Throw out the toys and get your kids involved in household chores: Living with hunter-gatherer communities taught me how to raise a happy, helpful child
With her toddler daughter in tow, US health reporter Michaeleen Doucleff travelled the world to find out how hunter-gatherer tribes bring up their families. Their wisdom has transformed her parenting
Michaeleen Doucleff is far from the first parent who has been driven to despair, locked into a grinding war of attrition with a wilful toddler. Nor is she the first to have been tipped into post-natal depression after long weeks spent at home alone for hours a day with a fussy newborn baby.
Like many parents, Doucleff spent much of the first months and years of her child’s life vacillating between the worry that there was something wrong with her, (“am I not doing it right?”) to the worry that there was something wrong with her child. Her daughter Rosy is smart and curious and lively, and before her arrival, Doucleff had longed to be a mother. So, why was it all such a battle?
Then, by chance, her job as a health reporter for National Public Radio in the US brought her face to face with a different approach to raising children that seemed to expose by stark comparison how fraught and fractious western parenting is.
Parenting is hard. But are we making it harder than it has to be? This question launched Doucleff on a journey of discovery, with her three-year-old toddler in tow, from which she has concluded that, in fact, the problem is our parenting culture.
The first clue to this came when she was sent to do a report on a Mayan community in the Yucatan in Mexico. None of the parents she met there seemed to be struggling in the way that she was. On the contrary, the parent/child relationships she witnessed in action were overwhelmingly harmonious and co-operative. There, she regularly witnessed children of all ages perform acts of jaw-dropping maturity and helpfulness, from a pre-teen who spontaneously got up to wash the dishes without being asked, to a family of five children who worked together to have everyone fed and dressed in time for the school bus without one single whine or nag.
Her curiosity fired, she started digging into the literature on hunter-gatherer communities. “The research is very rich,” she tells me from her home in San Francisco, “and what you find are these incredibly strong trends, that you really find common across many, many hunter-gatherers — from India, the Philippines, to Namibia and Tanzania to the Andes and the Amazon and Australia. All these groups have been separated by tens of thousands of years, but still carry a few core elements of their culture, or core values.”
Doucleff set out to experience those values first hand and wrote about it in her new book, Hunt, Gather, Parent (Harper Thorsons). She brought her toddler daughter Rosy on a world tour, to live with three different ancient cultures — the Yucatan Mayans, an Inuit community in Northern Canada and the Hadzabe hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. The book is part parenting guide, part travel memoir, part sociological interrogation. It seeks to put the conventional wisdom of western parenting in question and discover why so many traditional cultures share parenting practices that result in well-behaved, community-minded, self-confident kids. (Hint: there are no time-outs or star-charts here.)
Doucleff seeks to draw on the millennia of practical experience that has informed family dynamics in the world’s oldest cultures. She learns how Mayan parents never nag, but rather channel children’s intrinsic motivation to contribute to family life. Inuit parents, she discovers, never shout at their kids. Instead, they tame toddler tantrums with patience and tenderness and teach remarkable emotional self-regulation by example. She learns that Hadzabe parents cast an “invisible safety net” of community care around their children who explore their environment freely, and as a result develop impressive self-reliance and confidence.
To a western parent, some of the advice in the book seems revolutionary. She counsels parents to throw out the piles of plastic toys and activities that fill living rooms across Europe and America. As for kid-centred activities such as soft-play? Save your money. Constantly seeking to entertain and stimulate children teaches them to be passive, she argues. From the toddler years, kids want to join in what parents are doing. By making adult responsibilities and jobs like cooking meals, shopping for groceries and washing dishes a group activity, kids learn to make an authentic contribution to family life and develop self-respect. And some of it makes perfect intuitive sense; rather than arguing with or scolding children, Inuit parents expect them to be unpredictable and irrational and instead de-escalate conflict by exuding Zen-like calm.
Each time she came home to San Francisco, she’d attempt to put into practice what she had learned with Rosy. “We would see something and then I would try to figure out how to implement it here. And in that process, it allowed me to understand it much deeper — it crystallised the key aspect of it,” she explains. This led to her coming up with the acronym TEAM to synthesise the core principles the communities she lived with shared. T for together; E for encourage; A for autonomy; M for minimal interference.
The TEAM acronym reveals how none of the parenting techniques Doucleff witnesses employ the sort of heavy-handed behaviour modification that is a feature of western parenting. In the Yucatan, children are encouraged to help but are never forced or bribed. In the Arctic tundra, children are not punished or disciplined in any way, but rather gently steered towards community-minded behaviour. And in the Tanzanian bush, Hadzabe parents don’t consider it their business to control their children.
Interestingly, research in the areas of child psychology and developmental neuroscience is mounting up to support these principles. The notion that punishment is ineffective and even damaging is reaching consensus among early childhood experts.
Doucleff also learned about the crucial role that other care-givers or “alloparents” play in the lives of children and their parents in the communities she visited. Reflecting on the loneliness and isolation she experienced in her first few months with Rosy, she notes that in the Kung community in Botswana “when the baby cries, the Kung woman is almost never alone.”
“People say it takes a village. But it’s not about a village. It’s about four or five people helping you,” Doucleff says. “These alloparents aren’t just like a lot of people that come in and out of the child’s life. They are really core to the child and really know the child and are attached. That’s what I saw in these places… A relative, a close friend, a couple of children who are close.”
Back in San Francisco it took some time to unlearn the habits that Doucleff and Rosy had developed. “I started to see that I was actually practicing and modelling in the opposite of the book,” Doucleff says. “We think we value independence and generosity and helpfulness. But then, you know, my husband and I will sit and argue about who is going to do the dishes. Well that’s not valuing helpfulness. That’s valuing arguing and getting out of your responsibility.
Washing dishes together — and not arguing about who does them — teaches children the value of working together. Picture posed
“So now, we don’t argue about it. We both do them with Rosy every night — that shift is huge. And then Rosy gets to see people working together, people wanting to help each other. I realised, how am I going to get Rosie to want to do the dishes, if my husband and I aren’t wanting to do them? If it becomes this punishment or this onerous task that we are arguing about, why would she ever want to do them?”
Last year, the principles of TEAM were really put to the test. For seven weeks Michaeleen was locked down with Rosy alone while her husband left to care for his parents.
“During the lockdown I had to basically ignore Rosy for big chunks of time in our little condo, and she had to entertain herself. We started off small — like an hour. And then we’d go outside and take a break. But we worked up to like six hours a day. And she got really good at it. We are constantly entertaining children. This idea is so baked into us. Good parents play with their children, good parents give them lectures, interact with them at every moment. That’s what we think. But it’s not sustainable if you are with a child 12 hours a day and you are trying to get work done. Which is a lot of the world.
“There’s data that shows that when the parent micromanages children’s movements and activities, the kid doesn’t develop initiative to say, now I need to go do my homework or now I need to go take a shower. They cede the responsibility to the parent and they don’t develop that skill of being able to manage their time. And it was remarkable, Rosy learned to self-entertain.”
