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I want some help with the summary of my article and the summary response for it. The article is “There’s a Better Way to Parent: Less Yelling, Less Praise”. I will give more information about the topic for this essay.
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There’s a Better Way to Parent: Less
Yelling, Less Praise
When Michaeleen Doucleff met parents from around the world,
she encountered millennia-old methods of raising good kids that
made American parenting seem bizarre and ineffective.
JOE PINSKER
MARCH 2, 2021
Children playing in Kotzebue, Alaska, roughly 75 years agoCLASSICSTOCK / GETTY
At one point in her new book, the NPR journalist Michaeleen Doucleff suggests that
parents consider throwing out most of the toys they’ve bought for their kids. It’s an
extreme piece of advice, but the way Doucleff frames it, it seems entirely sensible:
“Kids spent two hundred thousand years without these items,” she writes.
Her deeply researched book, Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach
Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans, contains many
moments like this, in which an American child-rearing strategy comes away looking
at best bizarre and at worst counterproductive. “Our culture often has things backward
when it comes to kids,” she writes.
Doucleff arrives at this conclusion while traveling, with her then-3-year-old daughter,
to meet and learn from parents in a Maya village on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico;
in an Inuit town in a northern Canadian territory; and in a community of huntergatherers in Tanzania. During her outings, she witnesses well-adjusted, drama-free
kids share generously with their siblings and do chores without being asked.
She takes care to portray her subjects not as curiosities “frozen in time,” but instead as
modern-day families who have held on to invaluable child-rearing techniques that
likely date back tens of thousands of years. I recently spoke with Doucleff about these
techniques, and our conversation, below, has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Joe Pinsker: Many American parenting strategies, you estimate, are only about 100
years old, and some of them arose more recently than that. What about American
parenting sticks out to you as distinctive and particularly strange?
Michaeleen Doucleff: One of the craziest things we do is praise children constantly.
When I was first working on the book, I recorded myself to see how frequently I
praised my little girl, Rosy, and I noticed that I would exaggeratedly react to even her
smallest accomplishments, like drawing a flower or writing a letter, with a comment
like “Good job!” or “Wow! What a beautiful flower!”
This is insane if you look around the world and throughout human history.
Everywhere I went, I don’t know if I ever heard a parent praise a child. Yet these kids
are incredibly self-sufficient, confident, and respectful—everything we want praise to
do, these kids already have it, without the praise.
It’s hard to cut back on praise, because it’s so baked in, but later on, I decided to try.
It’s not that there’s no feedback, but it’s much gentler feedback—parents will smile or
nod if a child is doing something they want. I started doing that, and Rosy’s behavior
really improved. A lot of the attention-seeking behavior went away.
Pinsker: You visited an Inuit town in the Canadian territory of Nunavut, and spent
time in households where children were almost mysteriously immune to tantrums.
How did the parents you met respond when kids misbehaved?
Doucleff: One night while I was there, Rosy and I were staying with a woman named
Sally who was watching three of her grandchildren—so, four kids under 6 years old in
this house. Sally just approached everything they did with the most calmness and
composure I have ever seen. At one point, a little toddler, maybe 18 months at the
time, I think he was pulling the dog’s tail or something. Sally picked him up and,
when she did, he scratched her face so hard that it was bleeding. I would have been
irate, but Sally, I saw her kind of clench her teeth, and just say, in the calmest voice,
“We don’t do this.” Then she took him and flipped him around with this playful
helicopter move, and they both started laughing. Then it was over—there was no
conflict around it.
If the child’s energy goes high—if they get very upset—the parent’s energy goes so
low. Another time on our trip, in the grocery store, Rosy started having a tantrum, and
I was getting ready to yell at her to stop. But Elizabeth, our interpreter, came over to
her and addressed her in the calmest voice. Immediately, Rosy just stopped—when
she was around that calmness, her whole body relaxed. I was like, Okay, I’m just
doing this tantrum thing completely wrong.
Read: No spanking, no time-out, no problems
Pinsker: You write about how when Sally and Elizabeth see behavior like that, they
think about the causes of it differently than many American parents do. What is the
narrative they have for why young kids act out?
Doucleff: Yeah, this is huge—it single-handedly changed my life, and it’s something
you hear in other parts of the Arctic. In the U.S., when a child calls you a name or
smacks you, many parents think that the child is pushing your buttons, that they’re
testing boundaries and want to manipulate you.
The Inuit parents and elders I interviewed almost laughed when I said that. One
woman said something like, “She’s a kid—she doesn’t know how to manipulate like
that.” Instead, what they told me is that young children are just these illogical,
irrational beings who haven’t matured enough and haven’t acquired understanding or
reason yet. So there’s no reason to get upset or argue back—if you do, you’re being
just like the child.
This has totally shifted the way I interact with Rosy—I have so much less anger.
She’s trying her best. Maybe she’s clumsy and illogical and irrational, but in her heart,
she loves me, she wants to do well, and she wants to help.
Pinsker: One interesting observation in the book is that many American parents take
their whole family to spaces that are expressly designed for kids, like children’s
museums and indoor play places—despite the fact that these spaces are generally not
very fun for parents. How do you think about these activities?
Doucleff: I think that a lot of the time, we don’t know what to do with kids. On
weekends, it was sometimes like, How do we fill this time with Rosy? But the idea that
parents are responsible for entertaining a child or “keeping them busy” is not present
in the vast majority of cultures around the world, and definitely not throughout human
history. What some of the psychologists I interviewed told me is that in these fake,
childlike worlds, the child is separated from reality in some ways—they don’t learn
how to behave as an adult.
There’s a lot of good scientific evidence that children have an innate instinct to
cooperate and work together with their families. And child-centered activities can
kind of strip away what I call their family “membership card,” the feeling that they’re
a part of the family and working together as a team—not a VIP that the parents are
serving. Kids want to help us and be part of our lives, and we can take that away with
constant child-centered activities.
Pinsker: So if you aren’t going to the children’s museum as a family, what are you
doing instead?
Doucleff: Basically, my husband and I do things that we used to do before Rosy was
born, or things that we have to do, and modify them to include her. Sometimes I have
to work, and she has to entertain herself. Or we go to the beach, and I sit and read for
three hours, and don’t play with her—sometimes there are friends and sometimes
there are not. We’ll go hiking or work in the garden or go visit friends together. And
then we do chores. We do the laundry together. We clean up together. We go to the
grocery store together. We just live—without a kiddie museum.
All over the world, and throughout history, parents have gone about their lives, but
they’ve welcomed the kids into it. In many cultures, parents let the kids tag along, and
they let the kid do what they want to do, within the boundaries of being respectful and
kind. And for kids, that’s entertainment enough.
Read: The way American parents think about chores is bizarre
Pinsker: In the U.S., many parents find themselves essentially on their own when
making sure their kids are being looked after. Could you talk about the more
communal approach to raising children that you saw with the Hadzabe, the
community of hunter-gatherers you visited in Tanzania?
Doucleff: I was with a group of about 15 to 20 adults and their kids—they live in
small huts and work together all day. They spend enormous amounts of time with
each other, but they’re not all related. And when we first got there, it was hard for me
to tell which toddlers belonged to which moms and dads, because everyone was
helping to take care of them. The children were comfortable with all these different
women and men.
If you look around the world, you’ll see that in many cultures besides Western culture,
and definitely in hunter-gatherer communities, there’s an enormous amount of what’s
called “alloparenting.” Allo- is derived from a Greek word meaning “other,” so it just
refers to caretakers in a child’s life other than the mom or dad.
These people are deeply involved in the child’s upbringing. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an
anthropologist, has done some amazing research where she shows that young children
are basically designed to be raised by a group of people, not just two—meaning
sometimes a mom or a dad is on their own doing the work of several people. So of
course we feel worn down and exhausted.
Pinsker: American culture generally doesn’t encourage this approach to parenting,
since there’s often an emphasis on individual parents. How do you think about
transporting the spirit of those models over to an American context?
Doucleff: First of all, we do way more alloparenting than we give credit for, but often,
we don’t value the alloparents as much as we should: Nannies, day-care providers,
teachers—those are all alloparents. Personally, I’ve been trying to value those people
more and show my appreciation for them.
But there are opportunities aside from that. For one thing, a lot of alloparenting is
done by children who are two, three, four, five years older than the child. I think we
underestimate what children can do—there are children I met who were, like, 12 years
old, making meals and taking care of younger children. It’s because they’re given
opportunities all along to learn those skills.
Another thing is, we’ve built an “auntie-uncle network,” which is an idea I got from
the psychological anthropologist Suzanne Gaskins. We have two other families who
pick up the kids from school sometimes, and then I pick up the kids sometimes, and
we trade off. The three kids get to have a sort of extended family. Rosy loves it, and
we don’t have to pay for after-school care.
People tend to think of the nuclear family as traditional or ideal, but looking at the
past 200,000 or so years of human history, what’s traditional is this communal model
of working together to take care of a child. For me personally, this is reassuring,
because I don’t want to be with Rosy, like, every moment. Really, that’s not natural.
JOE PINSKER is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers families and relationships.
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