Jean Liedloff

Jean Liedloff (November 26, 1926 – March 15, 2011) was an American author, born in New York City, and best known for her 1975 book The Continuum Concept. She is the aunt of writer Janet Hobhouse, and is represented by the character Constance in Hobhouse's book "The Furies." Born in New York City in 1926, as a teenager she attended the Drew Seminary for Young Women and began studying at Cornell University, but began her expeditions before she could graduate.

Quotes

• In the two and a half years during which I lived among Stone Age Indians in the South American jungle (not all at once, but on five separate expeditions with a lot of time between them for reflection), I came to see that our human nature is not what we have been brought up to believe it is. Babies of the Yequana tribe, far from needing peace and quiet to go to sleep, snoozed blissfully whenever they were tired, while the men, women, or children carrying them danced, ran, walked, shouted, or paddled canoes. Toddlers played together without fighting or arguing, and they obeyed their elders instantly and willingly.
  • The Importance of the In-Arms Phase, Jean Liedloff, Mothering magazine, Winter 1989, https://continuumconcept.org/articles/in-arms-phase

• The notion of punishing a child had apparently never occurred to these people, nor did their behavior show anything that could truly be called permissiveness. No child would have dreamed of inconveniencing, interrupting, or being waited on by an adult. And by the age of four, children were contributing more to the work force in their family than they were costing others.
  • The Importance of the In-Arms Phase, Jean Liedloff, Mothering magazine, Winter 1989

• 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.
  • Allowing Human Nature To Work Successfully, A very candid interview with Jean Liedloff, by Michael Mendizza, Touch The Future, Fall/1998, https://continuumconcept.org/articles/human-nature

• 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.
  • Allowing Human Nature To Work Successfully, A very candid interview with Jean Liedloff, by Michael Mendizza, Touch The Future, Fall/1998

Quotes about person/work

• The anthropologist without portfolio was Jean Liedloff, and she couldn’t help puzzling over what could be setting these kids so strikingly apart from any Western children in her experience. The mothering practices of the Yequana women suddenly came into focus. Liedloff observed that the Yequana, unlike most Western mothers, were in constant physical contact with their babies until the babies started moving around on their own. By day mothers carried their babies in slings. This way the baby had access to the breast and could nurse at will. By night each family shared a single sleeping place, allowing the baby’s attachment to the mother to proceed uninterrupted. Liedloff also noticed that the babies were not the center of their mothers’ attention.
  • An Interview with Jean Liedloff by Chris Mercogliano https://continuumconcept.org/articles/JFL-interview