Raising Children With the Village: a Cross-Cultural Investigation of Allomothering and its Associations with Child Health

Rebecca Sear, Brunel University London
Anushé Hassan, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM)
Laure Spake, University of Otago
Radim Chvaja, University of Otago
Susan Schaffnit, PSU
Mary Shenk, The Pennsylvania State University
Richard Sosis, University of Connecticut
John Shaver, University of Otago

Considerable research supports the saying “it takes a village to raise a child”. Children are not raised by mothers alone, but by also by allomothers – anyone other than the mother providing childcare. Much research has focused on specific allomothers, particularly grandparents and siblings. Further, research testing for associations between allomothering and child health is mixed; while allomothering is often associated with improved child health, there are some null or negative associations. Here we expand the evidence for allomothering by presenting data on allomothering networks in full across five countries, detailing how many individuals children receive support from, who those individuals are and what types of support they provide. We then test for associations between allomothering and child nutrition. We collected data from 3997 mothers in Bangladesh, Gambia, India, Malawi, and US. Analyses showed that mothers receive support from multiple individuals for raising children, but there is variation between contexts in these allomothering networks; both in their size and who provides most support. We find no associations between allomothering and child height or weight. We conclude that the strongest evidence for the importance of alloparenting is its widespread nature; associations between allomothering and child outcomes are likely to be context-specific.

Keywords: Families, Unions and Households, Children, Adolescents, and Youth, Comparative methods

See extended abstract.