Abstract

Nursing mothers face an energetic trade-off between infant care and work. Under pooled energy budgets, this trade-off can be reduced by assistance in food acquisition and infant care tasks from non-maternal carers. Across cultures, children also often provide infant care. Yet the question of who helps nursing mothers during foraging has been understudied, especially the role of children. Using focal follow data from 140 subsistence expeditions by BaYaka women in the Republic of Congo, we investigated how potential support from carers increased mothers' foraging productivity. We found that the number of girls in early childhood (ages 4–7 years) in subsistence groups increased food returns of nursing women with infants (kcal collected per minute). This effect was stronger than that of other adult women, and older girls in middle childhood (ages 8–13 years) and adolescence (ages 14–19 years). Child helpers were not necessarily genetically related to nursing women. Our results suggest that it is young girls who provide infant care while nursing mothers are acquiring food—by holding, monitoring and playing with infants—and, thus, that they also contribute to the energy pool of the community during women's subsistence activities. Our study highlights the critical role of children as carers from early childhood.