HUNT, GATHER, PARENT

There are many parenting books out there. But NPR's Michaeleen Doucleff says all the parenting books that she read after becoming a mom left a lot out.

"I'm trained as a scientist. I spent seven years as a chemist and I really believed that the parenting advice we got today was backed by really stringent scientific research," she says. "And when I started looking at the studies as a scientist, I was really, really let down."

She couldn't find answers to the trouble that she was having with her young daughter, Rosy.

"She started actually, like, slapping me across the face, regularly. And I read all this stuff and nothing seemed to work," Doucleff recounts. "In fact, a lot of it made things worse for us. And then I started doing a story, actually for NPR, on parenting in the Yucatan and oh, my gosh, it just like shifted my whole sense of what parenting could be and what mothering was."

So, she decided to visit again — this time taking her daughter with her. They also traveled to the Arctic and Tanzania.

She writes about what they experienced and how to be a better parent, in her forthcoming book, Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach US About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans