ArticleHuman nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.)2019
Crucial Contributions : A Biocultural Study of Grandmothering During the Perinatal Period.
Article in Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.), 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 53 citations in OpenAlex.
- Grandparental Support and Maternal Postpartum Mental Health : A Review and Meta-Analysis.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Pooled it
- A Cross-Sectional Content Analysis Exploring Women's Experiences of Family Support Towards Tandem Breastfeeding in a Global Facebook Group sample.Maternal and child health journal · 2026Article
- Nurture together: trauma-informed and culturally safe perinatal support for migrant mothers.Frontiers in global women's health · 2026Article
- Grandmaternal caregiving is associated with a distinct multi-voxel neural representation of grandchildren in the parental motivation circuit.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Demography of grandmothering: a case study in Agta foragers.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Collecting real-time infant feeding and support experience: co-participatory pilot study of mobile health methodology.International breastfeeding journal · 2025Article
- Social learning is critical to breastfeeding success: Evidence from rural Namibian pastoralists.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2025Article
- Maternal grandmothers buffer the effects of ethnic discrimination among pregnant Latina mothers.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Grandmothers matter: how grandmothers promote maternal perinatal mental health and child development.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
- Lonely, stressed-out moms: Does the postindustrial social experience put women at risk for perinatal mood disorders?Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2024Review
- Hunter-Gatherer children's close-proximity networks: Similarities and differences with cooperative and communal breeding systems.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Meager Milk: Lasting Consequences for Adult Daughters of Primiparous Mothers Among Rhesus Macaques (Macaca mulatta).Integrative and comparative biology · 2023Article
- How prenatal cortisol levels relate to grandmother-mother relationships among a cohort of Latina women.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2023Article
- An evolutionary perspective on the association between grandmother-mother relationships and maternal mental health among a cohort of pregnant Latina women.Evolution and human behavior : official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society · 2023Article
- Maternal capital predicts investment in infant growth and development through lactation.Frontiers in nutrition · 2023Article
- Testing the buffering hypothesis: Breastfeeding problems, cessation, and social support in the UK.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2022Article
- Cesarean section and breastfeeding outcomes in an Indigenous Qom community with high breastfeeding support.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2022Article
- Rethinking the Fertility Transition in Rural Aragón (Spain) Using Height Data.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- The differential role of practical and emotional support in infant feeding experience in the UK.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Children are important too: juvenile playgroups and maternal childcare in a foraging population, the Agta.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Maternal grandmothers play a key role in allomaternal care, directly caring for and provisioning their grandchildren as well as helping their daughters with household chores and productive labor. Previous studies have investigated these contributions across a broad time period, from infancy through toddlerhood. Here, we extend and refine the grandmothering literature to investigate the perinatal period as a critical window for grandmaternal contributions. We propose that mother-daughter co-residence during this period affords targeted grandmaternal effort during a period of heightened vulnerability and appreciable impact. We conducted two focus groups and 37 semi-structured interviews with Himba women. Interviews focused on experiences from their first and, if applicable, their most recent birth and included information on social support, domains of teaching and learning, and infant feeding practices. Our qualitative findings reveal three domains in which grandmothers contribute: learning to mother, breastfeeding support, and postnatal health and well-being. We show that informational, emotional, and instrumental support provided to new mothers and their neonates during the perinatal period can aid in the establishment of the mother-infant bond, buffer maternal energy balance, and improve nutritional outcomes for infants. These findings demonstrate that the role of grandmother can be crucial, even when alloparenting is common and breastfeeding is frequent and highly visible. Situated within the broader anthropological and clinical literature, these findings substantiate the claim that humans have evolved in an adaptive sociocultural perinatal complex in which grandmothers provide significant contributions to the health and well-being of their reproductive-age daughters and grandchildren.
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