Doucleff, Michaeleen. Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy Helpful Little Children. Simon and Schuster, NY. 2021.
- A Bay Area Psychologist visits three cultures—Maya, Hadzabe, and Inuit—illustrating aspects of parenting that Western culture seems to struggle with. This book contains similar themes to David Lancy’s work (Raising Children and Anthropology of Childhood). Ie, we talk at our kids too much, we command them too much, we set up adversarial relationships without realizing it, we give them too many rules, praise them too much, etc. A big reason for this is the rise of the smaller nuclear family with corresponding loss of the larger community-family, due to the Catholic Church’s historical attempts to control society (pg 25). Loss of community-family means the loss of “alloparenting,” and the rise of two parents trying to do everything, which produces exhaustion and desperation in the adults, and anxiety and loss of connectedness-to-others in the children.
T: Togetherness. Kids will want to do things that their parents are already doing.
E: Encourage. Don’t force. Don’t set up the adversarial relationship. Let them make many mistakes.
A: Autonomy. This is different than independence. Let kids wander, without constantly telling them what to do and when and where. Let them talk for themselves. Don’t be their ventriloquist.
M: Minimal Interference: Let kids work out their own differences whenever possible.
Prologue
(6) Parenting advice today has one major problem. The vast majority of it comes solely from the Euro-American perspective.
(6) Today about a third of all teenagers have had symptoms that meet the criteria for an anxiety disorder, Harvard researchers report. More than 60 percent of college undergraduates report feeling “overwhelming” anxiety, and Generation Z, which includes adults born between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, is the loneliest generation in decades. And yet, the predominant parenting style in the U.S. is moving in a direction that exacerbates these problems instead of curbing them. “Parents have gone into a control mode,” psychotherapist B. Janet Hibbs said in 2019. “They used to promote autonomy.… But now they’re exerting more and more control, which makes their kids more anxious and also less prepared for the unpredictable.”
(9) Our culture often has things backward when it comes to kids: We interfere too much. We don’t have enough confidence in our children. We don’t trust their innate ability to know what they need to grow. And in many instances, we don’t speak their language.
(9) Our culture focuses almost entirely on one aspect of the parent-child relationship. That’s control—how much control the parent exerts over the child, and how much control the child tries to exert over the parent.
- Following the desperate agenda in the Western World to control literally everything. Geography in the age of colonialism / Conquest (and control of Other ethnicities, and the ultimate Other of Nature. The digital age is one of control by use of data/statistics and the corresponding technological machinery.
(9) When we interact with our children in terms of control—whether it’s a parent controlling the child or vice versa—we establish an adversarial relationship.
Children 1. The WEIRDest Parents in the World
(18) Franz Carl Müller-Lyer arrow lines illusion
(20) The vast majority of studies—about 96 percent—examined only people from European backgrounds. And yet people of European descent make up only about 12 percent of the world’s population. “So the whole field of psychology is studying only a thin slice of humanity. "
(21) WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies.
(21) In some indigenous cultures, such as hunter-gatherers in southern Africa and farmers in the Ivory Coast, people weren’t duped by the [Muller-Lyer] illusion at all. They saw the two lines as they were actually drawn—as equal in length.
(22) The researchers hypothesized that the illusion tricks Americans most effectively because we live among “carpentered environments,” or right angles. That is, we’re surrounded by boxes. Everywhere we look, there they are. We live in boxes (aka houses), sleep on boxes (aka beds), cook on boxes (aka stoves), commute in boxes (aka trains), and fill our homes with boxes (aka chests of drawers, desks, sofas, armoires, etc.).
- and there are no straight lines in Nature
(22) So when a San woman in the Kalahari Desert looks at the two lines of the Müller-Lyer illusion on a piece of paper, she isn’t tricked by the arrowheads. Her brain doesn’t automatically jump to the conclusion that these lines represent 3D edges of boxes. Instead, she simply sees what’s actually drawn on the page: two lines of equal length.
(23) Another way to put this idea: If being a member of a culture distorts something as simple as the way we view two black lines on a page, how might our culture be influencing more complex psychological processes? What could it be doing to our parenting philosophy or to the way we view children’s behavior? What if some of the ideas we think of as “universals” when it comes to raising children are actually “optical illusions” created by our culture?
(24) Western culture is relatively new at raising children.
(25) For 99.9 percent of the time humans have been on earth, the nuclear family simply didn’t exist. “It’s a family structure that’s been around for a tiny pinprick in human history,” says historian John Gillis, at Rutgers University, who has been studying the evolution of Western families for more than thirty years. “It isn’t old. It isn’t traditional. It doesn’t have any real roots in the past.”
(25) Over the past thousand years or so, the Western family has slowly shrunk down from a multigenerational smorgasbord to a tiny amuse-bouche, consisting solely of Ma, Pa, two kids, and maybe a dog or a cat. We not only lost Grandma, Grandpa, Auntie Fay, and Uncle Bill in the home, but also nanny Lena, cook Dan, and a whole slew of neighbors and visitors just hanging around the front porch or sleeping on the couch. Once these people disappeared from the home, most of the parenting burden fell on Mom and Dad.
(26) David Lancy likens this parenting approach to what happens when a blizzard traps a mom and a child in a house, alone. The isolation forces the mother to be the only playmate for the child—to be the only source of love, social connection, entertainment, and stimulation. These conditions can lead to tension and exhaustion. “There is every reason to believe that modern living conditions in which infants and toddlers are isolated from peers in single-parent or nuclear households produce a parallel effect,” David wrote in his book [The Anthropology of Childhood].
- compare Paul Shepard’s primates in zoos or other captivity who develop “managerial diseases” (anxiety, high blood pressure, heart trouble, etc) which are not seen in the wild. Ie, We are primates in zoos and laboratories [The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game].
(26) Many psychologists whom I spoke with think the erosion of the extended family is a root cause for the high rates of postpartum depression in the U.S., as well as the rising epidemic of anxiety and depression among children and teenagers. Moms, dads, and kids are simply lonely.
(27) The creation of the nuclear family remodeled how we parent, but also how we learn to parent. Goodbye, Grandma. Goodbye, Aunt Carol. And goodbye parenting knowledge, skills, and extra arms for holding, cooking, and rubbing little backs at bedtime. Hello isolation, exhaustion, and stress.
(28) A few thousand years ago, families in Europe looked a lot like they do in many other cultures today: big, multigenerational, and close-knit. Families’ homes were porous structures where relatives, servants, workers, regular old neighbors, and friends flowed in and out, without much fuss.
At the same time, kids enjoyed a huge amount of autonomy. The giant family structure formed a protective shell around toddlers and children. Mom and Dad didn’t need to hover over them because some other adult—or a highly capable and caring older child—was always close by to help. As a result, children in the Middle Ages (and throughout most of Western history) lived largely free from adult instructions and directions, from about age six onward. They may have had obligations and responsibilities in the home, but by and large, they made up their own rules and decided for themselves what to do each day.
(29) Innumerable repercussions followed from these laws [of the Catholic Church], Joe Henrich and colleagues reported in their 2019 study. The marriage laws shattered extended families into tiny pieces. By 1500 AD, the Western family began to look a bit like it does today. “At least in England and probably Germany, the dominant family form is likely the nuclear family,” Joe Henrich said [one of three psychologists who coined the term WEIRD; The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous].
- marriage laws of Catholic Church, which were instruments of control, community disintegrating, so that the Church could exert more influence.
(29) Joe and his colleagues found that the longer a community had been exposed to the Catholic Church’s marriage restrictions, the more likely people in that community thought like Westerners do—that is, they valued individualism, nonconformity, and other psychological traits unique to the West.
(30) When you grow up in a big, extended family, you have a bunch of obligations and responsibilities to others. You have to look after a younger sibling, help an ailing grandma, or fix meals for your cousins. You have to accommodate others’ needs. And you have to go with the flow. Your individual needs take a back seat to socializing and cooperation. You’re a little fish in a crowded, interconnected pond. When the family sits down to eat, everyone eats the same food, from the same pot. There’s no other way.
Now, when we whittle down the family to two married adults and two kids, many of these obligations fly out the window. Cooperation isn’t as necessary. Privacy abounds. We lose the skills required to deal with and accommodate others. We have time and room for individual needs and preferences. Eventually, over hundreds of years, you end up with a situation like the one we have at our house some nights: at the dinner table, everyone eats a different dish, with a different sauce to go on that dish, and everyone has a unique opinion about how that dish should be prepared and eaten. Individualism reigns supreme. And kids—holy cow!—can become really overbearing.
Ch 2. Why Do We Parent The Way We Do?
(31) The book Dream Babies traces the history of parenting advice from John Locke in the 1600s to the rise of Bill and Martha Sears in the 1990s. The book’s conclusion is a whopper: Much of the parenting advice out there today isn’t based on “scientific or medical studies,” or even on traditional knowledge passed down from grandmas to moms for centuries. Instead, a big chunk of it comes from centuries-old pamphlets—often written by male doctors—intended for foundling hospitals, where nurses cared for dozens, even hundreds, of abandoned babies, all at once. With these pamphlets, doctors were essentially trying to industrialize infant care. But their publications found another hungry audience: exhausted moms and dads.
(36) Why do I feel the need to provide Rosy with ABC train puzzles, fake tea sets, and wooden fruit she can “cut” with a fake wooden knife? Why do these items take up precious space in our cramped San Francisco condo? The answer has more to do with the Industrial Revolution—and burgeoning consumerism—than it does with cognitive science or child development.
- just like the old food pyramid is all about agribusiness instead human health, which we are duped to think it's about.
(37) In the mid-1800s, a new idea in psychology emerged and collided with the Industrial Revolution—and Western children have never played the same way again. Parenting experts began advocating for the “use of blocks, in school and at home, to teach values of order as well as building skills,” and for the use of “board games to enhance powers of planning and order,” Howard wrote (Children at Play: An American History, Howard Chudacoff).
(39) In the 1980s and ’90s, books, magazine articles, psychologists, and pediatricians began telling parents that if they didn’t praise children, ad nauseam, something horrible would happen: we would hurt their budding self-esteem.
- We're also projecting our own ego onto them. Of course they're amazing! I made them!
(39) Self-esteem is a cultural creation, not a human universal. The concept percolated through American popular culture during the 1960s, then took over our minds, schools, and homes with a rip-roaring vengeance a couple of decades later (when it became a keystone of the multibillion-dollar self-help industry). Western culture is likely the only place where the concept of “self-esteem” exists—and we are definitely the only culture that requires parents to maintain and cultivate it in their children. In America, parents are made to feel like they must nurture a “healthy” sense of self-esteem in their children, else their children could suffer from all types of social and emotional problems, including failure at school, alcohol and drug abuse, crime, violence, and even teenage pregnancy.
(41) In many cultures, parents praise very little—or not at all. Yet their children grow up exhibiting all signs of robust mental health, as well as great empathy. Furthermore, in the cultures we’ll visit in this book, the children who receive little praise show more confidence and mental strength than their American counterparts, who are steeped in praise.
Ch 3. The Most Helpful Kids in the World
(53) This skill—of paying attention and then acting—is such an important value and goal for children that many families in Mexico have a term for it: it’s being acomedido. The idea is complex: It’s not just doing a chore or task because someone told you to; it’s knowing which kind of help is appropriate at a particular moment because you’re paying attention.
Ch 4. How to Teach Kids to do Chores, Voluntarily
(58) In many instances, parents with Western backgrounds tell their toddlers to go and play while they do the chores. Or give their child a screen. If you think about it, we are telling the child not to pay attention, not to help. We are telling them “this chore is not for you.” Without realizing it, we cut short a toddler’s eagerness to help, and we segregate them from useful activities.
(60) Parents see this mess as an investment. If you encourage the incompetent toddler who really wants to do the dishes now, then over time, they’ll turn into the competent nine-year-old who still wants to help—and who can really make a difference.
(61) If you tell a child enough times, “No, you’re not involved in this chore,” eventually the child will believe you and will stop wanting to help. Children will come to learn that helping is not their responsibility.
(62) So the first step to raising helpful kids can be summed up in a single phrase: Let them practice. Practice cleaning. Practice cooking. Practice washing. Let them grab the spoon from your hand and stir the pot. Let them grab the vacuum and start cleaning the rug. Let them make a bit of a mess when they are little, slightly less of a mess as they grow, and by the time they’re preteens, they will be helping to clean up your messes without you having to ask them—or even running your entire household.
(65) With babes fresh from the oven, the primary way they can “practice” helping is by being close to a parent and watching their work. Toss out the idea that you have to “entertain” the baby with toys and other “enrichment” devices. Your daily chores are more than enough entertainment. Go about your business with the child in tow. When possible, let the baby see what you’re doing. Prop her up in a seat so she can see you wash the dishes, cut vegetables, or fold laundry. Attach her to your stomach while you sweep, vacuum, or walk around the grocery store. Include babies in every task that helps you and other members of the family.
(66) “The invitation is always for together, for doing the chore together.”
(66) Don’t start instructing; for small children, words are lectures—and confusing ones at that. Watch what the child does and try to build off their effort. If they start to make a big mess or big mistakes, gently guide them back into being productive.
(71) Continue the focus on working together. Call children over to help with chores alongside you. Instead of “Put away your plate after dinner” or “Fold your laundry,” you’re framing the tasks as a communal activity, such as “Let’s all work together to clean up the kitchen after dinner” or “Let’s all help fold the laundry as a family.” “The invitation is for doing things together,” Rebeca explains. “In Western culture, children often do work independently—one sibling does it on Thursday, one on Friday. But here it is ‘Let’s do the task together and we will finish sooner.’ ”
Ch 5. How To Raise Flexible, Cooperative Kids
(83) The Maya parents don’t feel the need to constantly entertain or play with their children. They don’t provide an endless stream of videos, toys, and treasure hunts to stimulate their kids and keep them busy. In other words, Maya parents are not on the floor playing princess games or spending weekends at kiddie museums, eating ten-dollar slices of pizza. Suzanne (Gaskins) calls these activities “child-centered.” That is, they’re activities solely for kids that parents would not do if they did not have children. Maya parents don’t feel the need to schedule many, if any, of these activities, Suzanne finds. Instead, the parents give their children an even richer experience, something that many Western kids do not get much of: real life. Maya parents welcome children into the adult world and give them full access to the adults’ lives, including their work. Adults go about their daily business—cleaning, cooking, feeding livestock, sewing, building homes, fixing bikes and cars, taking care of siblings—while the children play alongside them and observe the adults’ activities.
(84) And young children actually love these activities. They crave them. Children don’t see a difference between adult work and play, says psychologist Rebeca Mejía-Arauz. “Parents don’t need to know how to play with kids. If we get kids involved in adult activities, that’s play for kids.” And then they associate chores with a fun, positive activity. They associate it with playing.
(85) Here in the West, we often employ two types of motivation: rewards (e.g., praise, gifts, stickers, allowances) and punishment (e.g., yelling, time-outs, groundings, threats). But in many other cultures, moms and dads tap into another type of motivation: a child’s drive to fit in with their family and to work together as a team. To belong.
- ie, the most powerful urge in human emotion...fanaticism, etc.
(87) Every time we include a child in an adult task—whether it’s something as simple as taking the garbage out or something as complex as taking them to the Yucatán for a book project—we are telling that child that they are part of something bigger than themselves. They are part of a “we.” And they are connected to the other members of this family. What they do helps or hurts others.
On the flip side, every time we choose an activity devoted to and centered around the child, we slowly take away that membership card. We tell children that they’re different from the rest of the family, that they’re a bit like a VIP, who’s exempt from the family’s work, from the adult activities. We erode their motivation to work as a team.
(89) Respecting a kid’s autonomy—that is, minimizing bossiness—is necessary for this system to work.
(91) Throughout the day, try thinking to yourself, “It’s not my job to entertain the children. It’s their job to be part of the team.”
(92) Minimize (maybe even scrap?) all the child-centered activities. Don’t worry, your child will still partake in plenty of these activities at school and with friends and family. But make it a goal to say no to as many birthday parties, zoo trips, playdates, and “enrichment outings” as possible. Young children really don’t need these activities.
(93) Throw out toys and all other child-centered objects. Okay, so you don’t have to throw out all of them. But you can definitely prune the supply down to a few books, pencils, crayons, and maybe a set of Legos (or a toy the child regularly plays with). And you can definitely stop buying new toys. Remember that kids spent two hundred thousand years without these items. They don’t need them at all. Besides, relatives and friends will provide more than enough gifts to keep your house filled with pink plastic objects and blue fuzzy bears.
- relatives and friends purchase toys to make themselves feel better, not to make the kid feel better.
(94) If I have to ask Rosy more than three times to clean up a toy (or I find myself picking it up over and over again), I throw the toy away. Or I put it in a box, and at the end of the week we take the box to Goodwill. Sometimes I warn her with a statement like “Last chance to clean this up or it’s going in the trash!” Other times I just throw it away. Not once has she asked for one of the discarded items. Quickly, we’ve pruned the toys down to ones she really cares about, and she’s become better at cleaning up.
(94) Use toys to teach sharing. When you go visit friends, ask your child to pick out a toy or book to give to the other family. Or go through the toys together each month and set aside half for charity. I bet you my right pinky finger that your kids will really enjoy sharing with friends and charities, and will start doing it voluntarily after a few weeks.
(98) This approach consists of four core elements that provide the foundation for the parent-child relationship: togetherness, encouragement, autonomy, and minimal interference. I came up with a simple acronym, TEAM.
Ch 6. Master Motivators: What's Better Than Praise?
(110) Ingredient 1: Sense of connectedness.
(111) Ingredient 2: Sense of autonomy.
(111) Ingredient 3: Sense of competency.
(111) During my entire stay in Chan Kajaal, I never hear a parent praise a child, and I definitely never hear lavish praise—e.g., “Oh, Angela, that’s amazing how you did the dishes without being asked. You are a wonderful daughter!”
(111) The parents don’t say, “Good job,” or other phrases like that. “Sometimes they may use facial expressions to show their approval. And these nonverbal expressions are important.”
- less “phatic language” of non-western cultures. see Berman Coming to Our Senses and Everett Don’t Sleep There are Snakes. Overly talky society is a sign of its foundational anxiety and unconnectedness to Nature.
(112) When it comes to no praise, Maya parents aren’t alone. In all my travels outside of the U.S., I’ve never heard parents praise their children. And I’ve definitely never heard a constant stream of praise like the one that comes out of my mouth on a daily basis.
(112) Instead of praising children, Maya parents acknowledge or accept the child’s idea or contribution to an activity—no matter how inconsequential, ridiculous, or misshapen that contribution.
(121) “American parents need to stop talking so much and listen more to their children. "
(132) Across the globe, cultures use this “formula” to transmit all kinds of values, such as generosity, respect, and patience.
(132) 1. Practice. Give kids oodles of practice helping out around the house and working together, especially the young ones. Assign tasks, invite them over to watch, and encourage their desire to participate.
2. Model. Give children their membership cards. Immerse them in your day-to-day life so they can gradually learn chores by watching and can feel like full-fledged members of the family.
3. Acknowledge. When a child tries to help, accept their contributions and value their ideas. Respect their vision. Tell the child when they are learning the value. Point out the presence of the value (or its absence) in others’ actions. Connect their learning to “growing up” or maturing.
Ch 7. Never In Anger
(137) At the grocery store, another woman stops me by the apples. “Kids aren’t supposed to be around one person, every hour of the day,” she says with a slight tone of pity.
(138) “Your daughter must be sick of you. That is why she is misbehaving,” Sally tells me as we’re having a cup of tea at her mother’s kitchen table. “Rosy needs to be around other kids. You need a break.”
(141) I arrived in Kugaaruk with one goal: to figure out how to teach Rosy to control her anger and act with kindness to her family and friends. But these Inuit parents were going to school me on so much more, including how to control my own reactive and angry parenting style.
- Busy socialness. You have to be a polite, easy going person if you're going to be in the tribe.
Ch 8. How To Teach Children To Control Their Anger
(144) Inuit view yelling at a small child as demeaning, elders tell me. The adult is basically stooping to the level of the child—or throwing a grown-up version of a tantrum. Same goes for scolding or talking to children in an angry voice.
(145) Inuit parents repeat this same idea, that yelling and shouting makes parenting harder because kids stop listening to you. They block you out. As seventy-one-year-old Theresa Sikkuark puts it, “I think that’s why white children don’t listen. Parents have yelled at the children too much.”
(146) To train a child to behave in a certain way, we need two main ingredients, and a dash of a third: practice, modeling, and, if necessary, acknowledging. When we yell and get angry at children, we model being angry. Since children often yell back at us, we give them oodles of practice at yelling and getting angry at us. And then if we yell back, again, after they yell at us, we acknowledge and accept their anger.
Ch 9. How to Stop Being Angry at Your Kid
(157) During my three visits to the Arctic, I never once witness a parent argue with a child. I never see a power struggle. I never hear nagging or negotiating. Never. The same is true in the Yucatán and Tanzania. Parents simply don’t argue with children. Instead, they make a request and wait, silently, for the child to comply. And if the child refuses, the parents may make a comment, walk away, or turn their attention elsewhere.
(157) Two rules for reducing our anger toward children: expect misbehavior and never argue.
(159) Never force a child to do something. Instead of forcing, you encourage.
Ch 10. Intro to Parenting Tools
(165) These tools allow children to develop fantastic skills of executive function [ie working memory, flexible thinking, and self-control].
(168) Tool #1: Parent with calmness
(172) Tool #2: Parent with Touch or Toss (Physicality)
(175) Tool #3: Parent with Awe
(178) Tool #4: Take the Child Outside
(178) Tool #5: Ignore It
(189) “Kids need jobs. They don’t like to be unemployed. Makes them nervous.”
(190) In the vast majority of cultures, parents don’t constantly talk to kids or give them endless choices. Instead, parents take action.
(190) They do what they want the child to do (model).
(191) I think this low-talk parenting style is a big reason kids in these cultures seem so calm. Fewer words create less resistance. Fewer words cause less stress.
Words and commands are energizing and stimulating, and they often incite arguments. Every time we ask a child to do something, we create an opportunity for fighting and negotiating. But when you keep the conversation to a minimum, you keep the energy low. The chance for debate and fighting plummets.
(191) Same goes for choices. Even for adults, choices are hard. They can cause stress and anxiety because we don’t want to miss out on the option we don’t choose.
- welcome to the global world, The Anxiety of Progress, where this phenomenon never ends and only grows.
(192) Elizabeth and I are drinking coffee together at her sister’s kitchen table one day, and Rosy starts demanding Elizabeth’s attention. “Miss Elizabeth, look at me! Look what I’m doing. Miss Elizabeth, look,” Rosy keeps saying. “Look at me.”
Miss Elizabeth is definitely not looking at Rosy. In fact, Miss Elizabeth isn’t changing her expression at all. She keeps a perfect poker face. Instead of looking at Rosy, she steadies her eyes and then slowly turns her head and looks out into the horizon above Rosy’s head, as if Rosy is invisible.
My first thought is super negative. Goodness, she is being rude to Rosy, I think. But quickly I realize Rosy’s behavior is inappropriate, and Elizabeth lets her know that in an incredibly gentle yet potent way. Elizabeth continues our conversation, and Rosy stops being demanding.
(193) In many cultures, parents completely ignore misbehavior from children of all ages, says Batja Mesquita, a cross-cultural psychologist at the University of Leuven in Belgium. Parents don’t look at the child, don’t talk to them, and, perhaps most important, give no sign that they even care about the misbehavior (remember, many cultures expect children to misbehave). And in doing so, the parents convey a huge amount of information to the children about that behavior, especially in terms of its usefulness and how much the culture values it.
(194) The stronger we respond to a child’s misbehavior—even in a negative way—the more we acknowledge that behavior and, in essence, the more we train the child to behave that way.
(195) Stop issuing dos and don’ts...for example, Rosy starts to climb on top of the dog’s back. Instead of saying, “Don’t climb on the dog’s back,” I pause and think, What will happen if Rosy climbs on the dog’s back? Then I say to Rosy, “If you climb on her back, you will hurt her,” or even “Ow, Rosy, you are hurting the dog.”
Ch 11. Tools for Sculpting Behavior
(202) storytelling for disciplining...Storytelling is one of the unique characteristics that makes us human. It connects us to our environment, to our families, to our homes. It makes us cooperative and powerful. And it serves as a key tool for training children.
(205) We have brought all sorts of monsters into our house. Rosy can’t get enough of them. Storytelling has become our family’s go-to parenting tool. She calls the stories “take-aways” because the protagonist—a little girl who’s about three years old—often gets taken away (just as Celtic and Inuit kids do at the hands of water horses and sea monsters). “Mama, tell me a take-away,” she says every night before she falls asleep. Sometimes she even asks me to make them scarier.
(207) Just because parents don’t tell children stories doesn’t mean that kids don’t learn through stories, points out historian Emily Katz Anhalt. Many families, including our family, outsource oral storytelling to Disney, Netflix, and YouTube. “People learn from all the stories they’re told. That’s how we transmit our culture,” she says.
(211) Toddlers, age two and under, can’t really tell the difference between fiction and nonfiction. A year or two later, this ability begins to grow. “I’m hesitant to put an age on it because all kids are so different. But around age three or four, a child may not one hundred percent believe the story.”
(211) Around age seven, essentially all kids will know the difference between fiction and nonfiction, Deena says. But they still like to play along with fantasy for the fun of it.
Ch 12. Tools for Sculpting Behavior: Dramas
(217) Over and over again, Myna’s mom, dad, and grandparents executed one key parenting tool, which aimed to increase the child’s executive function. Jean called the tool “dramas.” Here’s how they work. When a child acts in anger—say, she hits someone or attacks a sibling—the parent may say something like “Ow! That hurts,” or “Ow, you’re hurting your brother,” to show the consequences of the child’s action. But there’s no yelling, no punishments.
(224) Associating unwanted behaviors with being a baby works incredibly powerfully on young children, who desperately want to be big girls or big boys.
Ch 13. How Did Our Ancient Ancestors Parent?
(235) When journalists write about hunter-gatherers, like the Hadzabe, they often use words such as “rare” and “last.” But those adjectives give the wrong impression. First off, there are likely millions of hunter-gatherers currently living around the world. In 2000, anthropologists estimated that the population numbered around 5 million. These communities live across a huge swath of the Earth. They hunt monitor lizards across Western Australia. They track caribou across the Arctic tundra. And in India, where nearly a million hunter-gatherers live, they collect highly valued medicinal plants and wild honey.
(235) In 1995, archaeologist Robert Kelly compiled a summary of Western knowledge of foraging societies worldwide. The resulting book, called The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers, describes scores of cultures worldwide, including more than a dozen in what we now call the United States.
(238) In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimerrer writes: In the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity.… In a gift economy property has a “bundle of responsibilities” attached.
Ch 14. The Most Confident Kids in the World
(252) With the !Kung hunter-gatherers in southern Africa, the word for “learning” and “teaching” is the same (n!garo), and parents will often use the phrase “She’s teaching/learning herself” while a child is trying to figure out how to do something.
(257) My mom didn’t know where I roamed from morning until it was time for dinner. And she never really seemed to care much. She never encouraged me to come home and help her put away groceries or fold the laundry. And I surely didn’t look for ways to help her. Sitting on the curb outside the 7-Eleven, munching on a hot dog, I never once thought about picking up some milk or cereal for breakfast in the morning. I was independent, yes. But I wasn’t autonomous.
(262) Giving children autonomy doesn’t mean sacrificing safety. It simply means staying quiet and out of the way. It means watching, from a distance, so kids can explore and learn for themselves. Then if the child gets into danger—real danger—you swoop in to help.
(265) Stop being a ventriloquist. I didn’t realize how much I act as Rosy’s ventriloquist until I see how the Hadzabe parents never answer for children or tell them what to say. Never, ever.
(266) Resist the urge to interrupt your child, no matter what, even if they make mistakes or leave out key points. Wait-a-bit before talking.
(266) Let children handle their own arguments. Inuit parents in the Arctic told me this advice over and over again. Essentially, when children argue among themselves, just step back and don’t interfere. Your meddling will only make the argument worse and prevent children from learning how to settle their own disputes.
(272) An autonomous child governs their own actions and makes their own decisions, but they have a constant connection to their family and friends. They are expected to help, share, and be kind. They are expected to give back to the group whenever possible.
Ch 15. Antidote for Depresssion [Alloparenting]
(279) Alloparenting is likely one of the key reasons why our species and our ancestors have survived the past million years or so while other humanlike species, such as Neanderthal and Homo heidelbergensis, didn’t make the cut. In other words, Homo sapien’s “success” on earth probably has less to do with “man the hunter” than “aunty the helper” and “grandpa the giver.”
(279) In the first few weeks of a new baby’s life, an infant will move from one caregiver to the next, on average, every fifteen minutes. By the time the baby is three weeks old, allomoms account for 40 percent of the newborn’s physical care. By sixteen weeks, allomoms account for a whopping 60 percent. Skip ahead two years, and the child spends more time with others than with their own mother.
(282) Scientists hypothesize that alloparenting evolved to help parents provide for their children. But what if, along with ensuring kids have full tummies, alloparenting also provided something else essential to parents: friendship? Subion and the other Hadzabe men and women have in abundance what I was missing as a new mom: social support. They have a rich network of people to whom they can turn when they feel down or need help. When life gets rough, they have each other’s back.
(283) Some anthropologists believe that alloparenting gives children something that sounds almost magical: trust in the world. Trust that your family will take care of you. Trust that the people in your neighborhood will take care of you. Trust that the forest will take care of you. Trust that people you meet will be kind, warm, and helpful. Trust that the world will provide for you.
(294) Helicopter parents strictly control a child’s overall schedule (macro-parenting), and they strictly control the child’s actions during those activities (micro-parenting). By contrast, free-range parents allow a child to set their own schedule, and they let the child decide how to act during those activities. They take a laissez-faire approach on both the macro- and micro-parenting fronts.
(297) In the U.S., we feel this enormous responsibility to “optimize” our children. That often means filling their days with nonstop activities or entertainment.
Ch 16. Sleep
(302) Basically all the “sleep rules,” as we know them now, came into fashion in the nineteenth century. During the Industrial Revolution, workers needed to arrive at factories at a certain time in the morning, no matter when the sun rose or set. As a result, “sleep had to be subjected to increasing levels of control,” Ben Reiss writes in his book Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World.
- hmm, what else do we think is innate/natural in our behavior but was actually shaped by the goals of modern aggressive individualistic socially dividing industrial capitalists??