Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans

After becoming a mother herself, Dr. Michaeleen Doucleff looks into the research behind contemporary parenting advice and discovers that there is a depressing lack of data and sometimes ineffectual conclusions. She goes to a Maya tribe on the Yucatán Peninsula out of curiosity about better parenting techniques. She meets parents there who raise really kind, kind, and helpful kids without using timeouts, scolding, or nagging, and who parent quite differently from us. Doucleff asks what else parents in the West are losing out on.

In the book Hunt, Gather, Parent, Doucleff travels to three of the most renowned tribes in the world—Maya families in Mexico, Inuit families living above the Arctic Circle, and Hadzabe households in Tanzania—with her three-year-old daughter in tow in order to study and put her parenting skills into practise. She observes that these societies don't have the same issues with parenting as parents in the West. Most remarkably, the bond that parents form with their early children differs much from that which many parents in the West form; it is based on trust rather than fear, collaboration rather than control, and individual needs rather than prescribed developmental milestones.

Maya parents are experts at raising up well-behaved kids. Including children in home chores from the time they can walk helps Maya parents raise obedient workers without the need of rewards, threats or chore schedules. Inuit parents have created a surprisingly successful method for instilling emotional intelligence in their kids. Inuit parents react to their children's crying, hitting, or misbehaving in a way that teaches them to calm down and reason before responding. With a little instrument that shields kids from stress and anxiety, which are increasingly widespread in American youngsters, Hadzabe parents are global masters at raising self-assured, motivated children.

Doucleff not only lives with families, where she can personally see their methods in action, but she also uses them with her own daughter, achieving remarkable outcomes. She gains discipline without resorting to violence. She discusses how these tactics may affect kids' mental growth and well-being with psychologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists, and sociologists. Hunt, Gather, Parent offers a global parenting paradigm that has been modified for American families and helps us reevaluate the way we interact to our children. It is full of helpful takeaways that parents can put into practise right now.