Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans
Michaeleen Doucleff
When Dr. Michaeleen Doucleff becomes a mother, she examines the studies behind modern parenting guidance and finds the evidence frustratingly limited and the conclusions often ineffective. Curious to learn about more effective parenting approaches, she visits a Maya village in the Yucatán Peninsula. more
352 pages, Hardcover
First published Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
4.15
Rating
16885
Ratings
1903
Reviews
Michaeleen Doucleff
4 books 39 followers
Michaeleen Doucleff is a correspondent for NPR's Science Desk. She reports for the radio and the Web for NPR's global health and development blog, Goats and Soda. She focuses on disease outbreaks, drug development, and trends in global health.Community reviews
I resent all parenting books, just like I hate every article that tells me I’m washing my face wrong or eating Tic Tacs wrong or making my grocery list wrong. Like, I’ve made it to age 36 and everything’s pretty much fine so I think I’ve got it under control. I also resented my husband for buying this book because he liked an interview he heard with the author on NPR. Uhhh, our kid is 3. AND A HALF. more
Giving 3. 5 stars. Here’s my hot take in a few points:1) if you get it in your head from the outset that this book is not academic but personal, autobiographical, and pragmatic with some confirmation from academia you’ll enjoy it more. 2) I really loved how practical it was. Strewn with action items and recommendations throughout and illustrates good examples of applications from her own parenting and those she learned from. more
SUMMARY OF REVIEW: DEAR PUBLISHER, WHY NOT PUBLISH BOOKS BY THE EXCELLENT HUNTER/GATHERER PARENTS instead of making a best seller out of Doucleff. The parenting tips seem good -- especially the ones that are nearly exact quotes from the different women she interviewed. But the overall book is problematic in its simplistic and rosy depiction of people's lives and the texts and documentaries they hearken back to - hunter/gatherer or not, everyone faces complications. Making the lives of these various peoples seem "simple" downplays the humanity and reality of their lives. I also got much less out of the stories about the author's application of what she was learning to her own daughter, than I did from the women themselves. more
Let me save you some time1. Give small children helpful household tasks even if they aren't good at them yet. 2. Don't get into power struggles with your children, instead cooperate with them. Stay calm. more
Some issues with this book:• The advice is not supported by research. The author relies on her limited observations of other families, and on the results of applying techniques to a one person sample, her own daughter. • The author assumes that child-rearing methods from other cultures are ideal for producing children that are well-prepared to contend with western culture. • The author presents an over-simplified picture of the cultures she visits and never moves past the surface-level observations of the one or two childcare tips she adopts from each. • The advice is sometimes contradictory. more
I have a lot of mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, I picked up a handful of tips that have really worked for usOn the other hand, the author’s “better parenting”involves saying things like “oh, you can’t do it because you’re a whiney baby. ” Um. what. I couldn’t help feeling like the author still didn’t fully grasp all of the concepts that people were trying to explain. more
I mean. it’s a white woman teaching brown culture. It made me deeply uncomfortable, even if she donates 30% of her profit, it isn’t her culture. It’s like cultural tourism voyeurism and more than a little cringeyWhere are the men and boys. All the examples of helpful children are girls helping with chores while boys play in the yard. more
TL;DR - Instead of this book, I recommend The Montessori Toddler, The Whole Brain Child, and The Absorbent Mind (by Maria Montessori). At first, this book seemed promising and interesting, but I’ve read a lot of parenting books, follow a lot of parents on Instagram and YouTube, and I listen to Dr. Becky Good Inside and Janet Lansbury via podcasts. This author seemingly has never heard of Montessori as a philosophy, yet it has been around for at least a hundred years. She makes absolutely no mention of it in the book, and that worried me. more
I really appreciated the advice and suggestions in this book. Lots of helpful ideas and tips. The ways were encouraged to change our approach to parenting made lots of sense. The author is a white woman and there seems to be a fetishization of other cultures that felt a little off. Also way too much personal interest from the author. more
I think that if this book had been around sooner, my teens and young adult would be even happier and more self-actualized. I've been reading parenting and child development books for about twenty years now (my oldest is 20), and some have been real standouts, but this is the first that really steps back from scientific studies to take a longer and wider view. Rather than contrasting Western parenting styles with what the rest of the world does, Doucleff looks at the practices of more rural societies in Mexico, Tanzania, and Canada, who live more communally and traditionally and, seemingly consequently, have much calmer children and much less fraught parent-child relations. Doucleff bravely cites all the mistakes she makes in her own parenting journey and the baffled but kind reactions she receives from her hosts while at the same time laying out helpful action steps for parents who are interested in adopting her newly learned techniques ("Dip Your Toe"). I'm lucky that I stumbled onto The Idle Parent: Why Laid-Back Parents Raise Happier and Healthier Kids years ago, as well as the excellent The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives, which eloquently and repeatedly argues that kids will make reasonable decisions if given the chance and the right information--we really don't have to manipulate kids for their own good, and if we do, it will always (eventually) backfire. more
I don't really recommend reading this book unless you want to be rolling your eyes 75% of the time. It can make reading it difficult. Before getting this book from the library I read her article in the Atlantic (my family members without kids forwarded it to me. How nice. ) and it was pretty much more of the same, although the author is even more obnoxious in the longer format. more
my, this book is a bad joke. Having a PhD in chemistry and education in the wine fermenting space, the author feels presumptuous enough to advise in the area she neither has experience nor any qualifications. Verily, you can pick up better advice by visiting the playground and chatting with moms/nanas/carers, let alone professional child psychologists and pediatricians. Maybe the author did an excellent job covering the Ebola outbreak, but her "ability to perform research" does not translate to her ability to interpret the research adequately. more
TL;DR: White, educated, San Francisco mom gets slapped in the face by her 3-year-old. Together, they travel the world gathering parenting tips from "Hunter Gatherer" moms (Mayan, Inuit, Tanzanian). Now, the daughter slaps her less. Summary: The author summarizes her research in an acronym that helps children feel they are part of the family "TEAM". T - Togetherness — A Mayan mother taught Doucleff to 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. more
tl;dr this book is good for people who are interested in how moms in non-American cultures approach challenges of raising little kids, or if you are similar to the author in being at your wits end with your little kid but learning best from observing a whole integrated approach (cultural practices vs. pick and choose from different popular books). I think this is one of those books that's not been set up for success by its marketing. I think learning about how other cultures do things is an incredibly fascinating topic, but I also can't help but roll my eyes at yet another parenting book positioning itself as saying non-Americans do it better than Americans. And this is with me agreeing with so many of the proposed alternative strategies too. more
Het gebeurt niet vaak dat ik een non-fictie werk zo fel wil aanprijzen, laat staan een opvoedboek. Het gebeurt nog minder dat iets mijn bullshit-meter en scepsis doorstaat en daadwerkelijk mijn eigen gedrag doet veranderen. Ja, ze stelt haar eigen slechte voorbeeld van vroeger als mama soms wat te scherp en aangedikt. Ja het is wat breedvoerig en repetitief. Maar het feit dat ik na enkele weken van toepassing van deze werkwijze al positieve evoluties merk in ons gezin en het gedrag van mijn kindjes is onbetaalbaar en vergeeft enkele literaire zwaktes. more
It's a bit like a textbook, but that's not entirely a bad thing. Michaeleen Doucleff has researched the ways in which traditional societies raise children to be responsible, happy members of their families and communities, and she has arrived at an interesting and not surprising conclusion: helicopter parenting is the opposite of what is called for to raise good children. In the Mayan communities of Mexico, the hunter-gatherer peoples of Tanzania, and the traditionally-living Inuit of the Arctic, she has found practical methods of raising children effectively, without drama, without ordering kids around from one activity to the next, while naturally growing the independence and autonomy they must have to be good adults. One of the biggest takeaways from the the child-rearing techniques of those peoples is that western parents talk too much. We give our kids instructions, tell them "don't touch that. more
To be fair, I didn’t realise this was a parenting book and thought it was more a history of how parenting practices developed. But it was awful. The author seems like she’s really lacking in any kind of normal parenting skills and is then absolutely amazed when other people are able to parent their children without shouting and crying. She gives ridiculous tips such as letting your child try things for themselves, wait until they are tired before putting them to bed and treat people you pay to look after your child with respect. She acts as if the whole western world use her former awful parenting approach and like basically raising children in a normal way is revolutionary. more
I read the first section, lightly skimmed the next couple, and scanned through the last. Two stars because it refreshed a couple very basic parenting truths I needed to rehear, namely that (1) teaching kids to help is messy, but worth it, and (2) staying calm helps kids calm down. But otherwise, this book is not worth it, for too many reasons. I started to write them all and didn’t want to think about it anymore. 😅ADDENDUM: A few months later, I can still remember the things that bothered me most about this book. more
As a mom of six, with a degree in Child Development, I’ve read A LOT of parenting books over the years. This is probably my favorite- definitely in the top 2. I wish this book existed YEARS ago when my oldest was a baby. As I read, I recognized ways that I parented like the “superparents” and ways that I did the OPPOSITE and am experiencing the consequences. 😂 There is so much to learn from this book that I will likely read it again. more
When I showed up to the bookstore, I thought this was a sort of anthropological study - serious, academic, and a totally normal purchase for a childless, single, somewhat directionless 24-year-old. (I'd read the Atlantic article and thought it sounded interesting: https://www. theatlantic. com/family/ar. ). more
Not worth the read. Author uses personal experiences as scientific evidence. She has a PhD in chemistry, not child development. I'm sure visiting other cultures and witnessing their lifestyles is very life changing, and made her parenting journey different, but the book makes her out to be a parenting expert. I'm not being mean, but honestly she's a mother of a toddler, she's surviving, just like all parents of toddlers. more
OKAY. So I have a lot to say about this book and not a lot of battery left. It was fabulous, it truly felt like Doucleff knew the ins and outs of my relationship with my toddler, and her parenting advice from non western cultures felt so relevant and eye opening, I have not been able to stop talking about it. Seriously, I won't shut up. I knew about the inuit ways of viewing children as emotionally 'dumb' so that section was not new, but the Mayan way of building helpful children, and giving them their membership card just awed me. more
This book was hard to read and nothing at all what I thought it was going to be. I would never, ever treat anyone the way she treats her child, and I cringed every time she talked about her daughter. When she described how she speaks to her three year old, I was appalled. Instead of writing a book about parenting, I think Mrs. Doucleff should have spent more time reparenting herself or perhaps in some kind of therapy as she behaved so much worse than her child. more
This could have been a third of its length if there was a good editor. I don’t care about what people are wearing, what they look like. of the many, many people she talks to. It takes til nearly halfway to get to the knowledge part of the book. I suggest to get this in book form (I listened to the audiobook) so one can skim over the fluff. more
An easy, light parenting book that spoke to me in the current phase of motherhood I am in (similar to the author's). As an often overwhelmed parent, this book brings us back to the basics and sets the priorities of parenting straight, with an insight into different cultures and how they embrace parenting in their everyday lives and routines. Little to do with creating an overachieving and stressful environment and much to do with creating a TEAM in your household. more
Huh: i think this has some good information, especially for new parents who may have had poor parents themselves. I think a lot of what she says, though, hasn't been lost. (Or, at least, how I feel I was raised. )So much of our contemporary problems -- including the isolation of parenting -- seem to stem from postwar attitudes towards suburbanization. Truly, it led to the isolation of families, the articulation of nuclear families instead of large extended families piled on top of one another to form a community where identity first cane from membership in the community (although she says that among some indigenous groups, alloparents are often not blood relatives), the articulation of childhood as something that needs to be extended/given/experienced, the decline of mom-n-pop shops where a child could be part of the family economy (obvs not all of this is squarely the fault of suburbs). more
I found this book at the precisely right time, as we are going through the common parenting travails of raising up a 4-year-old and 2-year-old. The tantrums, the stubbornness, the frustration: all of it is very present to us right now. Michaeleen Doucleff’s investigation into how modern indigenous cultures parent upends so many of the trendy (and ineffective, and frustrating) American parenting practices. Much of the knowledge here would have been regarded as common sense a hundred years ago here, but we have lost so much of this in our individualistic, hyper-verbal, and helicopter-y millennial parenting styles. I took many notes and have already started to put more of these ideas into practice. more
„Vakarų visuomenė labai orientuota į vaikų mokymą būti nepriklausomais – patiems ryte apsirengti, patiems susitvarkyti kambarį, patiems atlikti namų darbus. Sąrašą galima tęsti. Bet toks mastymas prieštarauja šimtus tūkstančių metų trukusiai evoliucijai. Mums, žmonėms, būdingas ypatingas noras būti su kitais ir kitiems padėti — tai viena pagrindinių savybių, skiriančių mus nuo kitų primatų. "Ko galėtume išmokti iš bendruomenių, kurios nesivadovauja moksliniais tyrimais, knygomis ir specialistų patarimais, o remiasi tūkstančiais metų, iš kartos į kartą perduodama vaikų auklėjimo patirtimi. more
I usually just delete books that I DNF but this one warrants somewhat of a review. I got about halfway through this one before I realized that I didn't care to finish (even though it's a book club pick, yikes. Sorry Sandra. ). My initial thoughts are that this is a privileged white woman teaching cultural parenting that she is not a part of. more