy.

War-Built Childcare Infrastructure

Paradoxically, the two World Wars made the greatest contribution to the expansion of modern childcare systems. With men away at the front, women were deployed to munitions factories and farms, creating an urgent need for facilities to care for their children. In the United States, the Lanham Act of 1942 marked the first time the federal government funded childcare facilities.^[14] When the war ended, most of these facilities closed, but the precedent had been set: the state could take responsibility for childcare.

The Emergence of the Nordic Model

In the 1960s and 1970s, Scandinavian countries, led by Sweden, began defining universal childcare as a state obligation. In 1975, Sweden passed legislation providing free early childhood education for all six-year-olds, and subsequently extended coverage to progressively younger ages.^[15] The core principle of this model was viewing childcare not as a burden on individual families, but as a social investment.

Different Countries, Different Choices

Today, childcare systems vary dramatically from country to country. France’s crèche system, evolved from Marbeau’s 1844 model, provides a tightly woven, state-supported childcare network. Germany, building on Fröbel’s legacy, guarantees the legal right to childcare for all children over three. The United States, by contrast, lacks a universal childcare system and relies heavily on the private market. Japan has grappled for decades with the problem of taiki jido — children on waiting lists who cannot get into childcare facilities.^[16]

What It Means to Raise a Child Together

“It takes a village to raise a child” — this African proverb may have become a cliche, but from the perspective of evolutionary anthropology, it is less a proverb than a scientific fact.

From the Efe’s fourteen caregivers to the wet nurse clause in the Code of Hammurabi, from Fröbel’s kindergarten to the kibbutz children’s house — the forms have changed, but the essence remains the same. Human children are exceptionally helpless for an exceptionally long time, require an exceptional amount of resources, and therefore need an exceptional number of hands. In Hrdy’s words, humans are “cooperative breeders.”^[2]

What is particularly striking about this long history is that the notion of “a mother raising a child alone is natural” is a relatively recent invention. After industrialization and the nuclear family dismantled the tradition of communal childcare, the state and the market have been filling the void. In the end, modern daycare centers and kindergartens may be nothing more than the institutionalization of what humanity has been doing for millions of years — raising children together.