What the planet's traditional cultures can teach you about being a better parent
In the two minutes leading up to my Zoom conversation with Michaeleen Doucleff, I have pelted down the stairs of my home three times, called upon for crises including the sharpening of a coloured pencil, the pouring of juice and the locating of a lost colouring book (on the table, in front of my seven-year-old’s nose).
So it is an understatement to say I find myself receptive to her advice that: “A lot of what we do isn’t necessary, isn’t helping and may even be doing our children a disservice. There’s an easier, more effective way. A way parents have turned to for thousands of years, on every liveable continent.”
Doucleff speaks from personal as well as professional experience. As global health correspondent for America’s National Public Radio, she reported on stories in some of the world’s most remote regions. Then, in 2015, she had a daughter, Rosy.
“She was a hard, hard child. She’s super-smart, but super-hot-tempered and persistent.” By the time Rosy turned three: “There was so much tension in our relationship,” says Doucleff. “I dreaded being with her. I knew I was failing. I’m a scientist, so I started researching parenting in the places I was reporting on.”
One day, Doucleff was sent to interview members of a Mayan community in the Yucatan, Mexico. “What I saw there blew my mind,” she says. “There was no yelling, no tears, no drama or bickering. We’re talking about families with five kids. But those kids were respectful to their parents, generous to the younger ones, and helpful. The parents were so calm. I remember sitting in the airport, thinking: What did I just see? Can parenting really be that easy?”
The experience was to spark an extraordinary journey, one that was both literal and emotional, as Doucleff and her three-year-old daughter took off around the globe, staying with hunter-gatherer communities from the Arctic tundra to the Tanzanian savannah and transforming their own relationship along the way.
Each culture was, of course, unique. Yet, says Doucleff, they shared fundamental principles when it came to raising and relating to children. Principles that parents in the West have lost and which, she suggests, we urgently need to rediscover, perhaps even more so in the midst of a pandemic, “because we are running so fast. We’re doing more parenting than we ever have. And this practice makes life easier. It’s going to save you so much time and energy.”
Her book Hunt, Gather, Parent charts her travels with Rosy, delving into academic study and science, and distilling this universal “hunter-gatherer” approach to child-raising into a handy acronym: Team.
T, she explains, stands for “together”: “In our old life, I was rushing to get all these chores done, so that I could take Rosy to some activity or class. Hunter-gatherer parents don’t do any of those.”
She tells me about visiting a Mayan family and watching, awestruck, as a 12-year-old woke from a nap, stretched, and then wandered over to do the dishes, completely unbidden. Doucleff later unearthed a study in which Mayan kids were asked why they helped around the house in this manner. The most common answer was simply: “because I live here”.
“They thought it was a silly question,” says Doucleff. “It’s instilled in them very early. Parents aren’t setting them up to a special activity and then doing the dishes. The activity is the dishes. Kids hang around while the parents do chores, and the parents incorporate them.”
Which leads us nicely on to “E” – encourage. It is, says Doucleff, extremely rare to hear a hunter-gatherer parent ordering a child to do, or indeed stop doing, something.
“A lot of cultures believe that forcing children turns the activity into a punishment,” she explains. “It erodes their intrinsic motivation – the desire to do something just because you want to.”
Instead, they lead by example. Older children are encouraged to take responsibility for younger ones, who in turn are encouraged into positive behaviour by their example.
When Rosy began throwing rocks during their stay with an Inuit community, for example, a nearby 10-year-old calmly told her: “Rosy, you’re going to hurt somebody with those rocks”. The effect, says Doucleff, was subtly but significantly different to employing the phrase she herself was reaching for – “Stop that!”
“It requires the child to think for themselves,” she says. “You’re not treating them like a robot that just answers commands. There’s much less tension and antagonism implied.” Rosy paused, then put down the rocks.
The next letter in Doucleff’s acronym stands for autonomy. Researchers, she tells me, have studied the number of times a hunter-gatherer parent in central Africa is likely to interject in their child’s activities with a command or suggestion. It averages at three times an hour.
“I ran that same experiment on myself and parents in the playground here [in San Francisco],” says Doucleff. The results? “Parents clock in about 100 times an hour. We micromanage them at a level that’s off the charts compared with how humans have been raised for the past 200,000 years.”
Autonomy, she points out, is not the same as independence. In hunter-gatherer communities, “kids always have responsibility to the group. They’re taking care of the other kids, or looking out for things to forage. We think there’s either helicoptering, micromanaging parenting, or a free-range child. But there’s another, better option.”
That option relies largely on the final component in Doucleff’s acronym: “minimal interference”. “It’s not the parent isn’t watching, it’s just that when they step in, they do the minimum required. My knee-jerk reaction with Rosy was to interfere. This approach is the opposite. You stand back, watch, and only interfere if you absolutely have to. The children teach themselves.”
All this freedom does not, she stresses, equate to permissiveness: “The level of expectation for respectfulness, helpfulness and kindness is so much higher in these places,” says Doucleff. So, I’m tempted to ask, was it embarrassing taking your wayward Western child into these well-adjusted families?
“Oh absolutely. I was horrified. Rosy was out of control, having tantrums and I didn’t know how to handle it. And here were these other mums, handling four or five kids with ease and grace. Then I saw how they handled Rosy. I thought: this works.”
Perhaps, I think, in the context of a hunter-gatherer community. But do these principles really work when transported back to our high-pressure, high-speed lives in the UK and the US?
“I think it’s about scale,” says Doucleff. “Rosy will never be as autonomous as a Hadzabe child. But that doesn’t mean I can’t give her some of it. Small changes can make big differences. It’s not all or nothing.”
Back home in San Francisco, Doucleff and her husband have sought out “zones of autonomy” such as large playgrounds, where Rosy can safely and regularly feel free of them. They have dropped the roster of activities, embraced household chores as a family and routinely limit themselves to three commands an hour.
“My relationship with Rosy is so different now,” she says. “I went from yelling at Rosy, to enjoying time with her. And I would not have survived lockdown without these tools. In fact, I consciously ratcheted up my use of them.”
In lockdown, the now five-year-old Rosy has been able to entertain herself for hours while her mother works beside her. “It’s not about ignoring them,” stresses Doucleff, “You’re there, watching and ready to help if needed. But you’re not the producer in their lives. You’re the stage hand.”
It’s one demotion that I’m very happy to embrace.
What Michaeleen and Rosy learnt on their travels…
How to motivate children
Intrinsic motivation is what makes a person dance in their living room at night when no one is watching. It makes Rosy immediately start colouring in the morning when she wakes up. And it makes Gelmy, the daughter of a woman I met in a small Mayan village on the Yucatán Peninsula, come in from playing with her friends to help her mother with the tortillas.
In many ways, intrinsic motivation is magical. It allows people to grow, learn, and work without (much) struggle or resistance. And it likely lasts longer than its counterpart, extrinsic motivation.
To motivate a child without bribes or threats, the child needs to feel:
Connected to you or another person close to the child.
Like they are making the choice to do the task and that no one is forcing them to do it.
Like they are competent and that their contribution will be valued.
Praise can undermine motivation and generate competition (and strife) between siblings.
Parents can learn quite a lot from a child. Knowledge can flow in both directions. Don’t assume your approach or vision is the best. When you pay attention to a child’s vision or ideas, you’ll likely find the child often has valuable and useful information.
Accepting a child’s knowledge, idea, or contribution is a potent way to motivate the child.
How to control anger
Over the past several years, I’ve interviewed more than 100 Inuit parents in the Arctic, from Alaska to eastern Canada. I’ve sat with elders in their 80s and 90s while they lunched on “country food”– stewed seal, frozen beluga whale, and raw caribou. I’ve talked with mothers selling hand-sewn sealskin jackets at a high school craft fair. I attended a parenting class in which day care instructors were taught how their ancestors raised small children hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of years ago. Across the board, all the mums and dads mention one golden rule of Inuit parenting: “Never yell at a child,” says 74-year-old Sidonie Nirlungayuk, who was born in a sod house not far from Kugaaruk, a town in the Canadian Arctic. “Our parents never yelled at us, never, ever.”
Watching the parent-child interactions around Kugaaruk, for the first time in my life, I see a way to parent that doesn’t involve anger – or yelling. It’s transformative. First, I notice how relaxed and calm the adults are. I also see the profound impact this calmness has on the kids in the house, including Rosy. The result is pretty much immediate. When we stay with Maria Kukkavuk, who has seen me struggling with Rosy and has generously offered to have us to stay, Rosy’s fiery belly cools. Her angst eases. One night, she becomes upset because she wants milk, which we don’t have. She starts to have a tantrum, but when she realises this behaviour is not having an effect on any adults in the room, she literally falls to the ground like the Wicked Witch of the West and cries, “Nooooooo!”
Observing this shift in Rosy raises a mirror up to my own anger. It makes me realise how when I raise my voice and scold her, I actually trigger her tantrums and meltdowns. We get caught in a feedback loop that’s as terrible as it is predictable. I start screaming; Rosy yells back. I yell more and make some flimsy threats. Then she lies on the ground, kicking and screaming. I go to pick her up and try to calm her down. But it’s too late. She’s angry. And to show it, she might lash out with a slap or pull my hair – which escalates my anger even more.
But somehow Kukkavuk and her family never fall into this toddler-parent emotional trap, this anger do-si-do. They never engage in power struggles with children. And over the time I spend with them, I work hard to reverse engineer how they do it.
It’s a two-step process:
Stop talking. Just stay quiet. Don’t say anything.
Learn to have less – or even no – anger toward children. (Note: I’m not talking about controlling your anger when it arises, but rather generating less anger in the first place.)
On the surface, these steps may look suspiciously like the positive parenting trap. But hear me out. And clearly, this isn’t an easy process. The second step is especially difficult. But Lord knows, if I can change (or make a big improvement), anyone can.
How to raise helpful kids
If you look at parents around the world – whether they farm maize in the Yucatán, hunt zebras in Tanzania, or write books in Silicon Valley – their toddlers have two traits in common. The first is tantrums. Yes, toddler tantrums are pretty much unavoidable no matter where you live, the ethnographic record shows.
But the second thing in common is a bit more surprising. It’s helpfulness. Toddlers everywhere are eager to be helpful – very eager. Toddlers are born assistants. And they’re hungry to get in there and get the job done “all by myself”. Need to sweep up the kitchen? Rinse a dish? Or crack an egg? No worries. Toddlers, Inc will be there on the double. Watch out! Here they come. In one study, 20-month-olds actually stopped playing with a new toy and walked across the room to help an adult pick up something from the floor. No one had to ask the toddler for their help, nor did the toddler need a reward for their assistance.
Maria de los Angeles Tun Burgos, who lives in a small Mayan village in the middle of the Yucatán Peninsula, is the perfect supermum to teach us how to raise helpful kids who also take pride in their work around the house. She has clearly done a superb job transmitting this value to her eldest daughter, Angela, who not only voluntarily washes dishes but also cleans the house while her mum is out running errands. De los Angeles Tun Burgos has two younger daughters – aged five and nine – who are at different stages of the learning process but still contribute. One of them is Gelmy, who voluntarily comes in from playing with her friends so she can help make tortillas.
But here’s the thing about learning to do chores voluntarily: it takes years, De los Angeles Tun Burgos tells me. “You have to teach them slowly, little by little, and eventually they will understand.” You can’t simply hang up a chore chart and expect a four-year-old to start washing the dishes on Tuesdays and Thursdays without you asking. As De los Angeles Tun Burgos says, you have to teach the child slowly. You have to train them. The child has to understand not just how to do the chores, but also when to do them, and why doing them is important and beneficial to the family – and themselves.
Need your child to lend a hand? Train them
Children have an innate desire to help their parents. They’re born that way. It might not seem like it, but they genuinely have a built-in drive to belong to the family, and helping earns their place in the group. Often, they don’t know how best to help. So they seem incapable or clumsy. The parents’ job is to train them. When first starting to help with a task, a child may seem clumsy and perhaps make a mess. But with practice, they will learn quickly while still maintaining their love for helping.
Never discourage a child, at any age, from helping a parent or family member. Shooing a child off can extinguish their motivation to pitch in and work together. If the task is too difficult or hazardous, tell them to watch. Or break the task into a doable subtask for younger kids (toddlers to about age six or seven)
Request a child to help throughout the day. Don’t go overboard with requests. One an hour is plenty. Things to ask: Go and fetch something you need; carry a small bag of groceries; stir a pot on the stove; cut a vegetable; hold the door; turn on a hose.
Be sure the requests are for:
Real jobs that make a real contribution to the family, not fake work.
Working together as a team, not for the child doing it alone.
Simple tasks that are easy for the child to understand and complete without help (e.g., hand a child a book and tell them to put it on the bookshelf instead of asking them to clean up the living room).
Tips for parents of children of all ages
Resist the urge to correct a child, especially when they’re pitching in or helping the family. Step back and let a child perform a task without interfering, even if the child isn’t executing the task as you wish or taking the optimal approach.
If a child is resisting a request (e.g. to help with the dishes), you’re likely forcing the issue too hard. The child knows what you want. Stop asking. Wait and let the child take the lead.
Pay close attention to how a child is trying to contribute and then build off their ideas instead of resisting them.
Help a child learn a task by letting them practise that task instead of lecturing or explaining the task to them. Offer simple course corrections, sparingly, while the child takes action.
Accept a child’s contribution to an activity even if it isn’t what you expect or want.
Use praise very sparingly. When you do praise, attach it to learning an overall value (e.g. “You are starting to learn to be helpful”) or to maturity (e.g. “You are really becoming a big girl”)
Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff (Harper Thorsons, £14.99)
