Animals that debunk the myth of maternal instinct

We’re in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, in the 1980s. It’s hot, and a baby elephant seems too weak to stand. It’s been four hours since its birth, and it still hasn’t tasted a drop of milk. With it are three desperate females: its mother, Tallulah, a 17-year-old first-time mother; Tara, a teenager from her family group; and Cynthia Moss, a U.S. scientist watching the scene from her car.

“I desperately wanted to do something, but I knew I shouldn’t interfere,” Moss writes in Elephant Memoirs. She had been watching Tallulah’s clumsiness for a while, and she seemed completely bewildered. The calf didn’t even seem to know which of the two elephants was its mother, and every time it approached Tallulah’s nipple, she made some movement that prevented the contact. Finally, to Moss’s relief, the calf managed to latch on to the nipple and began feeding. It survived.

Five days earlier, the researcher had witnessed a completely different birth. Deborah, a 47-year-old matriarch, gave birth calmly. From the first moment, she seemed confident. When her baby fell during its first steps, she gently used her trunk to help it up. Barely an hour and a half later, it was already nursing.

Cynthia Moss wasn’t the only scientist in Amboseli observing births and watching with concern with the clumsiness of first-time mothers. Jeanne Altmann was one of the first to question the so-called maternal instinct in animals. She followed baboons for years, and documented scenes that are hard to ignore: “Vicky, Vee’s first baby, failed to latch on to the nipple during her first day of life; her mother carried her upside down, and even dragged her and banged her on the ground for much of the day.”

Vicky wasn’t as lucky as the baby elephant. She died after a month. And this is normal: among primates, the mortality rate of firstborn babies can be up to 60% higher than that of their later-born siblings.

These findings call into question the maternal instinct. But there’s more. Unlike elephants or baboons, women can be asked if they love their children. Maria, a 23-year-old Brazilian woman, came to the Perinatal Listening project for help: she couldn’t love for her three-year-old son.

Natural or cultural bond?

This is not an isolated case. A study published in 2024 in the journal Social Science & Medicine explored whether mother-baby bonding in young mothers supports the idea of a maternal instinct or whether, on the contrary, it is influenced by sociocultural factors and individual experiences. The results were mixed: two-thirds of mothers reported feeling an immediate attachment, one-third did not.

Evidence like this has given rise to numerous popular and opinion articles in international media such as The Guardian and The New York Times, with compelling titles such as The Big Idea: Why the Maternal Instinct Is a Myth and Maternal Instinct Is a Myth Men Created. But before debating whether it truly exists, it’s worth asking: do we really understand what an instinct is?

More than a well-defined concept, instinct seems to function as an umbrella term, a label we apply to certain behaviors that meet certain conditions: they appear from birth, they do not require learning, they manifest themselves similarly in all individuals of a species, they are dictated by genetics, they are automatically activated by certain stimuli, and they seem beyond the control of reason.

Thus, we naturally speak of the survival instinct, the predatory instinct, the migratory instinct, or the maternal instinct. These labels are convenient for us, but, according to neuroscientist Mark S. Blumberg, scratch the surface of any complex behavior, and you find an endless series of difficult questions: “The deeper we delve into these topics, the harder it becomes to get a clear picture of what instinct really means.”

Let’s consider an example: a bear appears. Your pupils dilate, your heart races, and you run away as a reflex. Nothing seems more instinctive than running away, but if you think about it, we aren’t born knowing how to run. The opposite also holds true: a blind baby smiles; this gesture is innate. However, with experience, we learn the appropriate context and can decide when to smile and when not to.

The line between instinct and reason, or innate and learned, is blurry. An individual’s behavior arises from a network of interacting processes. Genes play a fundamental role, but they do not create traits on their own. Instincts are not closed programs, but rather develop through a complex interaction of physical, biological, and environmental factors.

From the innate to the learned

Often, what seems like an instinct is actually a predisposition to learn certain behaviors more easily. Take the example of the fear of snakes. It took psychologist Susan Mineka just a few minutes to get laboratory monkeys to develop a lifelong fear of snakes. All she had to do was show them videos of other monkeys being scared of a snake. However, when she performed the same procedure, but with other stimuli, such as flowers or stuffed rabbits, she found it impossible for the monkeys to develop a fear of them. They are born ready to learn to fear snakes.

In some cases, this predisposition to learn is so strong that it seems animals are born with that knowledge. It’s a gradient. Generally speaking, the more complex an animal’s nervous system (as in elephants, primates, or humans), the greater the flexibility and adaptability of its behavior. As Mark S. Blumberg says, the challenge is to stop labeling behaviors as instinctive and begin to understand the complex web of influences that shapes who we are.

Of course, we’re not born knowing how to parent, but we’re mammals, and nurturing isn’t entirely foreign to us. Babies’ features — their large eyes, rounded cheeks, and fragility — awaken a tenderness in us. We want to cuddle them. When they cry, we sense their distress and seek to soothe them. We also learn quickly: Tallulah, that first-time elephant in Amboseli, probably knew how to handle her next calf much better.

In humans and other animals, this process isn’t exclusive to females. When a child is born, brain chemistry changes, and not only in the mother giving birth. For example, fathers experience a surge in oxytocin, the bonding hormone, comparable to that of biological mothers. Another study revealed that they too can identify their baby’s face with the same accuracy.

So no, no human is born knowing how to raise a child, but somehow we are all equipped to learn how.

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