We need to own our parenting mistakes

Not all choices lead to equally good outcomes

Credit: Aardman Animations

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This week, I had a piece go live that discusses Hunt, Gather, Parent¹, a book that offers tips on how to parent more like an ancient hunter-gatherer. My take was that the book, and the paleo parenting trend generally, offers good advice — while also missing an opportunity to wrestle with or adopt the worldviews that made family life more manageable for our ancestors.

But I think Hunt, Gather, Parent also represents something else: An opportunity to identify lifestyle mistakes we parents make, acknowledge those mistakes, and then modify our actions as a result.

I started thinking about mistakes while reading a part of the book that discusses life in San Francisco, where author Michaeleen Doucleff lives with her family. At one point, Doucleff struggles with her toddler figuring out how to leave the house on her own. Doucleff consults with a “super mom,” or a woman practicing an older and more hands-off parenting style, from a Maya village in rural Mexico. The super mom suggests having the little girl run an errand around town, with the idea being that she needs more independence².

The problem is that Doucleff lives on a busy street in a major city, not in a rural village in Mexico. And by Doucleff’s own admission, higher levels of crime and traffic make it difficult to exactly implement the Maya mother’s advice.

Doucleff attempts to translate the super mom’s advice to an urban American setting, for example by suggesting parents give their kids more responsibilities. It’s not bad advice, but it was also pretty vague and not really what the Maya mom was actually suggesting. To use a culinary analogy, if the Maya mom’s advice was authentic Mexican food, Doucleff’s takeaways for urban Americans were a freezer burrito from the grocery store.

The point is that the Maya mom’s parenting style basically doesn’t work in the urban setting where Doucleff lives. Sure, you can pull out some very broad principles that arguably apply anywhere. But the specific parenting behaviors Doucleff observes in the Maya village — as well as in other indigenous communities around the world — are difficult-to-impossible to actually implement when transported to an entirely different setting.

I could relate to Doucleff’s dilemma here because I also live on a somewhat busy street in a somewhat large city.

But reading this section of the book, I couldn’t help wonder if both Doucleff and I have made a critical mistake in choosing where to live. The book persuasively argues that kids need independence. It evocatively describes settings where kids can have that independence. And it suggests that we anglophone Americans would be much better off emulating the “super” parenting styles that exist in these settings. I found the book’s argument compelling on all of these points³.

But if the places where we live make emulating those parenting styles impossible, I can only come to one conclusion: We’re living in the wrong places. Or our places are designed incorrectly⁴. The best environment for a kid is one that maximizes the development of their executive functioning. It probably doesn’t need to be a copy of a Maya village, but it probably should allow for the types of activities that flourish in such a village. And streets like mine and Doucleff’s aren’t that. When Doucleff and I chose where to live, we made mistakes, at least when it comes to the best interests of our kids⁵.

I’m not beating myself up about making this mistake. And I love my neighborhood, which is filled with old architecture, mature trees, and little cafes. I also can’t uproot my life because I’ve learned new and better information.

But it’s at least worth understanding what the ideal settings is for raising kids. That way if I do move someday, I can make better decisions. Or, when I talk to friends, family, or my own kids, I can tell them why my choice was imperfect and help them avoid making the same errors.

In other words, it’ll be easier to make a better decision next time — either in my own life or in the next generation’s — if I’m open about the shortcomings of my decision this time. After I own my mistakes, they’re less likely to be repeated.

This idea of ideal circumstances and mistakes came to mind again and again while reading Hunt, Gather, Parent. For instance, most of the communities Doucleff describes include big intergenerational families. These family-villages are so common that I got the impression that they’re an essential part of super parenting. And in that light, it’s seems reasonable to say that if you want to be a super parent, it’s a mistake to do things that would diminish your ability to build an intergenerational family-village⁶.

At another point, Doucleff suggests introducing kids to a family’s work. But most of the work she describes is physical or family-centric enterprises. One memorable passage recounts Doucleff’s father-in-law growing up in a family of bakers. Conversely, none of the super parents are enlisting their kids to help with Excel spreadsheets or copy editing.

Once again, there are probably some universal principles here that any parent can use. But also again, the more I read the more I couldn’t help wonder if the kind of wage-labor knowledge work that Doucleff and I have chosen was the inferior choice when it comes to introducing kids to the adult world — which is a major theme of the book. Perhaps we shouldn’t have become laptop warriors, but rather family entrepreneurs. Perhaps if you can make a living as a baker or contractor, such professions are better for raising well-adjusted and independent kids.

Obviously this is complicated, and factors like earning potential, temperament, and a person’s existing network are all important considerations. Some jobs, such as law, can be both family enterprises and require laptops. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution.

But in any case the point is that not every decision is equally good. Some places may be better environments for raising kids than others. Some professions might be better for having a family than others⁷. And I couldn’t help noticing that the super parents’ practice of slowly introducing their kids to grown-up work is extremely difficult to pull off in fields like mine.

None of this means I’m going to correct my “mistake” by abandoning my career. But when my kids come to me in a few years to talk about college and job choices, I’m not going to just tell them to blindly follow their passions. I’ll tell them to consider how the nature of their work (and not just the hours) will impact their kids. And I’ll tell them that not every decision that’s good for the individual will be equally good for the family.

One of my frustrations with Hunt, Gather, Parent is that it didn’t really call out deeper lifestyle choices as problems or mistakes. It points out that super parents don’t yell at their kids or over-schedule their free time, among many other things. But it never explicitly points out the obvious conclusion from Doucleff’s time globetrotting, which is that certain lifestyles — including the ones that readers like me have chosen — are mistakes. And in doing so, it obscures the ideal parenting environments that we could otherwise have been working toward.

I get that it’s difficult to acknowledge mistakes. My choices regarding where to live and how to work don’t feel like mistakes because I’m generally happy with them. I don’t have regrets on any emotional level.

But it’s still worth taking a hard look at the results that different choices produce. And the great thing about Hunt, Gather, Parent is that it makes a really good case that the parenting styles Doucleff observed in rural villages actually do work. The results — well adjusted kids who are self sufficient and a pleasure to be around —prove the methods. However, if we American parents want to emulate those methods, we’re going to have to own the fact that our lifestyles, values, and worldviews may in fact be mistakes.

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Headlines to check out this week:

Play Deprivation Is A Major Cause of the Teen Mental Health Crisis

“Dozens of research studies, conducted with people of a wide range of ages, have led to the conclusion that mental health for all of us depends on our ability to satisfy three basic psychological needs—the needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The logic underlying this is straightforward. To feel in charge of our life, to feel we can meet the bumps in the roads of life with equanimity, we must feel free to choose our own paths (autonomy); feel sufficiently skilled to pursue those paths (competence); and have friends and colleagues for support, including emotional support (relatedness).

How do children satisfy these psychological needs? They do so through play and other self-chosen, self-controlled activities.”

The Longest Relationships of Our Lives

“Not many people have five siblings like Gay does, but 82 percent of American kids do have at least one. The prototypical sibling relationship has two distinct phases. First, the kids’ connection is embedded within the family system and shaped by their parents. Then they start becoming independent, eventually leaving home and building their own lives. In these later years, the sibling bond is an intriguing mix of involuntary (nobody chooses their siblings) and voluntary (drifting apart from a sibling is generally considered less concerning than divorce or estrangement from a parent).”

America's "Friendship Recession" Is Weakening Civic Life

“Friendship is a public good connecting us to other people and places that we otherwise might not have any contact with. Friends expose us to new ideas and new ways of doing things. They can challenge our views and push us to participate in activities that we might choose to avoid—one of the strongest predictors of voting in an election is simply being asked to do so. People with larger social networks are more likely to be asked. The same is true for church attendance. Few things will get an atheist into a church, but an invitation from a friend might. Much of our civic infrastructure is built on these disorganized, evolving, and sometimes fragile friendship networks.”

1. The book advises people to adopt a kind of hands-off parenting style that lets kids develop executive functioning on their own. My piece was less a review of the book than a critique of the idea that we can copy and paste ancient ideas about family without also adopting corresponding values and worldviews.

2. Page 188 (I was reading the book via the Kindle app on my iPhone. I don’t know if page numbers are the same across all platforms.)

3. Though it was kind of preaching to the choir with me, the key is that the book offered observed evidence of a parenting style I already favored.

4. If you live in the wrong place, your choice is to either move or turn the place where you live into a better place. The latter option is the better one, but also not very realistic. My city won’t even listen to my requests to put in a single stop sign. So radically upzoning the neighborhood, narrowing the streets by 80 percent, and eliminating a host of rules about things like setbacks and minimum lot sizes is probably off the table.

5. This is my caveat that I’m not anti-city. I think my own street and perhaps Doucleff’s aren’t designed in a way that is optimally conducive for raising a family. But I have seen many families in cities such as Paris, where cars are deemphasized in favor of pedestrians, who seem to be doing fine. In fact, my personal opinion is that many Old World cities are actually much more family friendly than American suburbs. Unfortunately, many American cities lack safe urban spaces where people can wander without having to worry about being hit by cars. At the end of the day, I’m a city person. But cities need to be designed well if they’re going to be good places for kids.

6. The book includes one brief passage on avoiding estrangement. From that I conclude that Doucleff is aware that estrangement is a growing problem, and that it’s a threat to parents’ ability to raise kids in a traditional super parent village. But I also suspect the target audience of the book includes many people who see cutting off family members for things like being “toxic,” and the book doesn’t seriously challenge that behavior. I would have liked to see an entire chapter on estrangement and its prevalence, or lack thereof, in the indigenous communities observed.

7. I think a lot of people intuitively understand this idea when it comes to hours. Working 100 hours a week as an underling at a white shoe law firm will make it hard to have a family. But the idea here is about more than just time. It’s about the nature of work, and which jobs make it easier to induct family members into the business.