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

by Michaeleen Doucleff

Truth is, I didn’t know how to be a good mother. Never before had I been so bad at something that I wanted to be good at. Never before had the gap between my actual skill and the skill level I desired been so crushingly wide.

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.”

Most striking, in many hunter-gatherer cultures, parents build a relationship with young children that is markedly different than the one we foster here in the U.S.—it’s one that’s built on cooperation instead of conflict, trust instead of fear, and personalized needs instead of standardized development milestones.

Our culture thinks either the adult is in control or the child is in control. There’s a major problem with this view of parenting: It sets us up for power struggles, with fights, screaming, and tears.

This book, from NPR journalist, is great - audio or ebook - a parenting book I actually finished!