"Traditional values" is a sort of code phrase that refers to imaginary good old days when mother and father and children lived in a stable unit as the father earned the living and the mother ran the home.

Our real traditional values go back way beyond the supposititious times, and we can strengthen families and society if we learn from the implications of our evolutionary roots, the real traditional values that shaped us--especially that prolonged and intensive maternal care is imperative for our young. This traditional value, extending from past eons, is the single most important factor for an infant's start toward success or failure. The recent and alarming Carnegie Report tells us this.

We can and must learn from anthropology that our hominid and ape-like ancestors were anything but the brutish and aggressive creatures of stereotype. On the contrary, they lived in small, cohesive bands in which each individual knew the others and each mattered. Each had to rely on the others. As bodies stood upright and eye-hand coordination grew greater and brains expanded, tribal ties and communication intensified. People lived at peace with each other, trusting and cooperating, and taught their young to live so. Had they not, our species never could have evolved.

In this context, the mother who carried, bore and suckled her infant was the primary caretaker. Infants born in an increasingly unfinished state required increased care as their brains enlarged after birth and sought it first and foremost from their mothers. But the mother could carry out her caring function during this crucial period only with unstinting support from the tribe.

The report on American children at risk states what is screamingly obvious to anyone who knows how we became human: Our young cannot thrive without "nurturing love, protection, guidance, stimulation and support." Lacking these traditional values, a young, brainy creature can no more mature normally than a seedling deprived of water, weeding, fertilizer and sun. Worse, these sorts of learning, if not available when the infant is programmed to receive them, are permanently lost.

The human mother nurtures heart and mind and soul as well as body. She is the earliest source of love and trust and interaction. Cuddling her newborn, she contributes significantly to the proliferation of cells in the miraculously exploding brain. Her love and tenderness for her tiny new human are as nourishing and necessary as her milk.

In our heedless ignorance of how we got the way we are, we have sowed the wind and are reaping the whirlwind. Inevitably, unwanted children born to mothers who can't care for them--and into a society that cannot feed, clothe, educate or protect them--turn into the warped, brutalized products of illness and neglect, cruelty and crime who infest our social fabric and send us screaming for more police and jails.

That's attacking the problem at the wrong end. It's wholly futile. It was caring and sharing, structure and family, a tribe that offered a sense of belonging and being important, that brought us to our lofty human status. These were taught to newborns from day one.

These qualities are not adequately taught in our society. Especially in America, young girls bear young long before they are physically or emotionally ready, and without a social structure to lean on. We do not take motherhood and child care seriously. You might suppose women got pregnant all by themselves. Fifty-thousand years ago (when, for all anyone knew, they did) mother and infant nevertheless drew sustenance from the tribe from before the infant's birth through its puberty.

And they had role models. We are pre-eminently learning animals. Among our chimpanzee and gorilla cousins, zoo-raised mothers must be taught how to handle the offspring. If this is so with animals whose brains only double in size, how much truer must it be for us, whose brains quadruple. As N.J. Berrill explains:

"What has happened is primarily a lengthening of the learning period from birth to puberty. This extension of the period of growth and development, during which the young human could continually acquire new skills, including speech and communication generally and the transmitted experience of elders...was almost certainly the prime factor in the ascendancy of human wits over a hostile environment."

This is why attention to the beginning years, not those when the child is almost grown, has incalculable importance. Only caring for our young at the very start--in the womb, in fact--and understanding that devoted maternal care is indispensable to our babies' future, and therefore our own, has a chance of abating our contemporary pathologies.

That is the most important of all the traditional values to which we must return.

--Betty McCollister

Ms. McCollister is editor of the newsletter of the Iowa Chapter of the American Humanist Association. She has long been a humanist activist in her area and with the AHA, writes for humanist publications, and has a regular column in the Cedar Rapids Gazette.