Ansley Condon '11 gives us her real, informative, and hilarious take on the popular parenting book, Hunt, Gather, Parent.
As I went to sleep one night in March of this year, a thought kept playing over and over again in my head. “There just has to be a better way than what I’m doing. There just has to be.” Ironically, this is the same sentiment that Michaeleen Doucleff shares on page 5 of her book Hunt, Gather, Parent. So, I am here to tell you how this book has changed my household and my life into a calmer, happier place.
Let me start by saying – I love spending time with my kids (do I even need to say this? Don’t we all?). My daughter Riley turned 3 in March of 2021, and my son Cooper was born in September of 2020. We are also expecting baby #3 in about a month, so someone…please send me an IV of coffee. I am undoubtedly going to need it.
After my son Cooper was born, my husband and I made the decision that I would go part time at work. The kids would be home with me two days a week, and in daycare three days a week. I was super excited for some balance, but also sad to put my career on hold too. If I’m being honest, I enjoyed my nice paycheck, and I had worked hard to get to the management level that I was in at my company. (Let me also say that I realize what a privilege it is that we have this option, and I am extremely grateful for it.)
Going part time meant a new dynamic for my kids and me, and when Riley turned two and a half, she and I really started to struggle. I found myself wanting to manage my kids the way I had managed my job (be organized, always have a plan), and boy did Riley resist. If I said go left, she went right. When I said hurry up, I could have sworn she intentionally started to walk slower. It was a constant power struggle. Almost to the point that when I went to bed at night and knew I had the kids at home the next day, I dreaded it. I dreaded the looming battles I KNEW I was going to have with her, and I think both she and I were starting to resent the relationship we were building with each other.
Insert me aimlessly scrolling Instagram one night when I stumble upon one of my friends, Cynthia Schmidt’s, stories (check out her Instagram @rewritemotherhood – it is authentic and she is a beautiful writer).
Cynthia: “Check out this book called Hunt Gather Parent – it’s amazing and I’ve already seen a noticeable difference in my kids. Our house is so much calmer and my kids are so much more helpful.” (those aren’t her exact words, but that was the gist).
Me: “Seriously? Should I get this book? I’m so tired of arguing with my toddler.”
Cynthia: “Yes. It’s amazing.”
Me: *purchases book immediately*
To keep this brief-ish, let me give you some quick context for this book. And then let me give you my four biggest takeaways and tell you why they have changed my life.
The author, Michaeleen Doucleff, is a mother to a toddler who she loves dearly but is absolutely exhausting her. She feels she is in a constant power struggle (sound familiar?). After finding modern parenting books to be limited and oftentimes ineffective, she sets off to visit three ancient cultures to learn from their parenting techniques and strategies that have withstood the test of time.
My four biggest takeaways from the book:
*I am almost directly quoting the book, but taking some liberties to make sure this gets to the point*
#1: Modern parenting in Western culture is exhausting us all.
“The nuclear family (of modern Western culture, particularly American culture) lacks key teachers in a child’s life. For hundreds of thousands of years, kids evolved to learn from a bunch of different people of all ages - grandparents, aunts, family friends, neighbors, and all the children that tagged along with them. Over the past thousand years or so, the Western family has slowly shrunk down from a multigenerational smorgasbord to a tiny amuse-bouche consisting slowly of Ma, Pa, two kids, and maybe a dog or a cat. We not only lost family in the home, but also Nanny Lena, cook Dan, and a whole slew of neighbors and visitors just hanging around the front porch. Once these people disappeared from the home, most of the parenting burden fell on Mom and Dad. As a result, for the first time in human history, moms and dads are suddenly doing this crazy-hard thing, called parenting, all by themselves. The idea of two people taking care of a child by themselves is just absurd. Totally absurd.” (p. 24-25)
This isn’t “advice” per-se, but MAN did I feel a weight off my shoulders within a mere twenty-five pages of this book. You mean I’m not crazy for thinking parenting is exhausting? You mean my kids aren’t JUST supposed to be around me, they are supposed to be spending time with other people? You mean I’m not supposed to feel guilty for dropping them off at daycare, or for needing a break from it all? These are normal feelings?
Put bluntly, yes. I am not supposed to feel guilty. And neither is my husband. My kids are supposed to be around other people. It’s okay to ask for help. And it’s good for them to not be around me 24/7. Being around other people teaches them different ways to think, gives them an appreciation for different methods of approaching the world, and allows them to grow by learning from multiple people.
I was sold on the book already. I didn’t have to do it all. The nature of parenting is to have help around you. I took a deep breath and read on.
#2: Your kids’ days should be built around you. Not the other way around.
If I told you how many nights I stayed up organizing activities to keep my kids busy the next day, you’d either laugh at me, or say ‘yep, same’. Furthermore, if I told you that all my hard work in planning activities for them lasted a grand total of about 20 minutes the next day, only to find bored kids who just want to play outside with rocks, you’d probably again say ‘been there girl’.
The first part of the book focuses on teaching your kids to be helpful, self-sufficient little human beings by having them do what you do throughout the day. Cleaning dishes? Have them assist. Organizing laundry? We make a guessing game out of ‘whose clothes are these?!’ and sort them into little piles. Prior to reading HGP, I would put on a movie for Riley to distract her while I did chores or try to entertain her with one of the many activities I had setup the night before. Rarely did these things keep her attention for very long, and rarely did I get the chores done I needed to get done. What was the result? A resentful mom who still had laundry to fold at the end of the day and who was exhausted from cleaning up a bajillion activities.
So, we changed the narrative. When I am doing something around the house, I ask Riley to help. “But here’s the part that really blows my mind: many times, the Maya and Nahua-heritage kids actually enjoy doing chores! Their parents haven’t just taught them acomedido (how to be helpful), they have also taught the children to value their work and feel proud of their contributions to the household. Helping with chores is a privilege.” (p. 54)
Guys, it’s the dang truth. Children are wired to be helpful. All the time? No. A lot of the time? Yes. We just need to give them the opportunity and the space to be of help. And to do it at their own pace (more on this later).
*Mostly* gone are my days of planning a trillion kids activities (although I still like doing this every so often). Stress is down for me. Riley is much more self-sufficient because she is learning how to do things around the house from me throughout the day and she is proud she can do them on her own. This was a huge win.
#3: The book has A LOT of thoughts, techniques, and strategies. They are not all going to work for your house, and you need to pick and choose what you think may be effective.
In one part of the book, Michaeleen Doucleff almost overtly tells you to throw all your toys out. Keep a few necessary things (blocks, maybe?), but get rid of everything else. Now, I am a huge believer in purging ‘stuff’. I find throwing things out, or donating them, to be hyper cleansing and cathartic. But throwing away 99% of my kid’s things without warning (or a real backup plan?) just wasn’t going to happen in my house. So, I got rid of a few trash bags of things (mostly toys that annoyed me and made a lot of noise) and kept the rest. My kids didn’t notice, and my house was quieter. Win-win, but I didn’t follow her advice directly.
Here’s an example of something that has worked particularly well in our house but might not work for others. In Chapter 11 of the book, Doucleff talks about the premise of storytelling. Passing down stories from generation to generation – this is how children have learned about where they come from and family history along the way. But she also uses storytelling in a different way. She learns in her journeys from Inuit parents that stories are crafted to influence children’s behavior, including the creation of old wives tales and “monsters”. For example “Our parents told us that if we went out without a hat, the northern lights are going to take your head off and use it as a soccer ball. We use to be so scared!” (p. 204).
Now, the idea of scaring my child into submission didn’t sit well with me at first. But after 4 months of putting Riley down for bed, her getting out of bed OVER and OVER again, waking us up, and then being completely cranky the next day because she didn’t sleep, we decided to give it a try. So, we created “the sleep monster”. He lives in our neighborhood and he comes for little children late at night if they don’t stay in their rooms and get a good night of rest.
Go ahead and judge me, but the girl has stayed in her room every single night since we introduced the sleep monster. Sure, she’s a little scared. But she also thinks it’s funny running to her room before the sleep monster starts patrolling the neighborhood. And she now sleeps a full night without getting out of her bed multiple times and coming into our room. She is happier and better rested, and so are we. Hopefully she doesn’t need therapy when she’s older.
#4: Calmer parents create calmer kids. Unwavering patience and ‘not rushing kids’ is key.
Now, because I went to Notre Dame, you can go ahead and put me into a box of having a very Type A personality. Not to assume all of us in this group are this way, but I imagine a lot of us are.
I am hyper competitive, time urgent, and have a craving to be organized. I like to have a plan – and when that plan fails, I like to have another plan as a backup. I thrive when I know how my day is going to go and I have very little patience when things don’t go according to what I thought. So you can imagine that having this type of personality goes GREAT when raising toddlers, right? ***insert snarky sarcastic laugh***
My lack of patience and need for control were clearly having an impact on my relationship with my daughter. She couldn’t put her shoes on fast enough for me, get out the door fast enough, or be polite quickly enough when speaking to others. “Riley, can you say thank you?” I would bark anytime someone did something nice for her before the poor girl even had a chance to say it herself. Man – now that I think back on it, I bet she was stressed out. Kids don’t like to be rushed. They can sense our stress and our lack of patience. In short, I was definitely not modeling calmness and composure with her. I was rushing her….all the time.
To quote the book “If you master only one concept from this book, I hope you’ll try for this one. It’s hard but, I promise, it’s worth it. In many cultures around the world, parents believe that one of their key responsibilities is to help children learn how to calm themselves down – to teach them to respond to everyday frustrations of life with aplomb and composure. And they take this responsibility as seriously as they do teaching a child other skills, such as how to read, do math, or eat healthy foods…..The parents show the child how to be calm by being calm themselves.” (pgs. 168-169).
So, I made a vow to myself to become calm.
I stopped rushing Riley to do things on my timeline. I didn’t lose my patience with her when she resisted doing the things I asked her to do. I let her make a mess if her mess was purely in an effort to “help me” (example…..sweeping the floor. She loves sweeping, but generally she is just pushing dirt from one place to another place, so it’s not really “helping me”). Does it kind of kill my soul to watch how slowly and ineffectively she does this? Yes. But you know what? She’s just trying to be helpful. And that’s what’s important.
So, I just decided to chill the hell out. And you know what happened? It worked miracles.
She started to listen to me. She became a calmer little human. She wanted to be around me instead of avoiding me like the plague. She didn’t get so stressed about the little things that didn’t go her way because I wasn’t getting stressed about the little things that didn’t go my way. Like, duh Ansley, why didn’t you think of this sooner!
Am I calm everyday? Absolutely not. Do I still yell at my kids to get them to move faster out the door because I have a meeting in 30 minutes and they have to get to daycare? For sure.
But for the most part, parenting with calmness has led to an incredible shift in my relationship with my daughter and the temperament in our household.
In conclusion, if you are a frustrated parent or just find yourself burnt out – I highly recommend this book. It has done nothing but wonderful things for our family, and I hope the same for you. Happy reading!