Description

New York Times Bestseller

The world’s oldest cultures have perfected the art of raising happy, well-adjusted children. What can we learn from them?

“Hunt, Gather, Parent is full of smart ideas that I immediately wanted to force on my own kids.” —Pamela Druckerman, The New York Times Book Review

When Dr. Michaeleen Doucleff becomes a mother, she looks into modern parenting advice and finds that much of it lacks strong evidence and often fails to work. Seeking a better approach, she travels to a Maya village in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, where she observes parents using a completely different method—one that produces remarkably kind, generous, and helpful children without relying on yelling, nagging, or timeouts. This raises a key question: What else might Western parents be missing?

In *Hunt, Gather, Parent*, Doucleff takes her three-year-old daughter on a journey to learn parenting techniques from three long-standing cultures: Maya families in Mexico, Inuit families in the Arctic, and Hadzabe families in Tanzania. She discovers that these communities do not face the same challenges with children that many Western parents do. Instead of focusing on control, these parents build relationships based on cooperation, trust, and attentiveness to each child’s unique needs.

Maya parents excel at teaching cooperation. They raise children who naturally help with household tasks, without using rewards, punishments, or structured chore lists. Inuit parents have an incredibly effective method for teaching emotional intelligence. When children misbehave—whether by crying, hitting, or acting out—Inuit parents remain calm and patient, demonstrating how to self-regulate and think before reacting. Hadzabe parents foster confidence and independence in their children, relying on a simple but powerful approach that protects kids from the stress and anxiety that are so common among American children today.

Doucleff not only observes these parenting techniques firsthand but also applies them in her own life, achieving dramatic results with her daughter. She learns to discipline without raising her voice and engages with psychologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists, and sociologists to explore how these approaches benefit children’s mental health and development.

Packed with practical strategies parents can use right away, *Hunt, Gather, Parent* challenges conventional parenting wisdom and introduces a universal model that can be adapted for families everywhere.