Ooo, this book was soooo good that I have too much to say and not enough time to write it all! I’m excited to be the first reviewer to have already put these parenting strategies into action and say—yes, this works! My six year old is cooking and cleaning, and she is more peaceful and even sleeping better than she has been in years. Even the baby is happy because we are including him in everything we do as a family.
I was able to do get these results so quickly because I was already many months into implementing a complementary educational philosophy (Montessori) at home. Hunt Gather Parent gave me some of the context I was missing to make phenomenal changes in my household in literally just a few days. This is an important book for parents, grandparents, nannies and other caregivers. This knowledge is desperately needed in the US today!
So as the book jacket explains, this is the story of an American mom, Michaeleen Doucleff, who brings her three year old daughter Rosy along with her as she lives and learns about parenting with families from three indigenous populations—the Maya in Yucatan, the Inuit in the Arctic circle and the Hadzabe in Tanzania. The book is rich with first-person anecdotes from each of these settings, populated by realistic portraits of the people she encountered. I loved learning about each group, and I wanted to read more, more, more about the families she met and the experiences she had.
The book also weaves in a ton of scientific research and many of the author’s original interviews with anthropologists (I admit I gave the book a lot more credit once I looked at the notes and realized a lot of the interviews were her own original work). There is some interesting historical parenting perspective in the first two chapters that upends much of our current thinking about raising children.
As well, the author was generous in her willingness to share the darker, cringe-worthier parts of her own parenting journey. I think just about any parent reading this book will recognize parts of their own parent-child relationships in this! But never fear, there is help on the way, as Michaeleen shares many macro and micro tips and tools for finding a completely new way of relating to our children. A very high level recap of some of her main points:
--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.
--React with peace and gentleness to children. Respond to misbehavior by ignoring, redirecting, modeling, encouraging, and other kind educational methods.
--Give children autonomy in a safe way that builds both their confidence and their feeling of responsibility to their family and community.
I really appreciated that Michaeleen was able to identify some “universal parenting strategies” because I agree with her that finding commonalities among cultures is the way to find what truly works. I think all parents everywhere want the same things, right? For their children to be healthy and fulfilled, and for the relationship among family members to be supportive and rewarding.
And yet many of us in the U.S. (and probably Canada, Australia and U.K. as well), have completely lost our parenting compass. We don’t even necessarily know what values we want to transmit to our children, let alone how to transmit them and nurture the behaviors that support them. Do we want to encourage independence or interdependence? Peer social skills or family ties? Shouldering responsibility or following your bliss? As parents, do we want to be our kids’ friends or their leaders?
The indigenous families interviewed by Michaeleen seem to have settled on the perfect middle ground among all these ideas. Their children are confident, sociable and emotionally mature. They definitely come across as happy and content. The parents seem to genuinely enjoy the company of their children, yet the parents have their own lives and aren’t at all slaves to their children’s whims.
Now, as for my own parenting journey…I have been on this path for a few years to try to remake our family life and my relationship to our older child. I have read and implemented some of the best of other cross-cultural parenting books that have come out in the past handful of years, including about the French, Danes, and Japanese. Those books were wonderful and do not fundamentally contradict what Hunt, Gather, Parent describes. It’s just that those books failed to mention some of the underlying concepts which are also practiced in France, Japan and Scandanavia—things like family togetherness.
As well, I have been reading books by Maria Monthessori and her disciples and implementing them in our home for about 6 months. Montessori provides a more detailed and comprehensive method than Hunt Gether Parent for introducing children of all ages to the work of daily life, as well as to the important concept of modifying the manmade environment (ie. The home) to ease children’s anxiety and increase their feelings of success.
Importantly, Maria Montessori describes child development in her books and explains how the evolutionary purpose of childhood is basically to follow around adults and older children so the developing child can learn how to act, move and speak like others of their group, thus adapting to their culture, environment and time. This is how an Inuit child grows up to know how to live off the harsh lands of the Arctic, and how an American child grows up to know how to drive a car, shop at the supermarket and earn an income through gainful employment. Montessori describes how children have a developmental need to contribute to their communities and families, and how they will become demanding, possessive, clingy or otherwise maladapted if this developmental need is thwarted.
Montessori has been incredible for our family and has completely changed our family life! Using the Montessori method of breaking jobs into subtasks and teaching by modeling rather than correcting, our 6 year old had already assumed a range of responsibilities from helping to prepare meals and clean up afterward, doing her own laundry, washing her hair, and many others. She was SO MUCH happier and confident after we taught her these jobs, we couldn’t believe it. And as Michaeleen notes in Hunt Gather Parent, we were continually surprised by her physical abilities, such as carrying a laundry basket full of laundry up a flight of stairs all by herself!
However, our child was still clingy and demanding. She had difficulty concentrating and talked compulsively All. Day. Long. Enter the answer to my fervent asking…Michaeleen Doucleff’s Hunt, Gather, Parent. One of the wonderful ideas from this book we implemented immediately was the Family Membership Card—which essentially says children need to eat, work, play and do everything else ALONGSIDE the other members of their family. Whereas before our daughter had her own jobs to complete, now I suggested we do all jobs together. And she loves it! Using this tool and some of the others from the book, after just a few days she is already calmer and more focused. I enjoy her company more than I have since she turned two! And our baby is getting more attention because there isn't so much idle chatter in the house. The transformation for our entire family has been wonderful, and I assume this is only the beginning for us!
To those parents who, like me, are looking for a better way to relate to their children and manage their family lives, I think you will find many ideas in this book. But change takes time if you are just starting this journey. Be patient with your children and spouse, and especially with yourself. Little by little, things will fall into place.
To the author…thank you for writing this book! I can tell it was an act of love, and you deserve many rewards in return. I wish all parents and children everywhere love, peace and blessings.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 9, 2021
Reviewed in the United States on September 5, 2023
Reviewed in the United States on August 26, 2023
I don’t read many parenting books. This was actually only the second parenting book I’ve ever read and maybe the last! Lot’s of interesting insights and techniques to think about raising helpful, respectful and resilient children in a western culture that no longer teaches those values. Not every proposal presented in this book will work for all families, but all families can benefit from at least a few of them. One key takeaway is to get your kids involved in family life and culture as frequently as you can. They love to help! And practicing helpfulness is a skill we all have to learn.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 7, 2021
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Matthias Nyvelt
Bestes Buch über Kindererziehung, was ich bisher gelesen habe
Reviewed in Germany on August 23, 2023
