Are American parents doing it wrong?

What one author learned observing parents in the oldest cultures in the world.

If you’re surprised to see an email from me in your inbox today, it’s because I’m now publishing Is My Kid the Asshole? weekly instead of bi-weekly. Woo-hoo! I’ll be alternating between my regular format — explaining and addressing challenging kid behavior — and Parent Expert Q&As with authors of new, research-based parenting books.

With this inaugural Parent Expert Q&A, I’m thrilled to have interviewed NPR science journalist Michaeleen Doucleff, the author of Hunt, Gather, Parent, which came out last month. To report the book, Doucleff and her two-year-old daughter, Rosy, spent time in a Maya village in Mexico, an Inuit village above the Arctic circle, and a Hadzabe village in Tanzania to learn how these indigenous cultures parent — and, let’s just say, their approaches couldn’t be more different from how American parents do it. I asked Doucleff more about the techniques she observed and what happened when she tried them out herself.

In the Maya village you visited, parents organized very few child-centered activities. Kids instead spent much of their free time observing and helping their parents. Kids cooked, they cleaned, they did laundry. This seems so different from what so many parents do in the U.S. — they plan child-centered activities (zoo trips, playdates, dance classes), and clean up and cook when the kids aren’t around. What are your thoughts on how they parent, versus how we do?

When we consider the way we parent, we should ask: What are we teaching kids? With so many child-centered activities, we’re definitely not teaching kids how to behave in the adult world, and the skills they need to be a functioning adult. A lot of these thoughts and insights come from the work of anthropologist Suzanne Gaskins. She talks a lot about this idea of putting kids in this bubble, where life is special. If you spent all your days at cocktail parties, and lounging on the beach, and then somebody said, ‘oh, come and do the dishes,’ you’d be like, what? I think the way we parent gives the child the wrong impression about their purpose. I think it erodes their motivation to be cooperative, and to work together with a family, as a team. Also, when the parent is really micromanaging and controlling the child’s schedule, the child cedes responsibility to the parent. The child doesn’t learn to take initiative.

I also think it’s exhausting for the parents — it’s soul-sucking and exhausting, and I think it makes parenting so hard.

So what kinds of scheduling changes have you made at home? What does a typical Saturday look like for you now?