Michaeleen Doucleff’s central conceit, that American parents have lost touch with universal tools of high-quality parenting, is reductionist, elitist (e.g., unpaid alloparenting is more common at income levels lower than Doucleff’s), and belied by her quotation of Laura Markham and Tina Payne Bryson, who—like other non-hunter-gatherer parenting experts—have been preaching many, if not all, of these same techniques. Doucleff defines positive parenting and free-range parenting in artificially limited ways (as lacking tools and offering kids a Lord of the Flies existence, respectively), reshaping these schools of thought into strawmen for her to attack. “We interfere too much,” Doucleff writes.
While she’s not wrong about trends toward controlling, intensive, and isolated parenting in the U.S., using “we” for all of Western culture renders invisible the oodles of teachers and parents who already do the things Doucleff recommends. They have “the look,” avoid power struggles, use natural consequences, offer re-enactments and do-overs, and take stir crazy kids outside or give them jobs. Their kind, helpful children are also erased in this framing.
It just wasn’t necessary to characterize American parents as a mass of nagging, punitive, and over-praising buffoons without access to good advice in order to say the Maya, Hadzabe, and Inuit cultures (and Doucleff) have value to add: that these methods need to be more widespread and advice scattered across parenting books summarized with the lens of what’s universal. The schtick gets really, really annoying. But please read the book anyway.
Why? Doucleff chooses a successful organizing acronym: TEAM, for togetherness, encouragement, autonomy, and minimal interference. Her anecdotes read well. She hammers home the universal formula for transmitting values and reinforcing desirable behavior: “practice, model, acknowledge.” She brings together lots of fantastic advice: Invite your kids to work together to clean up, find a way to “acknowledge a child’s ideas without actually doing what they ask,” and don’t micromanage. Don’t interrupt your kids. “[T]urn commands, criticisms, and feedback into questions.”
I’ll discard the advice to ask, “Do whiny babies get to go to Trader Joe’s?” And I’ll also keep encouraging my kids to negotiate. Because, as Doucleff says, it would be a mistake to “romanticize other cultures, believing they contain some ‘ancient magic.’” Not everything she observes is ideal just because it’s traditional. And yet, Doucleff gathers so much wisdom on how to create a calm, cooperative household that new parents will benefit from the information, and any caregiver, no matter how skilled, from the refresher.
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