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

The basic idea of this book is really simple: if you want children to stop acting like babies, then you need to stop treating them like babies. This isn't something you can do overnight, and the book suggests tools and timelines to make it happen. I strongly recommend this book --- especially if you had a standard American upbringing but your spouse didn't (more on that later). Probably my biggest takeaway from the book is that kids, even really young ones, want to be helpful, so you should let them --- even if they screw up at first. This solved a 30-year-old mystery for me. When I was a kid, I often played with legos with some friends, and when we were done, we'd have to clean them up. We viewed this as a chore, but the younger brother of one of my friends was really excited to help clean up. I could never understand why he was so excited to help with such a boring thing, but this book explains it. He wanted to be helpful. I'm a scientist, and one thing I really like about the book is that it explicitly doesn't rely on scientific research (the author explains this clearly in the book). That may sound like a weird thing for a scientist to like, but quite frankly, most childhood psychology research is garbage (not even the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment is reproducible!), which is why you get so many contradictory books that claim to be scientific. Even if everything in this book were contradicted by a peer-reviewed article in a prestigious scientific journal, I'd trust this book over the article. Until research gets better, observational studies of different cultures are as good as it gets. (The author is also a scientist and came to the same conclusion.) For those who demand science, the author does include some scientific nuggets in the book (mostly from interviews with scientists), but these are more seasoning than meat. I had a pretty standard American middle-class upbringing, which is to say that my parents didn't do most of the things in the book (strange now that I think about it --- my mom was once an anthropologist who studied a culture similar to those in the book), so most of the advice is foreign to me. Some even sounds crazy (let young kids use sharp knives?!?), but my wife is not from the USA, and her take is that much of this advice is pretty obvious. Apparently she started using sharp knives around age 4, and her fingers are all there --- and free of scars. In contrast, I only got to use knives once I was in scouts (and had my Totin' Chip), and my fingers are covered in scars to this day... Maybe starting young is the way to go. If nothing else, reading this book brought our parenting philosophies closer together and saved us a lot of arguing. My daughter is too young for most of the advice in this book, except for one piece: children are never too young to watch adults do stuff. Sure enough, if I load my daughter into a sling or put her in a chair with a view of me, she's entertained watching me cook, clean, etc. (In contrast, if I put her in a chair while I work on my computer, she quickly gets bored and unhappy.) Besides that, I can't yet comment on how useful the book is, but the advice in the book is well reasoned and jives with my wife's experience. I've also spent a lot of time learning how other Americans raise their kids, and much of it seems insane. There have to be better ways. So, I look forward to trying the book's advice in the future. A word on some of the negative reviews: yes, the author's background does make its way into the book in small ways. Yes, she does suggest taking your kid to work if you can, which yes, is impractical for many people. However, this is simply one of many examples of how to treat your kid like an adult. The author spends more time talking about folding laundry than about taking kids to work. Rather than write a negative review if you can't take your kid to work, be creative and come up with some new way to treat your kid like an adult. The author is also limited in ways (lives in a small, urban dwelling in a crowded, overpriced city), and I'm guessing most people have options that are not available to her.

Ooo, this book was soooo good that I have too much to say and not enough time to write it all! I’m excited to be the first reviewer to have already put these parenting strategies into action and say—yes, this works! My six year old is cooking and cleaning, and she is more peaceful and even sleeping better than she has been in years. Even the baby is happy because we are including him in everything we do as a family. I was able to do get these results so quickly because I was already many months into implementing a complementary educational philosophy (Montessori) at home. Hunt Gather Parent gave me some of the context I was missing to make phenomenal changes in my household in literally just a few days. This is an important book for parents, grandparents, nannies and other caregivers. This knowledge is desperately needed in the US today! So as the book jacket explains, this is the story of an American mom, Michaeleen Doucleff, who brings her three year old daughter Rosy along with her as she lives and learns about parenting with families from three indigenous populations—the Maya in Yucatan, the Inuit in the Arctic circle and the Hadzabe in Tanzania. The book is rich with first-person anecdotes from each of these settings, populated by realistic portraits of the people she encountered. I loved learning about each group, and I wanted to read more, more, more about the families she met and the experiences she had. The book also weaves in a ton of scientific research and many of the author’s original interviews with anthropologists (I admit I gave the book a lot more credit once I looked at the notes and realized a lot of the interviews were her own original work). There is some interesting historical parenting perspective in the first two chapters that upends much of our current thinking about raising children. As well, the author was generous in her willingness to share the darker, cringe-worthier parts of her own parenting journey. I think just about any parent reading this book will recognize parts of their own parent-child relationships in this! But never fear, there is help on the way, as Michaeleen shares many macro and micro tips and tools for finding a completely new way of relating to our children. A very high level recap of some of her main points: --Include children in every aspect of adult life, including housework, cooking and other day-to-day work, and the children will be happier, calmer and naturally helpful. --React with peace and gentleness to children. Respond to misbehavior by ignoring, redirecting, modeling, encouraging, and other kind educational methods. --Give children autonomy in a safe way that builds both their confidence and their feeling of responsibility to their family and community. I really appreciated that Michaeleen was able to identify some “universal parenting strategies” because I agree with her that finding commonalities among cultures is the way to find what truly works. I think all parents everywhere want the same things, right? For their children to be healthy and fulfilled, and for the relationship among family members to be supportive and rewarding. And yet many of us in the U.S. (and probably Canada, Australia and U.K. as well), have completely lost our parenting compass. We don’t even necessarily know what values we want to transmit to our children, let alone how to transmit them and nurture the behaviors that support them. Do we want to encourage independence or interdependence? Peer social skills or family ties? Shouldering responsibility or following your bliss? As parents, do we want to be our kids’ friends or their leaders? The indigenous families interviewed by Michaeleen seem to have settled on the perfect middle ground among all these ideas. Their children are confident, sociable and emotionally mature. They definitely come across as happy and content. The parents seem to genuinely enjoy the company of their children, yet the parents have their own lives and aren’t at all slaves to their children’s whims. Now, as for my own parenting journey…I have been on this path for a few years to try to remake our family life and my relationship to our older child. I have read and implemented some of the best of other cross-cultural parenting books that have come out in the past handful of years, including about the French, Danes, and Japanese. Those books were wonderful and do not fundamentally contradict what Hunt, Gather, Parent describes. It’s just that those books failed to mention some of the underlying concepts which are also practiced in France, Japan and Scandanavia—things like family togetherness. As well, I have been reading books by Maria Monthessori and her disciples and implementing them in our home for about 6 months. Montessori provides a more detailed and comprehensive method than Hunt Gether Parent for introducing children of all ages to the work of daily life, as well as to the important concept of modifying the manmade environment (ie. The home) to ease children’s anxiety and increase their feelings of success. Importantly, Maria Montessori describes child development in her books and explains how the evolutionary purpose of childhood is basically to follow around adults and older children so the developing child can learn how to act, move and speak like others of their group, thus adapting to their culture, environment and time. This is how an Inuit child grows up to know how to live off the harsh lands of the Arctic, and how an American child grows up to know how to drive a car, shop at the supermarket and earn an income through gainful employment. Montessori describes how children have a developmental need to contribute to their communities and families, and how they will become demanding, possessive, clingy or otherwise maladapted if this developmental need is thwarted. Montessori has been incredible for our family and has completely changed our family life! Using the Montessori method of breaking jobs into subtasks and teaching by modeling rather than correcting, our 6 year old had already assumed a range of responsibilities from helping to prepare meals and clean up afterward, doing her own laundry, washing her hair, and many others. She was SO MUCH happier and confident after we taught her these jobs, we couldn’t believe it. And as Michaeleen notes in Hunt Gather Parent, we were continually surprised by her physical abilities, such as carrying a laundry basket full of laundry up a flight of stairs all by herself! However, our child was still clingy and demanding. She had difficulty concentrating and talked compulsively All. Day. Long. Enter the answer to my fervent asking…Michaeleen Doucleff’s Hunt, Gather, Parent. One of the wonderful ideas from this book we implemented immediately was the Family Membership Card—which essentially says children need to eat, work, play and do everything else ALONGSIDE the other members of their family. Whereas before our daughter had her own jobs to complete, now I suggested we do all jobs together. And she loves it! Using this tool and some of the others from the book, after just a few days she is already calmer and more focused. I enjoy her company more than I have since she turned two! And our baby is getting more attention because there isn't so much idle chatter in the house. The transformation for our entire family has been wonderful, and I assume this is only the beginning for us! To those parents who, like me, are looking for a better way to relate to their children and manage their family lives, I think you will find many ideas in this book. But change takes time if you are just starting this journey. Be patient with your children and spouse, and especially with yourself. Little by little, things will fall into place. To the author…thank you for writing this book! I can tell it was an act of love, and you deserve many rewards in return. I wish all parents and children everywhere love, peace and blessings.

Everything I have heard the author say on NPR about the Iñuit rings true to my own experiences. More than 40 years ago, I met 16 young Iñuit children, was amazed by their calm maturity, and moved to their village in Arctic Alaska (with the village council's permission). Our children lived among the Iñuit from birth until they left for college. I coached our sons' mostly Iñuit youth softball teams for a decade. We lost more often than not, but not ONCE did a parent complain to me about our team's performance or my coaching. I can think of no better place in the world to raise a child. I've pre-ordered the book. When I've had a chance to read it, I'll update my review. ---------------- I have read the book, and I like it. This is the story of smart, sensitive, frustrated 3-year-old girl (Rosy) who tries to reform her smart, hard-charging, professional, angry, and clueless mother into an adult who will listen, understand, free her daughter from near constant oppression, and let go of the tensions driving them apart. The mother (author Michealeen Doucleef) is a slow learner burdened by her own childhood experiences, but also self-aware and resourceful. Their emotional and geographic journey follows a happy and instructive path. Way to go Rosy! Doucleef – a self-confessed terrible parent – had the brilliant idea of turning her obvious parenting failures into a book project, both to satisfy her deep curiosity about Indigenous parenting and to finance her own reformation. Through determination and with lots of help, she gradually works her way back to solid parenting ground, learning lessons that should benefit anyone willing to journey with her. Doucleef has a self-deprecating nature that Iñuit admire, but at times her self-deprecation seems to me more like a literary device than true humility. I can live with that. Doucleef’s unexpected encounter with Chubby Mata (p. 216-217 in the first edition) moved me to tears. If you don’t know about Jean Briggs and Chubby Mata, then the encounter won’t have the same effect on you, but that’s OK. I am not surprised that Mata’s family loved Jean Briggs. For me, Doucleef's encounter not only increased my already considerable respect for Jean Briggs, but it muted criticism Doucleef is getting for misrepresenting Indigenous people. For decades, I have recommended Jean Briggs’ books and papers to newcomers to rural Alaska. I plan to recommend Doucleef’s book, too, especially to clueless elementary school teachers from the Lower 48 facing their first Iñuit classroom. Some get it, some don’t. I hope an adult Rosy, like Chubby Mata here, is able to report back to us on what it was like living with the childish version of Michaeleen. There have been a few negative reviews, here and elsewhere. To get a sense of the problem, one Amazon reviewer recommended Rebecca Onion’s review of Hunt, Gather, Parent in Slate, so I read it. I also read Shannon Withycombe’s Twitter blasts. Here is my take. Doucleef does not ignore the science nor the modernization of Indigenous societies. Readable scientific diversions are embedded throughout the book (for an example, see p. 236-239 in the first edition) and referenced in 15 pages of endnotes. It is not that Doucleef ignored the science, it’s just that she didn’t adopt the perspectives that Onion and Withycombe prefer. This happens all the time in science, and it’s healthy. Criticism is what academics do at conferences and in journals. They battle over ideas, over perspectives, and over who should get credit. A PhD chemist (Doucleef) who dares tread on cultural anthropology or early childhood education is going to get hammered, especially if they write a popular book. Very few psychologists, anthropologists, or journalists live among Indigenous people for very long, not even superb anthropologists like Jean Briggs. Academics and journalists live in cities because that’s where the money is. Like Doucleef, they do intermittent field work. Like Doucleef, many are fascinated with Indigenous people. Academics butter their bread with theories and papers that they hope will win grants, lure graduate students, and get them tenure. Academics advance their careers through production and publication just as journalists do. Doucleef is not writing for academics. She is writing for parents who are at their wits end. Consider the academic bickering if you will, but don’t ignore Doucleef because of it. For those who wonder about my credentials, I am an interdisciplinary PhD trained by anthropologists, biologists, ecologists, and economists. My undergraduate degree was a Bachelor of Journalism. I also lived and worked in small Alaskan Iñuit communities for 30 years. As I said in my initial note, we raised our children among the Iñuit. Had Doucleef shared authorship and editorial control with some of her key respondents (not a bad idea!), this book might have been even better, and would have been an example of the “co-production of knowledge.” Her current critics probably would have been silent.

I say “could be obvious” in my title because to those of us who grew up with parents who owned small businesses or farms a lot of this stuff isn’t new. But I could see how this would be helpful to those among us who weren’t raised to work for the family business. The author seems to believe most kids in western culture are raised without working but I think a lot of us were raised with the expectations that we helped around the house and worked. Maybe I’m wrong. She also makes a lot of generalizations about western culture when in fact western culture is a very very very broad term. It kind of gives off a “western culture bad, everyone else is good” vibe. On another note, the author says praising kids is bad but I disagree. I personally think it’s good to build up your kids and acknowledge when they do a good job with something. And lastly the author is a good writer and the book is easy to read. I enjoyed the illustrations and thought it was well organized. I definitely think you can learn something from it but I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s life changing.

This was my favorite book on general parenting advice I’ve read (for sleeping, my favorite was Precious Little Sleep, and eating, Baby Led Weaning). I loved the focus on learning from other cultures. More than most parenting books, the author both did a lot of research (and fieldwork) and actually ties that research to the advice she is giving. Also unlike other books, this is not just one good idea painfully overwritten into a full book, but rather a wide ranging discussion of parenting with tips throughout (although it does take a few chapters to get going). I took notes, and then distilled those into a single page I put on our fridge. I would say the actual improvements in our parenting life due to this book have been modest, but still appreciated (and many of the suggestions we were already doing). In particular, I’ve gotten better at incorporating our kids into the housework, and (mostly) better at keeping calm. The book didn’t end up helping much with getting our 5-year old ready in the morning, one of our biggest struggles. We’ve ended up sticking to counting to five with a consequence at the end, which we hate (and is against the advice of this book), but she completely ignores all other attempts. However, I made copies of a hand-made chart with pictures of each task (getting out of bed, brushing teeth, etc.) and the days of the week for her to check off as she goes (also not in this book), and we had our best morning in a long time, without yelling or counting.

I have five children- 15 year old twins, an 8 year old, 3 year old, and 22 month old. My 3 year old is high needs/spirited/whatever other terms society has coined for an extremely difficult child. He’s also unbelievably brilliant. However, he entered this world screaming, and hasn’t stopped. I have read innumerable parenting books, from clinical, spiritual, traditional, and modern perspectives. This is the only one that has significantly influenced mine and my son’s behavior. To those being highly critical of this book- I get it. It goes against everything we’ve been taught in Western society; but coming from a “veteran mom,” who was in desperate need of understanding her child, I followed many of the techniques listed (most books just tell you about your kid but don’t offer any parenting tools) with an open mind and the shift in our household is palpable. There are quite a few reviews referencing the mention of monsters to scare your child into submission and while I will not be using that tactic, I can see how it would work on a case by case basis. Also, if you’ve never raised a highly spirited infant or toddler, you’ll never understand the author’s honesty and frustration while speaking about her daughter.

I'm an expert in children's mental health, and my work has focused on the intersection between family dynamics and children and teens with a mental health challenge. I don't recommend parenting books very often, but I highly recommend Hunter, Gather, Parent. Dr. Doucleff describes a number of parenting practices found in non-Western cultures that offer tremendous wisdom for every parent, but especially for parents who have a child or teen who can be especially challenging. These include maintaining a calm, matter-of-fact demeanor rather than getting angry, yelling, or speaking harshly to kids. This "Zen" style of interacting with kids, even when kids push their parents' buttons, is firmly grounded in psychological science. I teach every parent I work with the value of never raising their voices with their children, and why this is an essential foundational ingredient in turning a chaotic home life with a "spicy" kid into one that is calm, peaceful, and loving. Hunter, Gather, Parent is a must-read for every parent, especially for parents who have a child with a challenging mental health condition.

Probably the first and last time I will ever say this about a parenting book- or any non fiction book- but I couldn’t put the book down! I hardly ever read through an entire book like this cover to cover- but this book I read in its entirety in less than a week. It was so helpful, so practical and so hopeful. The stories were entertaining and instructive and I love how humble and relatable the author is. I teared up and laughed multiple times. Reading this book was like going on a fun trip around the world with a friend and learning so much useful information at the same time. I am around kids all the time but I don’t have kids yet, because it has been overwhelming to me how stressful parenting seems to be from watching other parents. But this book actually made me WANT to have kids and feel excited about parenting, unlike a few other parenting books I have picked up. The information she gives is easy and laid out well, practical and easy to remember and seems simple to implement. I’d highly recommend reading this whether you have kids or not. It will give you hope to be a parent, help you in your parenting journey, and help you with friends and relatives who have kids. It will also help you understand yourself and how you behave and think and act coming from a western background. I feel like it answered SO many of the parenting questions I’ve had, and honestly believe it may be one of the only parenting books anyone needs to read.

I've written so many parenting books but nothing seemed to work. After reading this book, I realized in which ways my behavior and words were escalating many situations with my kids. I have learnt to ignore their bad behavior, stay calm while they are upset and most importantly I started to see them as capable individuals who can do many things on their own and also help each other out.

I love it! This book should be mandatary for all parents. Best book I’ve come across.

I really enjoyed this book! It gives a new take on parenting that really resonated with me.

"Hunt, gather, parent..." is a highly engaging piece of literature that calls for an "appeal to ancient wisdoms bias" much more than I expected. Certainly, the book title informs the reader that we should expect an idealisation of the past, but I had also expected a splash of fresh water (or a pinch of salt) given the author's background in science and medicine. Clearly, the author makes a strong argument for many of her claims, but I was surprised to find myself making counter-points which the author never addresses. I would very much appreciate another book with a more critical debate discussing the finer points of balancing safety and independence. However, that topic is far more difficult to tackle, and will not be resolved through a book, I'd still like to read it. That topic would be much like the current debate on balancing individual freedom and national security. The author did well to encourage critical thinking, as I too have attempted to do with this feedback, and I do appreciate the efforts made. I read the book in less than a week and found it difficult to put down. The writing was clean and polished making it a true joy to read. I wasn't a fan of the chapter summary, which is akin to self-help books, but it didn't bother me and I can see the value of it. I did love the illustrations. Such captivating storytelling, and a foot firmly planted in the science of child development.

The book was insightful, intuitive and gives parents practical advise on parenting. Was surprised and happy to see one para on the South Indian tribe. The author has done her research well on the indigenous cultures around the world. To be honest, coming from a culture which still is largely based on collectivism as opposed to individualism in western countries, the book was relatable and many of these tips are lost knowledge within my own community. Although I have witnessed this kind of parenting, reading about it in a structured and detailed manner was eye opening. Tried to implement few of these tips with my own toddler and it works! Have been having less conflicts and lesser tantrums. As opposed to the kind of parenting advise given nowadays, this book makes you feel not guilty about many things you should have never been anxious about. Teaches us how to raise confident and responsible kids.