This is one of the most fascinating interviews I've ever read! Jean Liedloff shares some of the realizations she had about child-rearing and human nature after living for over 2 years with Stone Age Indians in the Venezuelan jungle.

Laurel Blair, NTP
www.dynamicbalancenutrition.com


A very candid conversation with Jean Liedloff
Author of The Continuum Concept

Interview by Michael Mendizza

How did you happen to find yourself in South America living with a community of Stone Age Indians? Tell me the story.

On my first trip abroad, as a good American girl from New York, I first went to France then to Italy where I was introduced to a blond, blue-eyed Count called Eurico. He was so successful with the girls that he had become extremely conceited. I would not have anything to do with him — except for the fact that he was soon leaving to look for diamonds in the South American jungle and had fascinating stories to tell about his adventures. As he was saying good-bye to his friends he suddenly turned and asked me, "Why don't you come to the jungle with us?" Even though I found him terribly arrogant the thought of the jungle was thrilling, so I immediately said yes. We had just twenty minutes before the train left, so we rushed to my hotel, threw a few things into a suitcase, rushed across this huge piazza, and jumped on the train which was already pulling out of the station. It was very dramatic.

It all sounds rather exotic, given your prim and proper background.

I guess that being prudish was a crude form of idealism. But five and a half months in the jungle that first trip had its effect and I came out a very different girl.

It was quite an experience for a sheltered Manhattanite, hiking through the jungle, meeting snakes and scorpions, sleeping in a hammock. Even though there were jaguars and crocodiles, the worst for me were the things that made you itch. Of course diamonds were the object — technically speaking. For me the attraction was the word "jungle." There was a kind of rightness that one missed in New York. That was what I was unconsciously seeking.

The jungle represented something you felt was missing from your New York background. Can you reach back and help me understand this?

 As a child I was attracted to Tarzan and everything that had to do with jungles. It seemed to me — and this is in retrospect — that there was something primal, something right about it.

Tarzan represented a pure being, somehow before the fall. It was not the diamonds I came home talking about, it was the Indians and how they lived, what kind of lives they had and what the children were like.

I was so drawn by this first experience that I made four more expeditions and on these we went into unexplored regions. The people we encountered were living in the Stone Age.

I suppose I was looking for what I found and shouldn't have been so surprised when I found it, which wasn't until the fourth expedition. It was then I realized that I had unlearned a great many assumptions that I had about human nature.

It became clear that we have made a terrible mistake about what human nature is. We are under the misapprehension that we're born bad, or in the official words of the Church of England, innately depraved, and that is simply not true.

Let's go back. You said that you started to have a series of insights.

I was taking my assumptions apart, thinking, "gosh, if this isn't true then that isn't true." I was living for more than two years with these Indians, looking straight at them and not really seeing them, because I was so blinded by preconceptions. I didn't even notice that, amazingly, the children never fought. They played together all day unsupervised, all ages, from crawling, to walking to adolescence. Not only did they not fight, they never even argued. This is not at all what we have been taught human nature is — boys will be boys. So I thought well maybe, boys won't be boys.

It was a long time before I began to notice what was before my eyes. One thinks, "Well, these are savages. They wear red paint and feather loin cloths, so they're not people." But they're exactly the same species as we are, except they are behaving the way we all evolved to behave. We, on the other hand, are mistreated as infants and children, treated inappropriately for our species.

As a result, we keep re-creating an anti-social population. Nobody's born rotten. You just don't have bad kids. It's not true. There is no such thing. But we can make them bad.

Ironically, the reason it's possible to make these profoundly social animals bad or anti-social is because we are so social. Our parents, our tribesman, our authority figures, clearly expect us to be bad or anti-social or greedy or selfish or dirty or destructive or self-destructive. Our social nature is such that we tend to meet the expectations of our elders. Whenever this reversal took place and our elders stopped expecting us to be social and expected us to be anti-social, just to put it in gross terms, that's when the real fall took place. And we're paying for it dearly.

Just imagine the neurotic and psychopathic people that we have become. Why do we have a 50% divorce rate? Why do we have so many police? It's not just Americans, it's the whole of Western civilization laboring under a misapprehension of what human nature truly is. That's what I learned from my experiences.

One of my later partners, a Belgian, when he saw the little Indian boys running around with their bows and arrows, whooping and jumping, used to say as a joke: they were playing Indians. The fact is, no matter how roughly and wildly they played, it was never antagonistic. Very rarely did they have accidents and there was no supervision by adults.

Children, three, four and five years old would carry babies around all day. No one was saying, "Sit here and you can hold the baby while you're sitting down," or, "Watch out." Very small children are trusted to take care of infants because, five minutes ago they were babies themselves. They just know how to take care of babies.

Here we are, great big grown-up louts in our twenties or thirties reading books about how to take care of babies. I'd be embarrassed to admit to the Indians that our women don't know how to take care of their children until they read instructions written in a book by a man, a man they've never met. The Indians wouldn't have any respect for me. If you were there, you wouldn't either.

In the jungle every man, every woman, every child knows how to take care of babies. I don't mean to be disrespectful to our experts. They may be able to distinguish a measle from a mump, which is very useful if you have one or the other. But that doesn't, for one minute, give them deep knowledge of correct human behavior.

Researchers faithfully try to document what is normal. Nobody I know really wants a normal child. Just look at normal. It includes what's called the terrible twos, which are sort of wild, bossy tantrum-prone con-men. Luckily they're small otherwise we'd really be in trouble. And we've got God knows what kinds of drudgery and alienation for children and parents.

We use the word normal as though it were a synonym for natural, which it is not. Normal is how we think children must be. This includes things like three month colic, where babies are constantly vomiting. They call it spitting up so it doesn't sound like a real illness, but it is an illness. It's painful. This happens even when babies are drinking their mother's milk. They're throwing up. There are contractions and a lot of pain.

How can we believe that we alone evolved over millions of years without being able to digest our own mother's milk? Why are normal babies so stressed that they can't keep their food down?

The babies I saw in the jungle never had indigestion unless they were ill with a fever. Babies never threw up. They were not wriggling and struggling and arching and flexing and squeaking like ours do normally.

Are there other examples of the difference between natural and normal?

We oppose the baby from the start, coached by experts and the society around us, not by our own feelings. We wage a war of wills: the baby is hungry and cries and we say no, it's got to be four hours between feedings.

Studies show that the butter fat content of mammalian milk indicates that it is the human baby's nature to nurse approximately every twenty minutes... and obviously the baby is supposed to be in the mother's arms where the milk is available.

When the baby is first born things are stuck up its nose and down its throat to clear them. Then it's weighed and measured, which isn't doing it any good at this very sensitive moment. For what, the Bureau of Statistics?

What the baby needs is to be in its mothers arms, and the mother even more so needs to have the baby in her arms to share this beautiful moment of falling in love, which is exquisitely choreographed by hormones.

Even if logically, we aren't interested in this total stranger who we just caused pain, who isn't very cute at that stage anyway, it is our nature to fall madly in love with it and to put it's life above our own.

If you were exhausted after giving birth you could say, "Oh well forget it. Just drop that little stranger in the river. Or just leave it there for a minute. I'll be back later," at which time the wolves might have gobbled it up.

It's very important to have this great moment of falling in love, known as bonding. It's built in because it has to be for our survival. It has to have been there for us to have become the successful species we are, successful meaning that we survived.

Today normal is adversarial. The baby arrives and has an innate expectation that it will be among trustworthy allies. That's not what happens. From the baby's point of view he or she feels like "they're not on my side."

"Whatever I want, they say no. I want to be with my mother. I want to be close. I want to be safe. I want to be with someone alive, who's breathing and warm and smells right and feels right and who touches me and helps me feel my own flesh appropriately, not a lifeless box with a lifeless cloth. I don't want to hear myself screaming in my own ears, and hear other people screaming around me and get no response. When I scream I expect something to happen. Not just to scream but because I'm waiting. I'm expecting something and it doesn't come and I scream until I'm exhausted."

So normal is adversarial. I hope people realize that what they're doing with all the love in their hearts, and I have no doubt of that, is adversarial.

When you're following the advice of the doctors or the experts or your mother-in-law, your mother or your sister or whomever; when you are feeding the baby on a schedule, denying it physical contact, not allowing it to sleep with you and be with you, twenty-four hours a day, not less, then you're being adversarial.

It's perfectly clear that the millions of babies, who are crying at this very moment, want unanimously to be next to a live body. Do you really think they're all wrong? Theirs is the voice of nature. This is the clear, pure voice of nature, without intellectual interference.

The baby knows what it needs, and the minute you put it down, it cries. It's letting you know. It's signaling you perfectly clearly, "don't put me down!" And we have built into us equally, without a dictionary, the knowledge of what it means when the baby goes "waa, waa, waa." We know it means, "pick me up. Don't put me down. Don't leave me!"

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