Uploaded November 2024 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

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📰 Subscribe to Maiden Mother Matriarch here to listen to full extended episodes: louiseperry.substack.com

My guest today is Michaeleen Doucleff, correspondent for NPR radio and author of the bestselling book 'Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us about the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans.'

We spoke about the ways in which Western parenting radically diverges from the human norm, why parenting books are a product of atomisation, and why hunter gatherer parents are so much more tolerant of risk.

In the extended part of the episode, we spoke about some of the practical things we can learn from hunter gatherers, including on co-sleeping, potty training, baby carrying, and birth spacing.

00:20 WEIRD parenting
08:21 Isolated parenting
10:12 Entertainment myth
13:13 Competing parenting philosophies
20:00 Modernity and parenting
24:12 Problems of individualism
28:48 Risk tolerance
34:12 Scepticism of the science
40:01 Teaching children to be cooperative
42:00 Breastfeeding
49:16 Privacy, sleeping and sex

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