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Breastfeeding Duration and the Social Learning of Infant Feeding Knowledge in Two Maya Communities

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Abstract

Variation in the durations of exclusive breastfeeding (exBF) and any breastfeeding (anyBF) is associated with socioecological factors. This plasticity in breastfeeding behavior appears adaptive, but the mechanisms involved are unclear. With this concept in mind, we investigated whether durations of exBF and anyBF in a rural Maya population covary with markers of a form of socioecological change—market integration—and whether individual factors (individual learning, physiological plasticity) and/or learning from others in the community (social learning, norm adherence) mediate these changes. Using data from 419 mother-child pairs from two Guatemalan Maya villages, we fit a bivariate linear mixed model. The model compared exBF and anyBF among children from households of varying degrees of market integration whose mothers follow what we inferred to be local infant-feeding norms. It controlled for other factors expected to affect breastfeeding durations. We found evidence that exBF is associated with whether mothers follow their population’s infant feeding norms, but no evidence that exBF is associated with the household’s level of market integration. Conversely, anyBF is significantly associated with the household’s market integration, but not with the villages’ inferred norms. Because deviations from exBF norms are likely to result in infant mortality and reduced fitness, we hypothesize that the incentive to conform is relatively strong. Relatively greater individual plasticity in anyBF allows mother-child pairs to tailor it to socioecological conditions. Deviations from anyBF norms may be tolerated because they may provide later-life health/fitness payoffs, while posing few risks to infant survival.

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Notes

  1. The child’s mother was reinterviewed and confirmed her initial report. However, it is unlikely that a human child could survive on breastmilk alone for 60 months, so we have elected to treat the data point as an error in recall.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the contributions of a number of people and organizations to this manuscript. First, we are deeply indebted to the women who made the field portion of this research possible, both the Maya participants and the capable and determined research assistants from both Canada and Guatemala who invested countless hours into relationship-building and data collection. We thank also Dr. Mayron Martinez, Director of the VII Health Region in Sololá, Guatemala, and the Health Region’s staff for their support. Additionally, we thank Dr. Nicole Berry (SFU), members of SFU’s Human Evolutionary Studies Program (now Crawford Lab) and Maternal and Child Health Lab, the editorial staff of Human Nature, and four anonymous reviewers for thoughtful comments that greatly improved the quality of this manuscript. Finally, we thank our funders for generous financial support: The Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, The National Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada, The Michael Smith Foundation, Simon Fraser University, the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences and Department of Anthropology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada

    Luseadra J. McKerracher

  2. Department of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada

    Luseadra J. McKerracher & Mark Collard

  3. Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada

    Pablo Nepomnaschy

  4. Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada

    Rachel MacKay Altman

  5. Johanna and Brian Lawson Centre for Child Nutrition and Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

    Daniel Sellen

Authors
  1. Luseadra J. McKerracher
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  2. Pablo Nepomnaschy
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  3. Rachel MacKay Altman
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  4. Daniel Sellen
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  5. Mark Collard
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Correspondence to Luseadra J. McKerracher.

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McKerracher, L.J., Nepomnaschy, P., Altman, R.M. et al. Breastfeeding Duration and the Social Learning of Infant Feeding Knowledge in Two Maya Communities. Hum Nat 31, 43–67 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-019-09358-0

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