Hunt Gather Parent Quotes

Abe held my gaze a bit longer and then broke into an easy smile. ʺOf course, of course. This is a family gathering. A celebration. And look: hereʹs our newest member.ʺ Dimitri had joined us and wore black and white like my mother and me. He stood beside me, conspicuously not touching. ʺMr. Mazur,ʺ he said formally, nodding a greeting to both of them. ʺGuardian Hathaway.ʺ Dimitri was seven years older than me, but right then, facing my parents, he looked like he was sixteen and about to pick me up for a date. ʺAh, Belikov,ʺ said Abe, shaking Dimitriʹs hand. ʺIʹd been hoping weʹd run into each other. Iʹd really like to get to know you better. Maybe we can set aside some time to talk, learn more about life, love, et cetera. Do you like to hunt? You seem like a hunting man. Thatʹs what we should do sometime. I know a great spot in the woods. Far, far away. We could make a day of it. Iʹve certainly got a lot of questions Iʹd like to ask you. A lot of things Iʹd like to tell you too.ʺ I shot a panicked look at my mother, silently begging her to stop this. Abe had spent a good deal of time talking to Adrian when we dated, explaining in vivid and gruesome detail exactly how Abe expected his daughter to be treated. I did not want Abe taking Dimitri off alone into the wilderness, especially if firearms were involved. ʺActually,ʺ said my mom casually. ʺIʹd like to come along. I also have a number of questions—especially about when you two were back at St. Vladimirʹs.ʺ ʺDonʹt you guys have somewhere to be?ʺ I asked hastily. ʺWeʹre about to start.ʺ That, at least, was true. Nearly everyone was in formation, and the crowd was quieting. ʺOf course,ʺ said Abe. To my astonishment, he brushed a kiss over my forehead before stepping away. ʺIʹm glad youʹre back.ʺ Then, with a wink, he said to Dimitri: ʺLooking forward to our chat.ʺ ʺRun,ʺ I said when they were gone. ʺIf you slip out now, maybe they wonʹt notice. Go back to Siberia." "Actually," said Dimitri, "I'm pretty sure Abe would notice. Don't worry, Roza. I'm not afraid. I'll take whatever heat they give me over being with you. It's worth it.

We need to model calmness. We have to be regulating our own internal states first before we expect our children to learn to regulate theirs.

It’s not my job to entertain the children. It’s their job to be part of the team.

Parents don’t need to know how to play with kids. If we get kids involved in adult activities, that’s play for kids.” And then they associate chores with a fun, positive activity. They associate it with playing.

Whenever she wants to help, you let her?” I ask, still not understanding. “Even if she makes a giant mess?” “Yes. That is the way to teach children.

Togetherness is easy. It’s relaxing. It flows. It’s what happens when we all stop trying to control each other’s actions and simply let each other be.

togetherness, encouragement, autonomy, and minimal interference.

We’re training the child to cooperate, not to obey the parent. Part of working together is accepting a child’s preference when they choose not to help.

If a little child doesn’t listen, it’s because she is too young to understand. She is not ready for the lesson.

Many psychologists whom I spoke with think the erosion of the extended family is a root cause for the high rates of postpartum depression in the U.S., as well as the rising epidemic of anxiety and depression among children and teenagers. Moms, dads, and kids are simply lonely.

With little kids, you often think they’re pushing your buttons, but that’s not what’s going on. They’re upset about something, and you have to figure out what it is.

This skill—of paying attention and then acting—is such an important value and goal for children that many families in Mexico have a term for it: it’s being acomedido. The idea is complex: It’s not just doing a chore or task because someone told you to; it’s knowing which kind of help is appropriate at a particular moment because you’re paying attention.

In particular, our culture focuses almost entirely on one aspect of the parent-child relationship. That’s control—how much control the parent exerts over the child, and how much control the child tries to exert over the parent. The most common parenting “styles” all revolve around control. Helicopter parents exert maximal control. Free-range parents exert minimal. Our culture thinks either the adult is in control or the child is in control.

When you start to feel an unproductive emotion, such as anger, you can more easily swap that negative feeling for a positive one, such as awe. When you feel annoyance, you can swap it for gratitude.

So the first step to raising helpful kids can be summed up in a single phrase: Let them practice. Practice cleaning. Practice cooking. Practice washing. Let them grab the spoon from your hand and stir the pot. Let them grab the vacuum and start cleaning the rug. Let them make a bit of a mess when they are little, slightly less of a mess as they grow, and by the time they’re preteens, they will be helping to clean up your messes without you having to ask them—or even running your entire household.

Many moms will say something like ‘Come, my child. Help me while I wash the dishes,’ ” Rebeca tells me, referring to her interviews with Nahua-heritage moms. “The invitation is always for together, for doing the chore together.

Forcing children causes three problems: First, it undermines their intrinsic motivation—that is, it erodes a children’s natural drive to voluntarily do a task (see chapter 6). Second, it can damage your relationship with your child. When you force a child to do something, you run the risk of starting fights and creating anger on both sides. You can build walls. Third, you remove the opportunity for the child to learn and make decisions on their own.

Children don’t see a difference between adult work and play, says psychologist Rebeca Mejía-Arauz. “Parents don’t need to know how to play with kids. If we get kids involved in adult activities, that’s play for kids.” And then they associate chores with a fun, positive activity. They associate it with playing.

or task because someone told you to; it’s knowing which kind of help is appropriate at a particular moment because you’re paying attention.

Never before had the gap between my actual skill and the skill level I desired been so crushingly wide.

Sometimes I’ll say to Rosy, “Mango is hungry” or “Mango’s bowl is empty,” to teach her to pay attention to when the dog needs food.

Instead of “Put away your plate after dinner” or “Fold your laundry,” you’re framing the tasks as a communal activity, such as “Let’s all work together to clean up the kitchen after dinner” or “Let’s all help fold the laundry as a family.

Parents see this mess as an investment. If you encourage the incompetent toddler who really wants to do the dishes now, then over time, they’ll turn into the competent nine-year-old who still wants to help—and who can really make a difference.

The quality of our early family relationships is tied to whether we suffer from loneliness and social isolation as an adult. If a child feels nurtured by their parents and feels like they can count on them, then the child carries that with them for the rest of their lives.

Every human society expends tremendous time and energy teaching its children the right way to behave. You look at a simpler society, in the rain forest somewhere, and you find that every child is born into a network of adults responsible for helping to raise the child. Not only parents, but aunts and uncles and grandparents and tribal elders. Some teach the child to hunt or gather food or weave; some teach them about sex or war. But the responsibilities are clearly defined, and if a child does not have, say, a mother’s brother’s sister to do a specific teaching job, the people get together and appoint a substitute. Because raising children is, in a sense, the reason the society exists in the first place. It’s the most important thing that happens, and it’s the culmination of all the tools and language and social structure that has evolved.

Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it... Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents. Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step.

They expect children to have poor executive function and poor emotional control, and they see it as their job to teach children these skills. Basically, when a child doesn’t listen or behave, the reason is simple: The child hasn’t learned that particular skill yet. And perhaps, they aren’t quite ready to learn it. So there’s no reason for a parent to get upset or angry.

And sleep training? Guess who proposed that unique technique? Why, a surgeon-turned-sportswriter, of course, who wrote under the pseudonym Stonehenge. If babies “are left to go to sleep in their cots, and allowed to find out that they do not get their way by crying, they at once become reconciled, and after a short time will go to bed even more readily in the cot than on the lap,” Dr. John Henry Walsh wrote in his Manual of Domestic Economy in 1857. Besides doling out advice on infant sleep, John Henry also authored several books about guns, including The Shot-Gun and Sporting Rifle and The Modern Sportsman’s Gun and Rifle. (And he lost a big chunk of his left hand one day when a gun exploded in his grasp.)

To Phoebe's relief, the gathering in the drawing room turned out to be far less intimidating than she'd expected. Her parents and Seraphina were there to keep her company, as were Lord and Lady Westcliff, whom she and her siblings had always called "Uncle Marcus" and "Aunt Lillian." Lord Westcliff's hunting estate, Stony Cross Park, was located in Hampshire, not far from Eversby Priory. The earl and his wife, who had originally been an American heiress from New York, had raised three sons and three daughters. Although Aunt Lillian had teasingly invited Phoebe to have her pick of any of her robust and handsome sons, Phoebe had answered- quite truthfully- that such a union would have felt positively incestuous. The Marsdens and the Challons had spent too many family holidays together and had known each other for too long for any romantic sparks to fly between their offspring.

Eleven finally allowed to dye his own eggs, and then only in one color: red. All over the house red eggs gleam in lengthening, solstice rays. Red eggs fill bowls on the dining room table. They hang from string pouches over doorways. They crowd the mantel and are baked into loaves of cruciform tsoureki. But now it is late afternoon; dinner is over. And my brother is smiling. Because now comes the one part of Greek Easter he prefers to egg hunts and jelly beans: the egg-cracking game. Everyone gathers around the dining table. Biting his lip, Chapter Eleven selects an egg from the bowl, studies it, returns it. He selects another. “This looks like a good one,” Milton says, choosing his own egg. “Built like a Brinks truck.” Milton holds his egg up. Chapter Eleven prepares to attack. When suddenly my mother taps my father on the back. “Just a minute, Tessie. We’re cracking eggs here.” She taps him harder. “What?” “My temperature.” She pauses. “It’s up six tenths.” She has been using the thermometer. This is the first my father has heard of it. “Now?” my father whispers. “Jesus, Tessie, are you sure?” “No, I’m not sure. You told me to watch for any rise in my temperature and I’m telling you I’m up six tenths of a degree.” And, lowering her voice, “Plus it’s been thirteen days since my last you know what.” “Come on, Dad,” Chapter Eleven pleads. “Time out,” Milton says. He puts his egg in the ashtray. “That’s my egg. Nobody touch it until I come back.” Upstairs, in the master bedroom, my parents accomplish the act. A child’s natural decorum makes me refrain from imagining the scene in much detail. Only this: when they’re done, as if topping off the tank, my father says, “That should do it.” It turns out he’s right. In May, Tessie learns she’s pregnant, and the waiting begins.

Steve Powell explained to me, “People used to expect no more of a farm than to produce enough to feed themselves; today, they want more out of life than just getting fed; they want to earn enough to send their kids to college.” When John Cook was growing up on a farm with his parents, “At dinnertime, my mother was satisfied to go to the orchard and gather asparagus, and as a boy I was satisfied for fun to go hunting and fishing. Now, kids expect fast food and HBO; if their parents don’t provide that, they feel deprived compared to their peers. In my day a young adult expected to be poor for the next 20 years, and only thereafter, if you were lucky, might you hope to end up more comfortably. Now, young adults expect to be comfortable early; a kid’s first questions about a job are ‘What are the pay, the hours, and the vacations?’’’ Every Montana farmer whom I know, and who loves being a farmer, is either very concerned whether any of his/her children will want to carry on the family farm, or already knows that none of them will.

On the flip side, every time we choose an activity devoted to and centered around the child, we slowly take away that membership card. We tell children that they’re different from the rest of the family, that they’re a bit like a VIP, who’s exempt from the family’s work, from the adult activities. We erode their motivation to work as a team.

One could argue that we’re the only ones ever to act this way. In many cultures, parents praise very little—or not at all. Yet their children grow up exhibiting all signs of robust mental health, as well as great empathy. Furthermore, in the cultures we’ll visit in this book, the children who receive little praise show more confidence and mental strength than their American counterparts, who are steeped in praise.

Psychologists believe that the more a young child practices helping the family, even starting as a toddler, the more likely they will grow up to be a helpful teenager for whom chores are natural.

MONDAY On Monday morning I gathered my platoon together outside the barracks at the edge of town. “Right guys,” I said, “today we’re going to go hunting for skeletons. Apparently there’s a load of them in the forest, and if they pose a threat to the village we have to give them a whupping.” “Skeletons?” said Snipe, giving me a confused look. “Don’t them only come out at night?” “The forest to the south is pretty dark,” I said. “Plus, they might have an underground base there, to protect them from the sunlight. Either way, we need to investigate.” Ok, so I guess I should tell you a bit about my platoon? Mayor Birchwood set up a New Diamond City army, with volunteers who serve for a few days each month and then go back to their regular jobs for the rest of the month. I train those guys, but I also have my own team of soldiers who are the best of the best: The ones who can kick the most butt. There’s Captain Snipe, my second in command. He’s a bit moody, but he’s great with a crossbow. Then there’s Berian. He’s awesome with a sword, and a friendly guy. He has a beard, which is cool. Sometimes I wish that I could grow a beard. Shade is my stealth guy. He can sneak into anywhere. I always tell him he would have made a good ninja. Rainbow’s real name is Over the Rainbow (I’m not sure what his parents were thinking), but everyone just calls him Rainbow for short. He has a pet wolf named Malia, who does cool wolfy things for us, like sniffing out stuff and biting bad guys.

Take, for instance the Efe, a group of hunter-gatherers who have lived in the rainforest of central Africa for thousands of years. Right after a mom gives birth, other women come over to her house and form a baby SWAT team, ready to respond to every whimper and cry the baby has. They hold, snuggle, rock, and even feed the newborn. As the anthropologist Mel Konner writes: “Dealing with a fussing baby is a group effort.” After a few days, the mom can return to work and leave the baby with an allomother. In the first few weeks of a new baby’s life, an infant will move from one caregiver to the next, on average, every fifteen minutes. By the time the baby is three weeks old, allomoms account for 40 percent of the newborn’s physical care. By sixteen weeks, allomoms account for a whopping 60 percent. Skip ahead two years, and the child spends more time with others than with their own mother. All these snuggles, cuddles, and moments of comfort from allomoms have lasting benefits for babies and children. These women know the little dumpling just as well as the mother. And the dumpling feels just as safe and comfortable with these alloparents as they do with mom. As a result, babies attach and bond to many adults, perhaps as many as five or six.

Scientists hypothesize that alloparenting evolved to help parents provide for their children. But what if, along with ensuring kids have full tummies, alloparenting also provided something else essential to parents: friendship?

a lack of social support worsens mental health problems, forming a sort of snowball effect, Bert says. Loneliness can cause anxiety, depression, and sleep problems, which in turn cause more loneliness. “When people don’t have social support, their bodies have signs of physical stress. They look like they’re being threatened. Like people are out to get them,” Bert says.

brown Nissan sedan and we head west, toward the middle of the Yucatán Peninsula. After a few hours, we reach a stand selling pink plastic flamingos, about a dozen of them. I recognize them,

never hurts a child to give them a hug when they’re upset, to model awe or gratitude when they start screaming, or to offer them some fresh air and time outside when a tantrum erupts. You’re not giving into their demands, but rather using the tantrum as a moment to help them flex other neurological circuitry. See tantrums as a chance for the child to practice calming themselves down, and for you to model calmness—not the time for you, as their parent, to prove a point.

The stronger we respond to a child’s misbehavior—even in a negative way—the more we acknowledge that behavior and, in essence, the more we train the child to behave that way.

The next time your toddler or small child acts cranky or demanding, use the responsibility tool and try putting them to work.

Instead of jumping in as soon as a misbehavior occurs to scold a child, you keep your focus on the long game, knowing there will be an opportunity later on to teach your child the proper behavior.

Ultimately, you are responsible for your own children, but you have to love all the children like your own.

The evidence suggests, then, that for millions of years hominid males and females pursued substantially different reproductive "strategies" and typically exhibited very different behaviors: throughout most of human evolutionary history, hunting, fighting, and that elusive activity, "politics," were highly competitive, largely male domains. It is not a simple question of high female parental investment and male competition for females: males and females invested in different ways. Not only did males hunt while females gathered, but, if warfare was often over land and other scarce resources from which the winning males' offspring benefited, male fighting was in part parental investment; that is, like hunting and gathering, fighting and nurturing were part of the human division of labor by sex.

When we yell at children, we are training them not to listen,” she tells me. “A lot of times, parents will say, ‘But he won’t listen until I raise my voice,’ and I say, ‘Okay. Raise your voice to get him to listen and then you’ll always have to raise your voice.’ ” She maintains that Western parents simply shoot themselves in the foot when they yell. Because, in the end, yelling doesn’t teach children to behave. Instead, it teaches them to get angry. “We are training them to yell when they get upset and that yelling solves problems,” she says.

By contrast, parents who control their own anger—both around and toward their children—help their kids learn to do the same. “Kids learn emotional regulation from us,” Laura says. Every time you stop yourself from acting in anger, your child sees a calm way to deal with frustrations. They learn to stay composed when anger arises. So to help a child learn emotional regulation, the number one thing parents can do is learn to regulate their own emotions.

Evolution, in addition, isn’t just about biological evolution. How genes and bodies change over time is incredibly important, but another momentous dynamic to grapple with is cultural evolution, now the most powerful force of change on the planet and one that is radically transforming our bodies. Culture is essentially what people learn, and so cultures evolve. Yet a crucial difference between cultural and biological evolution is that culture doesn’t change solely through chance but also through intention, and the source of this change can come from anyone, not just your parents. Culture can therefore evolve with breathtaking rapidity and degree. Human cultural evolution got its start millions of years ago, but it accelerated dramatically after modern humans first evolved around 200,000 years ago, and it has now reached dizzying speeds. Looking back on the last few hundred generations, two cultural transformations have been of vital importance to the human body and need to be added to the list of evolutionary transformations above: TRANSITION SIX: The Agricultural Revolution, when people started to farm their food instead of hunt and gather. TRANSITION SEVEN: The Industrial Revolution, which started as we began to use machines to replace human work.

Shelly shook her head and made sure she had plenty of space so that she wouldn’t hit anything. As many times before, she kept the hoop close to her waist and then twirled it with small, tight bursts of speed. As the hoop gathered in momentum it started to give off a hum that soon took on a light blue illumination far brighter than the streetlamps. It was so bright, that it lit up the entire backyard.

Maybe I’ve had such trouble with Rosy, not because I’m a bad mom, but because I just haven’t had someone to teach me how to be a good mom?

Daniel turned to the page as I looked over his shoulder. One word caught my eye. “Witches?” I said. “Shouldn’t this have been sent to me?” “Not witches,” he said, pointing. “Witch-hunters. An Italian cult of witch-hunters.” “Okay, so what’s the connection to you? Your parents are Italian and you like fighting. Oh my God. You’re a witch-hunter. I’m a witch. Hate to break it to you, Daniel, but if you’re a witch-hunter? You’re doing it wrong.” He gave me a sidelong smile. “Maybe it’s not that kind of hunting.” “Then you’re definitely doing it wrong.” He laughed and we continued reading.

You invest so much in it, don't you? It's what elevates you above the beasts of the field, it's what makes you special. Homo sapiens, you call yourself. Wise Man. Do you even know what it is, this consciousness you cite in your own exaltation? Do you even know what it's for? Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you've forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterwards, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody's told you that even waking souls are only slaves in denial. Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger. Too late! The electricity's already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self 'chose' to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary—almost an afterthought— to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: it reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other. But it's not in charge. You're not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn't share living space with the likes of you. Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it. Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers. Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift- wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents. Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step. Oh, but you can't. There's something in the way. And it's fighting back.