Michaeleen doucleff biography of williams

In the first segment, Tiokasin talks with Michaeleen Doucleff, Ph.D., author of the New York Times bestseller Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About Raising Children.” The book describes a way of raising helpful and confident children, which moms and dads have turned to for millennia. It also explains how American families can incorporate this approach into their busy lives. Michaeleen wrote the book after traveling to three continents with her 3-year-old daughter, Rosy. Maya, Inuit, and Hadzabe families showed her how to tame tantrums, motivate kids to be helpful, and build children’s confidence and self-sufficiency. Michaeleen is also a global health correspondent for NPR’s Science Desk, where she reports about disease outbreaks and children’s health. More about Michaeleen at michaeleendoucleff.com

In the second segment, William Iggiagruk Hensley (Iñupiaq) is the author of "Fifty Miles from Tomorrow: A Memoir of Alaska and the Real People” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009). It is a stirring memoir of his childhood among the Iñupiaq people in Alaska, his lifelong crusade, including a stint in Congress, to protect their culture and way of life. William brilliantly portrays how the lessons he learned in childhood, battling the wilderness of Alaska without many basic necessities, helped him as an adult to battle the hardships of political corruption and deceit in order to preserve his heritage In 1971, after years of William's tireless lobbying, the U.S. conveyed 44 million acres and earmarked nearly $1 billion for use by Alaska Native peoples. This is the inspiring true story of one man's quest to preserve and defend his people's "Ilitqusiat" — or Native Spirit.

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Hunt, Gather, Parent, by Michaeleen Doucleff, shares ancient wisdom that’s still relevant today: the key to raising healthy, happy, helpful humans is to engage them in work of the family and community. 

That’s a truth we seem to have forgotten in our collective desire to optimize our kids. Our intentions are good, but our actions — signing our kids up for multiple extracurricular activities; spending our weekends shuffling them around to tournaments and birthday parties — may actually be harming our kids’ development.

Michaeleen’s investigation of parenting practices began when her daughter was two and hitting, biting, and experiencing frequent tantrums. “Everything in my heart wanted to help her, to teach her how to calm down,” Michaeleen says. So, like a good modern parent, Michaeleen read parenting books and blogs. But nothing she tried seemed to help.

“We’d get in these big cycles: I’d eventually get angry and she would get louder,” Michaeleen says. “To be honest, I really started to dread my time with her.”

Then Michaeleen, a science correspondent for NPR, was sent to the Yucatan to follow up on a research paper that found that Mayan kids are better at paying attention than American kids. The experience was life-changing.

“What those parents showed me in the week we were there really shifted my whole thinking about parenting,” she says. “I started to realize there’s a different way to do this that’s not only easier but more effective.”

Learn more in Hunt, Gather, Parentby Michaeleen Doucleff.

In this episode, Jen, Janet & Michaeleen discuss:

• How a trip to the Yucatan shifted Michaeleen’s approach to parenting
• Why letting children explore is more effective than telling kids what to do
• Going against the parenting grai

[00:00:00]Randi Rubenstein: My name is Randi Rubenstein, and welcome to the Mastermind Parenting Podcast. At Mastermind Parenting, we’re on a mission to support strong-willed kids and the families that love them. 

Well, hello, hello. I have an exciting two parter for you guys. So today you’re going to hear part one and then next week we will release part two of my conversation, my most recent catch up with my friend, Michaeleen Doucleff and the author of Hunt, Gather, Parent. I know many of you know who she is, but just in case there’s someone who’s listening for the very first time to this episode, this is going to be a good conversation.

 Michaeleen and I, we connected a couple of years ago after I read her book, Hunt, Gather, Parent. And you know, I love Michaeleen because she sort of accidentally found herself in this parenting space. Not personally, she didn’t accidentally find herself in the parenting space in her personal life. She purposely became a parent. 

But the parenting professional space, she, she didn’t really, this was not her plan. She was an NPR journal, she is a journalist and she found a story. Like she was, she was studying these indigenous cultures, and it was a different story. And she started to notice something about the way they were parenting their kids that felt very different than what she was experiencing in the urban city in America where she lived at the time.

 And, um, with, you know, just her and all her friends, many of which who were becoming parents at, um, an older age than people become parents typically in indigenous populations, and she just noticed that the kids didn’t seem so freaking challenging. And, people just weren’t as stressed out as what she was seeing in San Francisco, in her own home and everyone she knew. 

And so she ended up she was gonna write a story it turne

Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy Helpful Little Humans by Michaeleen Doucleff (Avid Reader, 2021) is a book I picked up on the recommendation of fellow Ronin Institute scholar Arika Virapongse. She dropped a link to a review in our slack channel. The book's anthropological and non-Western exploration of parenting practices immediately intrigued me.

Doucleff, with her 5-year-old daughter in tow, visited and interviewed Mayan, Inuit, and Hadzabe families. Her goal was simple: learn how parents in more traditional cultures manage to produce such happy, responsible, and independent children. What techniques, practices, and mindsets have people in the modern, Western world lost? The result is packed with information. Doucleff summarizes her experiences in a simple acronym: TEAM parenting, for togetherness, encouragement, autonomy, and minimal interference.

I highly recommend this book to all parents, especially if you'd like to learn from the wisdom of our elders. The advice jibes with everything I've read about motivation and drive (such as Deci and Ryan's self-determination theory), the importance of play and autonomy, excellence, learning, and how people generally work.

However, because Doucleff is parent to only one, there is little discussion of managing siblings or how to apply the ideas to a whole household of kids. Some of the strategies were time or energy intensive; it wasn't always clear how you would use them if you had multiple children who needed immediate attention. (This is a continuing pet peeve of mine: nearly every parenting book I've picked up has been written by someone with only one or two kids.)

Below, I've included detailed summaries of the parts of the book I found most interesting.

WEIRD culture and why Westerners parent like they do

Only 12% of people in the world are of European descent. The Western, European industrialized, rich, and democratic