Michaeleen Doucleff challenges our command-driven parenting style and offers a better alternative. If we want resilient, independent children, is constantly ordering them around the right approach?
Doucleff shares four powerful principles that foster independence while protecting children’s emotional well-being and explores parenting practices from diverse cultures that can alleviate the burdens we place on ourselves and our kids.
This conversation leaves you questioning fundamental assumptions about raising children in the modern world.
Available now: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Transcript
Michaeleen Doucleff is the author of Hunt, Gather, Parent. Her work has taken her all over the world to explore, observe, and learn from the parenting practices of various cultures. She is also a correspondent for NPR’s Science Desk.
Here are a few highlights from the episode:
Children are born wanting to help. Everyone knows this in our society. So the first thing is to really let your children help you even when they can’t do it…Never turn down a child’s request to help.
Parenting is about transmitting values.
Praise is a tricky beast. Praise can motivate children, but it can also demotivate. It depends on how it’s done, what context it is, the child. We have this sense that all praise is good, and it’s not. I tell parents, you can just stop praising.
If you could just change one thing in your child’s life, that would be to give them two hours, or an hour, per week of autonomy.
When you’re their personal assistant and you’re managing their time block, hour by hour, you’re doing them a disservice because they’re not able to learn this skill of figuring out, What do I do next?
One of the most stressful things is this feeling of, “What do you do with your time with your kids?” Kids do not need to be entertained. They have not been entertained for 200,000 years.
You can either change the environment and get rid of everything, which is what we tend to do with kids, but then you just leave them unempowered, or you slowly teach them.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:27 How (and why) we’ve lost our way as parents
05:17 The rise of the nuclear family
11:01 TEAM Parenting: T
14:35 TEAM Parenting: E
20:16 Why you don’t need to praise your child
23:27 TEAM Parenting: A
33:57 TEAM Parenting: M
35:49 “Kids do not need to be entertained”
36:27 Technology, parenting, and transmitting values
1:00:14 Resources parents can use to educate kids about technology
1:02:05 How you can use the environment to give kids autonomy
1:07:11 Success and parenting
