61. Michaeleen Doucleff, PhD | Hunt, Gather, Parent

My guest today is Michaeleen Doucleff, PhD. Michaeleen is a global health correspondent for NPR’s Science Desk and the author of the New York Times bestseller Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans. Michaeleen has a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Berkeley, California, and a bachelor’s degree in biology from Caltech. For the past decade, Doucleff has reported on disease outbreaks and children’s health for NPR. Before that, Doucleff was an editor at the journal Cell, where she wrote about the science behind pop culture.

Some of the topics we explore in this episode include:

- Key elements of parenting we have lost in the Western world

- Children’s innate capacity for helpfulness and autonomy

- How the child world and the adult world has been separated

- Ways parent and child interests can be harmoniously integrated

- The value of doing less as a parent

- And the importance of allowing a child’s authentic interests to be expressed