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There are six kinds of couple – which are Boris and Carrie?
This week, Boris and Carrie’s relationship was in the spotlight. The question being asked was whether Carrie Symonds has undue influence over the Prime Minister, but really, the issue perplexing some people seems to be: “Why would he listen to Her?”
Happily, we can clear this one up right away: it’s because they are a couple – specifically, a Left brain, Right brain couple – and men listen to their partners. With a few exceptions, they listen pretty hard, because they respect their wives or girlfriends and, now that the world is no longer run exclusively by men, the female POV is rather useful. If Carrie is sticking her oar into government business, then we should be grateful for it; if she wasn’t banging on about green issues, animal welfare, needing women at the table, domestic violence, etc, Boris Johnson wouldn’t be giving any of it a second thought. Her holding him to account is part of the plan. These two are not exactly a union of opposites – after all, they met on the job – but they are that familiar marital type: the powerful man and the woman who has power over the powerful man, who have very different priorities.
If anyone is genuinely surprised that Boris has found himself in one of these couples, they really haven’t been paying attention. Half the people we know are in Left brain, Right brain marriages (she was Remain he wasn’t; she wants the boys to learn ballet, he wants them to play rugby; she wanted a rescue dog, he didn’t) and the rest of us fall into the following categories:
OUR RULES MARRIAGE
Dominic West and Catherine FitzGerald spring to mind. Lately they may have been more his rules, even so, you sense these two answer to no one’s expectations. Our Rules couples sign up for an adventure and both parties would rather anything than the stultifying predictability of a “My Wife and I” marriage.
MY WIFE AND I MARRIAGE
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have an MWandIM: they’re a team, but you know William is on bins, carving and driving, while Kate’s in charge of everything on the domestic front and ego stroking. Plenty of that going on.
If Carrie is sticking her oar into government business, then we should be grateful for it
SERVICE TO HER MARRIAGE
There are two in this marriage, but only one that really counts. The most obvious example, currently, would be the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (Harry’s given up his family, friends, country, status, job and is all set to play a walkon-role in the Oprah interview and Second Gentleman if the plan works out).
ADORER MARRIAGE
This would be George and Amal Clooney – he’s only too happy to worship the ground she walks on and do her sewing and mending. It’s the traditional marriage in reverse and we can’t help but admire from afar.
TAG TEAM MARRIAGE
Thinking of David and Sam Cam here, Damian Lewis and Helen McCrory, all those couples who take turns at the helm and are perfectly capable of stepping back, switching roles, and taking their turn at being supportive while watching the other one shine. Properly modern really.
In the two minutes leading up to my Zoom conversation with Michaeleen Doucleff, I have pelted down the stairs of my home three times, called upon for crises including the sharpening of a coloured pencil, the pouring of juice and the locating of a lost colouring book (on the table, in front of my seven-year-old’s nose).
So it is an understatement to say I find myself receptive to her advice that: “A lot of what we do isn’t necessary, isn’t helping and may even be doing our children a disservice. There’s an easier, more effective way. A way parents have turned to for thousands of years, on every liveable continent.”
Doucleff speaks from personal as well as professional experience. As global health correspondent for America’s National Public Radio, she reported on stories in some of the world’s most remote regions. Then, in 2015, she had a daughter, Rosy.
“She was a hard, hard child. She’s super-smart, but super-hot-tempered and persistent.” By the time Rosy turned three: “There was so much tension in our relationship,” says Doucleff. “I dreaded being with her. I knew I was failing. I’m a scientist, so I started researching parenting in the places I was reporting on.”
One day, Doucleff was sent to interview members of a Mayan community in the Yucatan, Mexico. “What I saw there blew my mind,” she says. “There was no yelling, no tears, no drama or bickering. We’re talking about families with five kids. But those kids were respectful to their parents, generous to the younger ones, and helpful. The parents were so calm. I remember sitting in the airport, thinking: What did I just see? Can parenting really be that easy?”
The experience was to spark an extraordinary journey, one that was both literal and emotional, as Doucleff and her three-year-old daughter took off around the globe, staying with hunter-gatherer communities from the Arctic tundra to the Tanzanian savannah and transforming their own relationship along the way.
Each culture was, of course, unique. Yet, says Doucleff, they shared fundamental principles when it came to raising and relating to children. Principles that parents in the West have lost and which, she suggests, we urgently need to rediscover, perhaps even more so in the midst of a pandemic, “because we are running so fast. We’re doing more parenting than we ever have. And this practice makes life easier. It’s going to save you so much time and energy.”
Her book Hunt, Gather, Parent charts her travels with Rosy, delving into academic study and science, and distilling this universal “huntergatherer” approach to child-raising into a handy acronym: Team.
T, she explains, stands for “together”: “In our old life, I was rushing to get all these chores done, so that I could take Rosy to some activity or class. Hunter-gatherer parents don’t do any of those.”
She tells me about visiting a Mayan family and watching, awestruck, as a 12-year-old woke from a nap, stretched, and then wandered over to do the dishes, completely unbidden. hInuit parents have a golden rule, which is ‘never yell at a child’
Doucleff later unearthed a study in which Mayan kids were asked why they helped around the house in this manner. The most common answer was simply: “because I live here”.
“They thought it was a silly question,” says Doucleff. “It’s instilled in them very early. Parents aren’t setting them up to a special activity and then doing the dishes. The activity is the dishes. Kids hang around while the parents do chores, and the parents incorporate them.”
Which leads us nicely on to “E” – encourage. It is, says Doucleff, extremely rare to hear a hunter-gatherer parent ordering a child to do, or indeed stop doing, something.
“A lot of cultures believe that forcing children turns the activity into a punishment,” she explains. “It erodes their intrinsic motivation – the desire to do something just because you want to.”
Instead, they lead by example. Older children are encouraged to take responsibility for younger ones, who in turn are encouraged into positive behaviour by their example.
When Rosy began throwing rocks during their stay with an Inuit community, for example, a nearby 10-year-old calmly told her: “Rosy, you’re going to hurt somebody with those rocks”. The effect, says Doucleff, was subtly but significantly different to employing the phrase she herself was reaching for – “Stop that!”
“It requires the child to think for themselves,” she says. “You’re not treating them like a robot that just answers commands. There’s much less tension and antagonism implied.” Rosy paused, then put down the rocks.
The next letter in Doucleff ’s acronym stands for autonomy. Researchers, she tells me, have studied the number of times a hunter-gatherer parent in central Africa is likely to interject in their child’s activities with a command or suggestion. It averages at three times an hour.
“I ran that same experiment on myself and parents in the playground here [in San Francisco],” says Doucleff. The results? “Parents clock in about 100 times an hour. We micromanage them at a level that’s off the charts compared with how humans have been raised for the past 200,000 years.”
Autonomy, she points out, is not the same as independence. In hunter-gatherer communities, “kids always have responsibility to the group. They’re taking care of the other kids, or looking out for things to forage. We think there’s either helicoptering, micromanaging parenting, or a free-range child. But there’s another, better option.”
That option relies largely on the final component in Doucleff’s acronym: “minimal interference”. “It’s not the parent isn’t watching, it’s just that when they step in, they do the minimum required. My knee-jerk reaction with Rosy was to interfere. This approach is the opposite. You stand back, watch, and only interfere if you absolutely have to. The children teach themselves.”
All this freedom does not, she stresses, equate to permissiveness: “The level of expectation for respectfulness, helpfulness and kindness is so much higher in these places,” says Doucleff. So, I’m tempted to ask, was it embarrassing taking your wayward
Western child into these well-adjusted families?
“Oh absolutely. I was horrified. Rosy was out of control, having tantrums and I didn’t know how to handle it. And here were these other mums, handling four or five kids with ease and grace. Then I saw how they handled Rosy. I thought: this works.”
Perhaps, I think, in the context of a hunter-gatherer community. But do these principles really work when transported back to our high-pressure, high-speed lives in the UK and the US?
“I think it’s about scale,” says Doucleff. “Rosy will never be as autonomous as a Hadzabe child. But that doesn’t mean I can’t give her some of it. Small changes can make big differences. It’s not all or nothing.”
Back home in San Francisco, Doucleff and her husband have sought out “zones of autonomy” such as large playgrounds, where Rosy can safely and regularly feel free of them. They have dropped the roster of activities, embraced household chores as a family and routinely limit themselves to three commands an hour.
“My relationship with Rosy is so different now,” she says. “I went from yelling at Rosy, to enjoying time with her. And I would not have survived lockdown without these tools. In fact, I consciously ratcheted up my use of them.”
In lockdown, the now five-year-old Rosy has been able to entertain herself for hours while her mother works beside her. “It’s not about ignoring them,” stresses Doucleff, “You’re there, watching and ready to help if needed. But you’re not the producer in their lives. You’re the stage hand.”
It’s one demotion that I’m very happy to embrace.
Over the past several years, I’ve interviewed more than 100 Inuit parents in the Arctic, from Alaska to eastern Canada. I’ve sat with elders in their 80s and 90s while they lunched on “country food”– stewed seal, frozen beluga whale, and raw caribou. I’ve talked with mothers selling hand-sewn sealskin jackets at a high school craft fair. I attended a parenting class in which day care instructors were taught how their ancestors raised small children hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of years ago. Across the board, all the mums and dads mention one golden rule of Inuit parenting: “Never yell at a child,” says 74-year-old Sidonie Nirlungayuk, who was born in a sod house not far from Kugaaruk, a town in the Canadian Arctic. “Our parents never yelled at us, never, ever.”
Watching the parent-child interactions around Kugaaruk, for the first time in my life, I see a way to parent that doesn’t involve anger – or yelling. It’s transformative. First, I notice how relaxed and calm the adults are. I also see the profound impact this calmness has on the kids in the house, including Rosy. The result is pretty much immediate. When we stay with Maria Kukkavuk, who has seen me struggling with Rosy and has generously offered to have us to stay, Rosy’s fiery belly cools. Her angst eases. One night, she becomes upset because she wants milk, which we don’t have. She starts to have a tantrum, but when she realises this behaviour is not having an effect on any adults in the room, she literally falls to the ground like the Wicked Witch of the West and cries, “Nooooooo!”
Observing this shift in Rosy raises a mirror up to my own anger. It makes me realise how when I raise my voice and scold her, I actually trigger her tantrums and meltdowns. We get caught in a feedback loop that’s as terrible as it is predictable. I start screaming; Rosy yells back. I yell more and make some flimsy threats. Then she lies on the ground, kicking and screaming. I go to pick her up and try to calm her down. But it’s too late. She’s angry. And to show it, she might lash out with a slap or pull my hair – which escalates my anger even more.
But somehow Kukkavuk and her family never fall into this toddler-parent emotional trap, this anger do-sido. They never engage in power struggles with children. And over the time I spend with them, I work hard to reverse engineer how they do it.
It’s a two-step process:
Stop talking. Just stay quiet. Don’t say anything.
Learn to have less – or even no – anger toward children. (Note: I’m not talking about controlling your anger when it arises, but rather generating less anger in the first place.)
On the surface, these steps may look suspiciously like the positive parenting trap. But hear me out. And clearly, this isn’t an easy process. The second step is especially difficult. But Lord knows, if I can change (or make a big improvement), anyone can.
How to raise helpful kids
If you look at parents around the world – whether they farm maize in the Yucatán, hunt zebras in Tanzania, or write books in Silicon Valley – their toddlers have two traits in common. The first is tantrums. Yes, toddler tantrums are pretty much unavoidable no matter where you live, the ethnographic record shows.
But the second thing in common is a bit more surprising. It’s helpfulness. Toddlers everywhere are eager to be helpful – very eager. Toddlers are born assistants. And they’re hungry to get in there and get the job done “all by myself ”. Need to sweep up the kitchen? Rinse a dish? Or crack an egg? No worries. Toddlers, Inc will be there on the double. Watch out! Here they come. In one study, 20-month-olds actually stopped playing with a new toy and walked across the room to help an adult pick up something from the floor. No one had to ask the toddler for their help, nor did the toddler need a reward for their assistance.
Maria de los Angeles Tun Burgos, who lives in a small Mayan village in the middle of the Yucatán Peninsula, is the perfect supermum to teach us how to raise helpful kids who also take pride in their work around the house. She has clearly done a superb job transmitting this value to her eldest daughter, Angela, who not only voluntarily washes dishes but also cleans the house while her mum is out running errands. De los Angeles Tun Burgos has two younger daughters – aged five and nine – who are at different stages of the learning process but still contribute. One of them is Gelmy, who voluntarily comes in from playing with her friends so she can help make tortillas.
But here’s the thing about learning to do chores voluntarily: it takes years, De los Angeles Tun Burgos tells me. “You have to teach them slowly, little by little, and eventually they will understand.” You can’t simply hang up a chore chart and expect a four-year-old to start washing the dishes on Tuesdays and Thursdays without you asking. As De los Angeles Tun Burgos says, you have to teach the child slowly. You have to train them. The child has to understand not just how to do the chores, but also when to do them, and why doing them is important and beneficial to the family – and themselves.
Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff (Harper Thorsons, £14.99)