Nikola Raihani
I managed to grab the remote control from the kids and stretched out on the sofa, preparing myself for what was to come.
It was in March 2020, when the number of cases of the new and dangerous coronavirus in the UK was rapidly increasing.
The Prime Minister was preparing to declare a general quarantine in the country.
Schools and kindergartens were supposed to be closed.
Just like millions of other parents, I was about to become a de facto school teacher for young children.
The very thought of it filled me with horror.
And I wasn't the only one who felt that way.
My phone was buzzing with messages flooding the school's WhatsApp channel.
Parents wondered how they would meet the demands of daily tasks while simultaneously dealing with adverbial clauses and sharing with the rest.
In the months that followed, many parents felt unbearable pressure on mental and physical health.
Lockdowns and school closures continued, along with reports of worrying increase in parental stress, anxiety and depression.
Many have wondered why it's all so difficult.
Shouldn't we be naturally good at raising our children without any outside help?
Didn't people manage without schools in the past?
As an evolutionary biologist, I don't have the answers to all the pandemic-related family crises, but I can say one thing for sure: as a species, humans are spectacularly ill-prepared for parenting in isolation.
From an evolutionary perspective, it's not surprising that many of us feel overwhelmed.
Despite the common idea that the modern family consists of small, independent units, the reality is that we often benefit from help raising our offspring.
For most of human history, extended families have provided support.
In modern, industrialized societies, where smaller family units are more common, teachers, nannies, and other caregivers have allowed us to emulate that historical support network.
This collaborative way of raising children makes us unique among the great apes.
Called "cooperative parenting," it is seemingly more similar to how species more distant from us, such as meerkats or even ants, live - and has brought some key evolutionary advantages.
Species that use cooperative rearing They live in large family groups in which individuals cooperate in raising offspring.
Perhaps surprisingly, other great apes, such as chimpanzees, do not approach parenting in this way.
Although both humans and chimpanzees live in complex social groups, consisting of relatives and non-relatives, a closer analysis reveals some drastic differences.
Mother chimpanzees raise their newborns same, with very little or no help from anyone else, even his father.
The same goes for gorillas, orangutans, and bonobos.
Moreover, female great apes do not go through physiological menopause, meaning they remain fertile throughout their lives.
As a result, it is quite common for mother and daughter they raise offspring at the same time.
This limits the ability of great ape grandmothers to help raise grandchildren.
We are obviously different.
For most of their time on Earth, humans have lived in extended family units, where mothers received help from many other family members.
In many modern human societies, this is still the case.
Fathers among men often participate in raising offspring, although the extent to which they are involved varies considerably from society to society.
Newborns also often receive input from various other relatives, such as older siblings, aunts and uncles, and, of course, bake i deke.
Even young children can play a key role in helping to raise and protect younger children.
In such an environment, the burden of childcare very rarely falls on just one person.
Abby Paige, a biological anthropologist who has worked extensively with the Agtama, a hunter-gatherer society in the Philippines, says we are only beginning to understand the true reach of such traditional support networks.
For example, among the Agta, children as young as four years old are often already productive members of the family.
"Children's contributions are often overlooked," says Page.
In the past, due to strict concepts of what constitutes work and play, researchers usually failed to notice that a child might be playing nearby at one moment and picking fruit from a bush at another.
"Children definitely help themselves in these kinds of hunter-gatherer societies," she says.
Agta children also help by protecting younger siblings from danger.
Paige recalled a time when she was sitting in one of the Agta family huts with a four-year-old boy and his baby sister.
All three were sitting on the ground when a scorpion walked into the hut.
Paige admits she panicked: "I wasn't the least bit helpful."
Luckily, the little boy knew what to do.
"He immediately jumped up, took a stick from the fire and hit the scorpion, then proceeded to jump on it several times."
This simple act is potentially saved his sister's life.
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This experience led Paige to reconsider what meaningful childcare actually means.
In the West, childcare usually means that a responsible adult, often a parent, not only looks after a young child, but also tries to keep the child engaged and stimulated.
When parents cannot achieve this, for example because they are busy with work, they may feel guilty or that they may be incompetent.
But Page's research showed many other ways children can stay safe and thrive, without an intense emphasis solely on parents.
Moreover, sibling care, where older children help raise younger siblings, is a defining characteristic of species that employ cooperative parenting.
Meerkats search for food to share with their young and keep their cubs in their den.
They teach the cubs how to safely handle the dangerous animals that are their prey.
Females even they produce milk so that they can feed their younger brothers and sisters.
Just like the child who saved his sister from a scorpion, some of the most important forms of care in these cooperative societies involve protecting younger individuals: protecting them from predators and from trouble in general.
Cooperative parenting has a key advantage over many solitary forms of child rearing: it can make a species more resilient and most likely evolved as a way to combat various adversities.
Many species that use cooperative breeding can be found in the hottest, driest regions on the planet.
People also inhabited in the past raw regions where food was hard to find, which had to be gathered, scavenged, or killed.
Cooperation was a prerequisite for survival in a way that it is not for modern apes.
Our ape relatives today live in relatively stable, innocuous environments - practically giant salad bowls - where it is much easier to get the food they need to keep themselves and any offspring that depend on them alive.
Humans appear to have been the only apes capable of surviving in such harsh environments: apes are absent from the fossil record in these regions.
Paradoxically, our tendency to cooperate, which has allowed us to survive and thrive for so long, has probably made the crisis we have recently gone through all the more difficult from a psychological and practical perspective.
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During lockdown, we were cut off from people in our support networks: grandparents, aunts and uncles, but also schools, daycares and playgroups, all of which helped to mimic our ancient human group structures.
Not only that, but we were also expected to rely entirely on our small family units as if it were a perfectly instinctive thing.
For many of us, it seemed almost impossible, and there is no real explanation for why it seemed that way.
After all, our Western idea of the family places a great deal of emphasis on maternal care and very little on the contributions of other family members.
The expectation is that mothers and fathers, or even mothers themselves, be more than sufficient as guardians.
However, according to Rebecca Sir, professor of evolutionary demography at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, this idea of a self-sustaining nuclear family reflects the experiences and views of Western researchers rather than historical reality.
The idea of the nuclear family, supported by a male breadwinner, became particularly entrenched in the postwar period, at a time when "academic circles were full of rich, white, Western men who looked at their own families and thought that was how it had always been," says Sir.
The term "nuclear family" first appeared in the 1920s.
The family structure itself, which centers on two parents and a relatively small number of children, is older and could be linked to the Industrial Revolution, when the shift from agriculture to manufacturing enabled more independent lifestyles.
An alternative explanation is that politics Western churches in the Middle Ages, which prohibited marriages between relatives and other extended family members, led to the decline of family units.
But despite the nuclear family being such a ubiquitous concept in 20th-century Western scholarship and popular culture, including countless novels, films and TV series, Sir explains that it is actually quite an anomaly, even in the West.
"Cohabitation between parents and children alone is relatively rare around the world," says Sir.
"There are many variations of family structure in the world, but what is common is that parents receive help in raising children, and this is true even for the Western middle classes."
The usual arrangement for humans is not a couple raising their young in isolation, she explains.
Instead, when it comes to raising children, we usually need help, and we get it.
Nor is the idea of women as mothers and homemakers as traditional as it is sometimes presented.
In historical and contemporary societies, women play a significant role in production for their own families.
Women are also breadwinners.
With this different view of the human family, perhaps our expectations of parenting during a pandemic would also be different.
Instead of assuming that parents, and especially mothers, should carry the burden (and they do), perhaps we could have acknowledged the crucial role of other family members and caregivers.
With an awareness of how dependent we are on each other in raising our offspring, perhaps we could have been gentler with others - and ourselves - while we struggled.
Expecting humans to parent like chimpanzees is a bit like isolating an ant from its colony: we're not necessarily prepared for it - and it often doesn't end well.
Admitting that we need others is not a sign of failure, but rather what makes us human.
Nikola Raihani is Professor of Evolution and Behaviour at University College London, and the author of the book The social instinct: How cooperation shaped the world . She is @nicholaraihani on Iksu.
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