The sovereign child: Remembering how to parent in ancestral ways (transcript)

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Episode Transcript:

Lian (00:00)

Hello my beautiful mythical old souls and a huge welcome back. Could our long ago ancestors remind us of a more human, compassionate, effective, sane way of parenting? Well, in this week's episode, I'm joined once again by the wonderful Arthur Haynes. Arthur is a Maine hunting, fishing and recreation guide, forager, ancestral skills mentor, author, public speaker and botanical researcher. Arthur is also a devoted father and today we explore something very close to both of our hearts, how we parent and how we might remember a truer way. Together we explore whether our attempts to control and shape our children are not only unnecessary but could be a wound to their sovereignty.

This is a deeply human conversation rooted in both lived experience and ancestral wisdom, where we ask what it means to parent in a way that honours the innate wholeness of the child. We journey the emotional and practical terrain of ancestral child rearing, from physical punishment and coercive control to co-sleeping, mixed-age play, and the essential power of physical touch.

We reflect on how so many of our cultural norms, even the well-intentioned ones, can fracture the nervous system of both parent and child. And we remember together that there is another way, one that's more natural, connected and compassionate. A way that calls us back to what we already know, somewhere deep within. 

And if you recognise that the way you look holds pain, has you hide or contort, you may well be experiencing what I call the beauty wound. And in just under a week on the 13th of May, I and a circle of women will be journeying deep into that beauty wound to alchemise it into our own unique beauty potion, becoming that mythic beauty that is truly right for our soul. We only have one place left and again there's not long before we begin. If you feel that place is for you come join me at bemythical.com slash beauty.

And if you're struggling with the challenges of walking your soul path in this crazy modern world come join our Academy of the Soul Unio. You can find out more by hopping over to bemythical.com slash unio or click the link in the description.

And now back to this week's episode, let's dive in.

Lian (02:47)

Hello Arthur, welcome back.

Arthur Haines (02:51)

Thank you for inviting me back again.

Lian (02:54)

⁓ obviously can't get enough of you. And we actually, I think, sort of agreed to come back and do this one at the beginning of our last episode. I was just recalling how, as we began, your daughter was near you in the room and I witnessed how you spoke to her as you were asking her if you could have the space to yourself and the quiet so that we could record. And...

Arthur Haines (03:22)

Mm-hmm.

Lian (03:23)

As I was witnessing that, I was really struck in a really positive, beautiful way at the way that dynamic unfolded and the respect and love and choice that was present in it. And when you came back, I said to you how I'd loved witnessing that. And then we had a sort of short conversation about the and sovereignty and treating children as actual human beings with choices. And which of course isn't isn't something that's novel to me, but there's always something precious in me witnessing another parent behave in that way with their children. And there was something particularly moving in the way that you did that. And so it seemed like,

Arthur Haines (03:52)

Mm-hmm.

Lian (04:10)

this is an episode actually that would be lovely to come back and do together. So here we are. And then we actually had a little kind of mini scene again at the start of this one, which I won't go into right now, but I was just like, yeah, perfectly apt and really setting the scene for us to have a really embodied conversation on this topic. So I'm really looking forward to this.

Arthur Haines (04:14)

you

Right.

Same, this is a particular topic that I really love sharing information on. So I'll thank you here and then again at the end of the show for giving me the opportunity because it's very sad to me the parent-child interactions that I see around in the United States. ⁓ I just see children's sovereignty ripped away from them over and over and over again throughout the day as I'm watching parents

Lian (04:56)

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (05:04)

But I'm also watching parents who are just burning themselves out by trying to control everything their child does. Don't run there. Don't pick that up. Don't throw this. Don't do that. Don't do that. Don't do that. And by the end of the day, they are so frazzled. They are just so beaten down from trying to control every aspect of this little human's life that now they're losing their patience and they can't be good people to really anybody. And I feel like

Lian (05:32)

Hmm.

Arthur Haines (05:34)

people really need to understand that we have lived in this hunter-gatherer communal type of setting where we were egalitarian, we were non-hierarchical, and that includes the very young and the very old. And just because they're in our care, it doesn't mean that we have rights and privileges over them. And this whole idea that children are sovereign, that they're sovereign humans, and I need to respond to them.

Lian (05:55)

Hmm.

Arthur Haines (06:02)

in many situations the exact same way that I might respond to you. And if it's not appropriate for me to speak to you in a particular way, then why is it appropriate to me to speak to a child? And here, you know, we're weird. You know, we're Western, industrialised, and we're educated, we're rich, we're democratic, we've got all of that thing going on. And we forget that as weird societies that we are very different from not only most of the societies around the planet, but also particularly back into time. And we love to normalise what we do now, but the fact is, is what we do now in these heavily industrialised societies is actually really weird. And now I'm not trying to use the acronym. I'm just saying it's very bizarre biologically and evolutionarily. And so this is a topic I really love speaking on.

Lian (06:37)

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (06:58)

because it helps both parents and children.

Lian (07:02)

Yes, yeah. yeah, I'm already like, I can't, just, I'm already so thrilled we're having this conversation. Can we just start with a little bit of your backstory when it comes to parenting in particular? you would have shared a little bit of that in our previous episodes, but for someone who perhaps just wants to understand it for specifically from the context of parenting, or this is the first episode they've seen between us, would you be able to?

Arthur Haines (07:29)

Right.

Lian (07:30)

bit of flesh on the bones. Like how did you come to see ultimately children in this way and therefore parenting in this way?

Arthur Haines (07:39)

Right. ⁓

I first started as sort of a botanist. I work as a plant taxonomist, but I also sort of dabble in ethnobotany. So I study human interactions with plants. And when I started looking into hunter gatherer diets and noticing that the nutrient density of their diets was substantially more than what we get in our cultivated and sort of animal husbandry diets that we have in industrialised countries.

I started investigating, if their diet was so protective of chronic disease, what about the other aspects of their life? Were those also beneficial to them? And you start looking at their sleep patterns and their lack of insomnia because they've had bright light and blue light, the whole spectrum of light due to their elemental exposure during the day, and then dark abodes at night that don't have lights and flashes and Wi-Fi.

You see where hopefully I'm trying to go, their movement patterns, literally the way they seated themselves didn't lead to problems that we get with chronic sitting in chairs and a shortening of our connective tissue that leads to back problems or potentially leads to back problems. know, they're just everything that I research in these wild populations seems to… sort of demonstrate a benefit to adopting what aspects of the life we can and pulling that into our modern day living. And I just found it everywhere. And so, I mean, I wanna be clear. I was raised in a house that used physical punishment. You my grandfather whom I love very much, but would often joke with me, children should be seen, but not heard. In other words, we were not necessarily allowed to speak out of turn.

You know, all of the hierarchy was there. And growing up, I always said, if I had kids, you know, I'm going to do this and I'm going to do this and I'm going to do this. And to the great fortune of my children, I did not have them until much later in life when I had learned how damaging all of those parenting practices are. And it really

Lian (09:52)

Hmm. ⁓

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (09:58)

all boils down to that there is no sovereignty for the young.

We've stripped it away. They do not have the rights and privileges of adult humans. And this is just the honest truth of it all. And, you know, there are even homes where the dog, the family dog has been trained with positive reinforcement, has never yelled at, has never struck, is never grounded. There's no negative. But the children won't even get the treatment that the family dog does.

Lian (10:12)

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (10:35)

And it's just, again, another hard truth about the parenting and keeping in mind that here in the United States, the last time I looked at this statistic, 70 % of parents were accepting a physical punishment. doesn't mean they always used it, but just to give an idea. And this sort of leads us into one of the very first differences between hunter-gatherers and weird parents, again, using the acronym.

Lian (10:56)

Gosh.

Mm-hmm.

Arthur Haines (11:05)

for our industrialised ⁓ members here. Physical punishment was just simply not something that was used. And there has been some really great writing, particularly on the Inuit, like the book Never in Anger, actually discussing like their version of parenting and how up until the age of around three or so young children, you know, toddlers at this point who were acting out were simply never spoken to. in anger. It was just understood. We don't even have a developed brain yet. You know, we often think of these people as so primitive, but yet they absolutely understood that this is a person who's developing their central nervous system. They're developing that executive function to keep themselves calm and to not throw tantrums at a young age. So not only was there no yelling and screaming at children and punishment, but certainly there was no physical punishment. was no striking of the children. And

Lian (11:41)

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (12:04)

I like to describe it like this and to think about I am allowed to do something to my five-year-old daughter that if I were to do it to you, I could be arrested for assault. The exact same action, if I were to restrain you and strike you, you could have me arrested. How on earth am I allowed to do it to this tiny little person?

Lian (12:29)

Yeah, I was, I can't quite remember what the law is. I think over there, it's still legal. And I think in this country, it's I think it's slightly different with say, Scotland, England, and I was having a conversation with my daughter about it. Not long ago, about how I think there was some kind of movement to kind of

Arthur Haines (12:30)

I'm always

Lian (12:53)

make the laws in each of these kind of countries that make up the UK the same or something like that. And so my daughter and I were in conversation and did a bit of research. And a line of it said something like, I think it is probably better than it is over in the States. Like, I think it's illegal to a point. And it was like, but it was something like, as long as it doesn't leave a mark. And it was so I mean, I remember seeing as I read it, I remember seeing my daughter's face looking at me like, that's just like,

Arthur Haines (12:58)

Thank

Lian (13:22)

unimaginable that it's okay up until that point. know, it's like we've never, we've never, you know, done anything like that and wouldn't. But I think it really shows you when you have someone that's kind of innocent to all of this and see the reaction, and the valid, the right reaction to have, it really was one of those moments of like, yes, that's what everyone's missing, like how a child would like

Arthur Haines (13:40)

Mm-hmm.

Lian (13:50)

think there's children out there that are being hit and it's okay as long as it doesn't leave a mark. How could that be okay?

Arthur Haines (13:57)

And it just it speaks to again the lack of sovereignty and the fact that we live in a hierarchical society now, I remember when my ⁓ oldest daughter was was young she may have been four or five years old and I mentioned to her that there are children that when they're punished they are struck by their parents and she started laughing. I was like wow that's a

unusual reaction. And finally, I understood what it was. She said, I know you're joking.

And it took two other adults in the house to explain to her that like, no, that's what happens like in lots of places before she understood like, ⁓ really? Because obviously, ⁓ well, one of the really important caveats that we have to present here is no one is expected to be an angel. We're all isolated.

Lian (14:36)

⁓

Arthur Haines (14:49)

So many of us are living in our nuclear families. No one's perfect. We lose our tempers. And we shouldn't beat ourselves up over this for days and days and days on and on. I'm not perfect. But I aspire for the things that we are talking about today. And I mostly meet them. But I'm not perfect. And so for parents that are out there, especially single moms, which we get here, ⁓ you know.

a lot right now.

Sometimes we're going to raise our voice and we don't have to look at it as this giant failure. Just apologise. The exact same thing that you would do to an adult if you raised your voice, just treat them as if they were another adult. And I think it's really important for me to think when I think about physical punishment, I think about anything where the line is blurry between

Lian (15:21)

Mmm.

Yeah.

Arthur Haines (15:44)

acceptable behaviour and illegal behaviour, maybe we should just not do it at all. And keeping in mind that physical punishment does rob children of IQ points. This has been demonstrated in studies that homes where children are are struck as physical punishment with when all things are isolated for in large statistical studies, they come out lower on the IQ scale just

Lian (15:51)

Hmm. ⁓

Arthur Haines (16:12)

a small bit, but it is a measurable difference than homes where they're shown a bit of respect and their sovereignty is actually afforded to them.

Lian (16:23)

Hmm, yeah. Can I ask just out of curiosity, the ages of your children?

Arthur Haines (16:31)

Oh, my oldest is 11. That's Samara. And my youngest, Farah, is now five.

I was 43 with my first and 49 with my second. And who knows? Maybe there'll be another one. I don't feel like I'm done. the point being, it was really important for me to wait until later in life.

earlier as a young male, as we've talked about with virtually no real masculine models, I was as selfish and callous as every other young man out there. There was nothing special about me in terms of wanting to live up to some archetype of masculinity and be that type of parent that would give my children sovereignty. I mean, there are so many ways to think about sovereignty with children.

Lian (17:00)

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (17:24)

which is again, this whole overarching goal that's gonna be going on throughout our discussion today. ⁓ If you picked up something that I didn't want you to pick up, that you were visiting my home and you picked up something, I would never just walk over to you and tear it out of your hand. I would ask you for it, right? Or mention something like, that's something very special. Would you mind, you understand where I'm going with this.

Lian (17:47)

Mmm.

Hmm.

Arthur Haines (17:52)

but we

just have no qualms about walking up to children and just, nope, I don't want you to have that. And what have they learned? And this is really important with this type of thing or even physical punishment. Remember what the definition of bullying is, right? Bullying is a larger or at least in some way physically or emotionally intimidating person

who uses the threat or actual violence to coerce somebody into doing something. So physical punishment is fully bullying children. And then they go to school and mimic the behaviour on smaller children, and they get in trouble for it. The very thing that's role modeled in their home.

Lian (18:25)

Mmm.

Mmm.

Yeah, gosh. ⁓

Hmm.

Arthur Haines (18:44)

So,

you know, when we encounter those situations where a child picks up something that ⁓ maybe a guest in the house would rather not have them playing with, and I need to get it back quickly, I offer trades. I know things that they like, would love to play with that maybe they haven't had access to that is safe for them. You know what I'm trying to get at. And I offer trades as opposed to, excuse me, ⁓ just going up and sort of tearing things from their hand.

Lian (19:10)

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (19:12)

that just it role models, because that's how they're learning is through role modeling. You're just role modeling. The bigger you are, the more you can get away with. And that's not that's is that the type of empathy and compassion that we want to be role modeling, right?

Lian (19:25)

Is that the message?

It's funny because when we started here, I was like, well, I imagine the vast majority of people listening to this show would be kind of like noddling. I imagine most of them would be violently in agreement, ironically, with what we're talking about here.

think it was a really good place to start because there's so many sort of subtleties that are downstream from this idea of using physical punishment that I'm really glad that we started with this because there are things that you kind of, can just be like, well, of course I'd never do that, but there's sort of like subtle ways that we can do this that are really only illuminated through this kind of conversation. So thank you for starting here.

Arthur Haines (20:13)

Yeah, and you're most welcome. And I think what happens is people make this case that I physically punish my children because I love them. Like, now let me switch that around and say, I beat my wife because I love her. And no one would accept this. They'd be like, no, you're an abusive scumbag. They would just harbor no goodwill toward me.

Lian (20:35)

Hmm.

Arthur Haines (20:42)

But if I strike my child because maybe they went into the road, somehow now it's okay. And it isn't. What I've tried to do and one of the best examples that I can think of is, you know, some people, don't want, we have a wood stove here and they certainly don't want their child to be burned by putting their hands on the wood stove or falling against it and that kind of thing. And, but just,

Punishing your child if they go near it they have no understanding of what's going on except for some reason when they get near this object They're in trouble. They haven't actually learned the lesson So what I did with my daughter both daughters is I waited for a time when the wood stove was hot but not injurious it was not so burning hot that they could physically touch it and I allowed them to make contact with it and you know

Lian (21:22)

Mmm.

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (21:39)

whether you doesn't matter what language you're using, we were using the word ksipede, which is the indigenous word for this part of the world that means it is hot. And so they now understood, ksipede means it's, but you know, if you were using English or whatever language you could say, it's very hot, it's hot, don't touch it. And suddenly there's a wide, you know, a wide-eyed learning moment where they're like, they touch it and they bring their hand back. And now they understand that anytime they hear it's hot or whatever language you're speaking in,

Lian (21:48)

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (22:09)

It's like, is something I need to stay away from. I'm telling you, it was vastly more effective than punishment. And it didn't break trust between the caregiver and the child, which is what physical punishment does.

Lian (22:13)

Mmm. ⁓

Yeah. ⁓

Hmm, yeah. So I know you had, think it was at seven points that you wanted to ask to explore. Should we move on to the second?

Arthur Haines (22:34)

Yes. and we,

yeah, we've, we've covered the physical punishment, which is a really big one, this idea that we're not going to act in anger because when we lose our control as parents and we strike our children, that's not punishment. That's abuse. You lost control. Stop pretending that you're doing something beneficial for them. Another one that's really important that we see amongst hunter-gatherers around the world is this high responsibility given to the toddler.

Lian (22:43)

Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Arthur Haines (23:03)

and to the child. Remember, they're sovereign beings. They are allowed to explore their world and people will say, well, yeah, but we live in a different world and it's really dangerous now. Trust me, it isn't more dangerous. In some ways, it's much less dangerous because they had landscapes with large predators, right? They had toxic plants to contend with. They had all kinds of hazards.

Lian (23:16)

Mmm.

Mm-hmm.

Arthur Haines (23:28)

including fires that would be going for cooking and staying warm. Many hunter gatherer children that were observed by anthropologists could be seen with small burn scars where they had fallen into a fire. But it was considered very bad taste to drag your child away from the fire because if the adult wanted to play next to it, you would let them. It's up to the child because it's their physical body. Now, I'm not saying that we have to take this to the

full extent that potentially hunter gatherers do, allowing that child to have more responsibility for themselves allows them to develop a confidence to understand what their physical limitations are that when we're totally controlling them, they never get a chance to really understand that. I mean, there's a funny story. There's an indigenous group on the African continent where there's an anthropologist who is interviewing

Lian (24:16)

you ⁓

Arthur Haines (24:26)

a mom and she has an infant behind her and the infant's playing with a machete and the infant drops the machete and the mom while she's speaking to the anthropologist just sort of reaches around behind her and picks the machete up and hands it back to the child.

And the other colleges coming from one of our uninductive country is sort of like this. And the mom is not even responding just to go have it back. It's the child's will. It's their choice. It's their body. And people listening to this are going to have a really hard time ⁓ potentially with this. When we're up on top of a cliff, I try to do my best with this type of stuff.

young toddler daughter gets closer. I move closer to her, but I don't necessarily intervene. If that makes sense. I'm doing what I need to do so I can feel sane in that moment and make sure that I feel like I'm protecting her, but I don't pull her back. I'm just right there for the grab. So she still feels like she for autonomy. And I feel like I'm letting her still explore her environment. There, there are ways to.

Lian (25:15)

Mmm. ⁓

Mmm.

Yeah.

Gosh,

mmm.

Arthur Haines (25:44)

Accomplish

this.

Lian (25:46)

Yeah, that brings up, I think there's something important to recognise in this, that it's really going to bring up our own stuff, which we then need to be in relationship to. This isn't necessarily easy, it's gonna bring up all of our own understandable kind of protection towards our child. But also, depending on our upbringing, the circles we move in,

Arthur Haines (25:58)

Yeah, right.

Lian (26:15)

worry of other people judging us and you know there's a lot there that we will need to be in relationship to in order to kind of move towards what you're describing.

Arthur Haines (26:23)

Yes.

You can't eliminate risk and you know, we tend to be a society that wants everything to be extremely safe and I would just argue, you What kind of existence if we follow that idea of safety to its logical conclusion? We wouldn't play sports because we might break something or sprain something we'd never go outside because a branch might fall on us or scratch eye

scratch our eye, you understand where I'm going. If we follow this too far, we just end up with a life in a padded room. Let your children explore their world and back off with the helicopter parenting because it's bad for them and it's bad for you. ⁓ You know, another sort of moving on to these things that have been observed in hunter gatherer groups sort of around the world in the far north, the equator, different continents.

Lian (26:52)

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (27:19)

⁓ is this idea of mixed age play groups. Now when we send our children off to public school, that is usually not the case. We group them together by similar age and put them in classrooms because we want the curriculum to match their level of brain development and the prerequisite education that they've had so far, but it leads to problems.

Lian (27:24)

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (27:46)

We used to have in small, you know, communal settings, these groups where there would be children of all different ages. The older children were looking after the younger children and became very experienced caregivers who could now help the actual parents and were watching other parents' children as well. So there was ⁓ just this beautiful communal caregiving, if you will.

Lian (28:02)

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (28:14)

And it's been observed that children even as young as four years old were watching after toddlers. They were already learning how to keep them safe in the terrain that they were in. But of course, there's another problem with this that people don't think about. Let's just call it a biological seniority. It's not a hierarchy, but clearly if I'm five and that person's 13,

I know they know more than me, they have greater physical abilities than me, they can assist me with things. And there is a, how about I call it submission, which is much too strong a word, but I'm going to submit to their, shouldn't do that because of this. And like, okay, I trust this person and they know more than me. When you're all at the same age, you're all fighting for dominance.

Lian (29:00)

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (29:08)

It's yet another thing that reinforces hierarchy. that kid has aged or grown a little faster than this kid, so they have a slightly larger body that they can use to get their way. Or who knows the most, who can just expel the most facts because as young kids, you don't have many experiences. All of this just leads to the development of hierarchies. And so we're supposed to be in these multi-age playgroups.

Lian (29:33)

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (29:36)

⁓ and it's actually harmful for socialisation to be in a single age play group. You are not able to watch your role models who maybe can even just speak the language better than you. You're stuck mostly with children. If you're say five years old, who are all, you know, they don't know how to conjugate their verbs properly and so on. And it's just getting reinforced by the people that they're around. Language is just one easy topic that we could.

Lian (29:36)

Yeah.

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (30:05)

⁓ come up with, but that's with everything in life. If you're around people of your own age all the time, you're not learning from the older children who know how to do things at a higher competency than you do.

Lian (30:19)

Gosh, the...

That makes so much sense. And with each one of the observations you've shared so far, like this increasing picture of just fundamentally, systemically, we're just building everything just completely upside down and inside out. it's hard because, yeah, it's like everything we look at is

built in the wrong way to support what you're describing.

Arthur Haines (30:58)

It is, and it's really hard to completely step out of that and not be considered weirdos living up on the mountain that no one wants to be around because we still want to have our circle of friends, our circle of family. We still need to interact with people who live in town, so to speak, because there's lots of good people in all of these settings.

Lian (31:03)

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (31:19)

So we can only break down so much of it. So sometimes we have to figure out what we can adjust.

and what we have the capability and willingness to make adjustments to and move on those things for the benefit of the coming generations. Speaking about the mixed age playgroups, there's a couple other things here. Almost zero formal instruction, which is primarily all we do. We send them off to public school and they sit and they listen to a teacher. ⁓

Lian (31:34)

Hmm.

Mm, yes.

Arthur Haines (31:52)

And little to no direct instruction. In other words, I'm not going to tell you how to do it while I'm working on something. You're watching what I do. And then you go off and try to replicate it. And at first you fail, but as you get older, you've watched it now 15 times your dexterity, your physical strength increases, and you're starting to get it. And eventually by the time that you're approaching that adulthood,

Lian (32:05)

Mm-hmm. ⁓

Arthur Haines (32:20)

you've got these skills down pat solely through replicating them by watching. And as somebody who has taught physical activities like mountaineering and submission wrestling for a long time, I can tell you that the ability to watch and replicate is almost gone from our population. They're waiting for the, okay, everybody pay attention. Now class has started.

Lian (32:41)

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (32:47)

Now pay attention and I'm going to verbally tell you how to do it because if I just show you your ability to learn through watching and replicating has been essentially stripped away from you. It's how you were evolutionarily designed to learn, but through formal education and sitting in a classroom and being told, okay, now's the moment to pay attention because I'm speaking. We've just

all those teachable moments get missed because no one's paying attention to them. If that makes sense.

Lian (33:21)

Hmm. It really does. was, I had tons of, it makes complete sense. And I had loads of different, examples, both to the contrary and also, ⁓ matching what you're saying. Cause I was thinking it's funny because we, our evolutionary heritage, I think is, is still present in that I was thinking if we, with some things, I think we would naturally.

kind of go into that, like say for example teaching a child to cook, I think most people would be more inclined to, you know, just be cooking and the child watch and maybe sort of get involved now and again. And then there's sort of these other whole areas where we don't. I was thinking, I wonder why that is. I wonder why there's some areas where that's still...

is present and then others there isn't, but you're completely right. It makes everything you've said makes so much sense. And it's also, you know, as adults, you know, unless we consciously unlearn that way we've been taught to learn, we're there kind of waiting, like we continue that on, don't we? Where we lose that ability to learn through watching and, you know, absorbing what's happening, as opposed to sort of sitting there being

Arthur Haines (34:31)

Right, right.

Lian (34:43)

spoon fed.

Arthur Haines (34:45)

Let me give an example between my two daughters. None of this is the fault of either of my daughters, because I'm also continuing to learn. When my first daughter was born, Samara, and she became a toddler, she wasn't often included in doing things. Not included like chores in the home, doing dishes and cooking and things like that. And that's many parents, understandably, they only have so much energy.

Again, because they're isolated from all of the communal caregivers that they would have had historically. And it's just, it's so hard to, now I've got to like pick up their mess and I've got to clean up the, you know, the dinner mess. But the problem is it robs children of their desire to be involved. And then they stop helping. My five-year-old daughter, from the moment she was born, she has been included in everything.

Lian (35:15)

Mmm.

Hmm.

Arthur Haines (35:41)

She has been helping us butcher animals since she could hold, physically hold a knife in her hand. You know, so by one and a half, she kind of knew how to use a blade without too much risk of hurting herself. Both of my daughters have made little tiny cuts on their hands before, and let's not pretend that adults don't do this. I do this all the time. I'll make myself.

Lian (36:04)

Mm-hmm.

Arthur Haines (36:06)

But they've

had nothing serious because they've had knives in their hands since they were very young. But because my younger daughter was always included, and if it was something that she couldn't be included in, we literally set up a mock scenario so that she could still do essentially what we were doing. And that makes more work. But now you have one person who's always, want to help, and another person.

Lian (36:27)

Mmm, wow. Mmm.

Arthur Haines (36:34)

the older daughter, again, no fault of her own, who simply doesn't even always see what's happening because she was not included from the beginning. So she's more, she's playing or doing things over here instead of being like, wait, you're doing something. I want to be involved in it. And so this, this whole idea of keeping them included so they can be watching you and learning.

Lian (36:41)

Mmmmm

Hmm.

Arthur Haines (37:02)

is really important because later on you build your house, your home, little helpers who want to help you do dishes and want to help you peel things and sort things. At first it takes more time, but later on you gain a highly competent helper. And this is one of those things that goes back to allow them to observe even when it's going to take more energy to clean up the mess they've made as well.

Lian (37:09)

Mmm.

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (37:31)

It's part of this no formal education and little or no direct instruction.

Lian (37:32)

Yeah.

Hmm. ⁓ I love all of the examples you've just given. Yeah, makes complete sense. Where are we on our list of observations now?

Arthur Haines (37:50)

Well,

we've just got a couple more, okay? A couple more that I was hoping to be able to cover today during our discussion. So another one that's really important is high indulgence of the infant. This is the anthropological term for don't let them cry, okay? When a child is crying, they're stressed and they're looking to be comforted. And we have all kinds of scenarios now where we have cry it out training and fervor methods and

Lian (37:53)

Okay.

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (38:18)

and so on where we allow children to cry for extended periods of time. In hunter-gatherer societies, this is not observed. Infants and toddlers are responded to promptly and always. ⁓ Generally, within 10 seconds, the figure is ⁓ they are immediately picked up and comforted. We have been convinced that we

if we coddle our children, I'm not talking about like a teenager, I'm talking about like an infant that can barely sit up at this point, that somehow if we respond to their crying, that we will create this person who will not have any strength and any resilience that somehow we will break all that and create this very fragile person. We're dealing with

humans at their most fragile stage. And hopefully all I have to say is the cry it out method, which is again, not observed in any hunter gatherer population was developed by a male pediatrician. Do I have to say anymore? Like what type of indoctrination does it take for a mammalian mother to not respond to the cries of her infant?

Lian (39:33)

Mm.

Arthur Haines (39:44)

And, unfortunately that is exactly what we've done. And, and we, and when the children finally, sorry, go ahead.

Lian (39:50)

It's everything you said there.

So about say it's it's I didn't actually know that that you said about a male pediatrician, but it makes a lot of sense. And I was just recalling when when my first was a baby, it was just so I didn't even kind of get to the point of even kind of considering.

letting him cry, it was just so obvious it would be unthinkable. It just has such a, that sound of your baby crying or any baby crying actually, it's just, there is such an instinctive response to go to them. And I remember when I had friends with babies a similar age, and maybe when they're about six months and you're kind of like,

you know, hardly any sleep and then you start to get well-meaning advice from people, you know, you know, where they're getting, I mean, no one really said this to me, but my friends were getting that kind of advice from family, you know, we'll let them cry it out and blah, blah, blah. And I remember one of my friends trying that and sharing with me what it felt like to her to try and sit and listen to her son cry in the other room and not go to him.

Arthur Haines (40:47)

Yes.

Lian (41:08)

And I remember just witnessing the whole thing, her sharing that and realising like, this isn't easy. It's not like she's thinking, oh, this is a great idea, but it was costing her so much to follow something that was so against her own instincts. it was a really, I mean, that was years ago, but it's so ingrained in my, like not just my memory, like my embodied sense of like, oh my gosh, I could feel what that was costing her. And yet she was doing it because this indoctrination.

Arthur Haines (41:23)

right.

Yeah.

It's really hard because, you know, obviously we've raised our daughters with this. We respond to them when they've cried, particularly in infanthood and as toddlers. And certainly I'm not saying that as an older child that, you know, we don't sometimes see a child who might be, you know, kind of putting on a little bit of a show. ⁓ That's not what I'm discussing here. I'm talking about little humans.

who only have one way of communicating when they're in trouble, and that is to cry. And it's so hard because we'll be at our family's homes and they're putting their children to bed, often much too early. Their children aren't tired, but they're convinced that they need to have this. They go to bed at this time no matter what. And they're watching their children cry and listening to them through the infant monitor.

Lian (42:06)

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (42:34)

⁓ Farah, who's still just up with us. She's just going to stay awake longer so that when I put her to bed, she's actually tired and she just goes to sleep. And because she goes to bed later, she just immediately falls asleep and doesn't wake up until much later in the morning. So there's no like 5 a.m. wake up because they went to bed so darn early kind of thing. And she's just watching and listening to her her nieces and nephews.

crying on and on and on, sometimes for an hour and a half before they finally fall asleep. And it's just it's so awkward. Like here's Farah who's not experiencing any of that. And they're sort of looking at her and then they're looking at their own children. And it's just it makes for such an awkward moment. And I feel so terrible for those children. I understand that parents need time alone as well. ⁓

Lian (43:08)

my gosh.

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (43:31)

But this is a really harmful practice because by the time your children stop crying, there are cases where they've gone into kind of a shutdown mode. ⁓ Try to imagine an infant in the wild. I'm talking about a wild animal that's been left. It calls for its parents. calls for its parents. At some point, a predator is going to find this calling infant. And the infant needs to essentially stop calling and be very quiet.

and not do anything vocal so it's not found. And this is sort of this instinctual behaviour that eventually some children go into where they stop crying. And we are like, see, it's working. The cortisol levels are still screaming. They're still stressed out of their gourd. They're just stopped crying because at some point in an evolutionary perspective, the lion, the hyena, whatever it is, is going to find the squeals, the cries. ⁓

Lian (44:15)

⁓ Mmm.

Arthur Haines (44:28)

the vocalisations of whatever infant species we're talking about. So none of this is good for the child. And when we look at hunter-gatherers, there's always this close physical contact, which is one of our last ones here to talk about. There's co-sleeping. I was warned never to sleep with my child. The crib industry has done a wonderful job of terrifying us from co-sleeping. ⁓ For moms that need sleep, this is one of the best ways your daughter, your son,

Lian (44:50)

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (44:57)

starts to cry, mom rolls over, starts breastfeeding, they go to sleep. You don't have to get up and walk into another room, breastfeed or bottle feed for a while, and then go back to bed. You are so darn awake at that point that it's totally disrupting your sleep patterns. So we always slept in the same bed with our children for quite some time, ⁓ age four or five anyways, until they were ready to sleep on their own.

And that felt good to be able to provide that, that feeling of safety and security and protection for them that made them ⁓ just much more secure about sleeping in another room eventually. And of course, this close physical contact, there's a really great statistic to share with you.

When anthropologists watched various hunter-gatherer groups, how they interacted with the children, 80% of the interactions were non-verbal. So their physical touch primarily in some way. And only 20% were verbal. When they came to the United States to sort of get a comparison of what weird countries are doing, they found that it was the inverse.

Lian (46:02)

Mmm wow

Arthur Haines (46:15)

that 80% of our interactions were verbal and only 20% were physical. We are literally disconnecting ourselves from that physical contact that infants would have experienced. Partly because there are times when moms and dads simply can't keep up when they're doing it alone. Again, remember in a communal situation, the baby could be handed around. So this isn't meant to be entirely judgmental, but it's also

Lian (46:16)

⁓ wow.

Mmm.

Yes.

Arthur Haines (46:43)

Know this, that your child is looking for lots of physical contact and find ways to manifest as much of it as you possibly can.

Lian (46:53)

Yeah, ⁓ it's, I feel a bit heartbroken at this point. It's, I was just thinking back again to when my, my son was a baby. And again, it was, whilst I, you know, it just, was so obvious that co-sleeping was the thing to do. Again, just instinctively, I couldn't not and

Arthur Haines (46:59)

Yeah.

Lian (47:22)

yet the kind of, you know, around you, was because constant messages being told, you know, this is harmful and this, you know, all these reasons. And I look back and I just think, my goodness, I'm so glad I had just such a strong instinctive sense of what to do. But, and I was thinking also, I wonder, and it's hard to know, because it's not like I have a comparison.

Arthur Haines (47:29)

Yes.

Lian (47:48)

My children are now 16 and 14 and very physically affectionate. I know my son being 16, a lot of my friends, children same age, particularly boys, don't want that now. Whereas he'll quite happily say, oh, give me a cuddle and of would literally snuggle up to me and literally put my arm around him to give him a hug. I if that is because we had so much physical closeness when they were young. It's just part of our language, part of our relationship. And it's only really occurred to me as we're talking now that maybe that is why.

Arthur Haines (48:20)

Yes. Yeah, you normalised physical contact as opposed to trying to break it from a very early age, which I'm not saying that that's what the parents are trying to do, but it is a consequence of the parenting information that they're receiving. Look, we know this stuff is really important, all of these things and much more that we could talk about, because when we look at, let's look at our teenagers, say here in the United States.

Lian (48:35)

Mmm.

No.

Arthur Haines (49:00)

identity crises, freak outs. Like these are really common things. Like even things that are much more serious, like suicide. One in six high school students in the United States are having suicidal thoughts and one in 12 make an attempt on their life. This is, these are straight from the centers of disease control, the CDC statistics. And you can find them online to confirm what I'm giving you. And there might be higher now because I'm

Lian (49:10)

Mmm.

my gosh.

Arthur Haines (49:29)

When I did a quick look, I noticed that they're increasing here in the United States. But that was not observed in hunter gatherer cultures. There was no teen suicide. And they knew exactly who they were and what their role was within their community. So identity crises simply didn't exist. These emotional mood swings are just unobserved. So we know that this parenting method is sort of what

Lian (49:49)

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (49:56)

We're evolutionarily expecting to receive as an infant, but we don't receive it. So maybe I'll leave you with just one last scenario that I think speaks to what happens when we really change up the communal living, the type of child rearing that we're doing, the physical punishment comes online. There are these two groups of people that are genetically similar. In the central,

Lian (50:01)

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (50:25)

Republic of ⁓ Central Republic, excuse me, of Africa in that country, there is a hunter gatherer group and a group of farmers, agriculturalists that essentially split off from them. And they're living in these two different ways, but they are genetically similar. They have a common ancestor. So it makes for a really great comparison. One still living as hunter gatherers, the other living as agriculturalists.

Lian (50:47)

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (50:53)

And they started asking, they asked children about their experiences of death and started recording who they could remember and a number of questions that I'll present to you here. And so the first thing they did is they asked hunter gatherer and agricultural children to write down all of the people that they could remember that had died, ⁓ particularly adults. And what was interesting is that the hunter gatherer children could remember a similar number of male and female people who had died. The agricultural children remembered more men than females that had died. Okay, not because more men had died, just they remembered the men more than the females. Okay, it gets worse. So the level of grief experienced by the hunter gatherer children was the same depending on whether it was a female

Lian (51:30)

Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Arthur Haines (51:52)

or a male, it didn't matter. They experienced a similar level of grief. The agricultural children experienced more grief when men died than they did when women died. Okay. Like I said, it's going to, it keeps getting worse. Now in terms of biological kin, the hunter-gatherers could remember as approximately as many people on their mom's side that had died and on the father's side.

Lian (52:03)

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (52:20)

whereas the agricultural children remembered more deaths on the father's side than they did on the mother's side. The grief that the hunter-gatherer children experienced was tied to the relationship and the experiences they had had with them. And the agricultural children, the grief they experienced was tied to what they had received, the provisioning, the material gifts and so on. And then how they coped. The hunter gatherer children spent time with family. The agricultural children wanted to receive material gifts to help them cope. OK, so this is a study. It can be looked up. It's quite crazy, and it's quite stark. And this is what happens when we abandon our communal living, when we abandon the parenting and the child rearing.

Lian (52:59)

Gosh.

Arthur Haines (53:15)

And also when we abandon the celebration of both the masculine and the feminine, this is the results of that that come from this ⁓ pretty incredible study that was done. And I think anyone who's listening can understand that the hunter gatherer side of it demonstrates a much more balanced and emotionally mature person in many ways than what was witnessed in the children.

Lian (53:23)

Hmm.

Arthur Haines (53:44)

of agriculturalists. And so it's a call to the need to reestablish some of these biologically normal methods of interacting with children and with the other adults that were around.

Lian (54:00)

Mmm gosh that is ⁓ there's so much in there. Right you you can you can you unbreak my heart now at this point before we close Arthur please leave us with with some kind of message of hope.

Arthur Haines (54:06)

and scary.

Well, the problem is that if you're someone who's compassionate and you care about children, I can't all and you can't control what happens to other people's children. They have their rights and you know it's wrong when people are like, that's my child and I'll do what I want. It's not your child. You're now placing ownership over them, right? It's not your child.

It's the child that's in your care. And you have legal responsibility and financial responsibility, but it's not yours to control. If you view your child that way, you have already robbed them of their sovereignty. And so that's part of the problem is the very worldview that we have. But I'm hoping that the things that you gave your children can in part help mend the heart right now from just listening to what goes on ⁓ in industrialised societies. Because it sounds like you gave your children ⁓ something a lot better than many children end up receiving, unfortunately.

Lian (55:35)

Yes, again, I think so much of that I was raised in quite an unusual way myself. And then I think a combination of that and say sort of instincts just kind of like kicking in as they're meant to when we give birth. ⁓ I look back and I feel fortunate really that I was blessed, you know, it wasn't that I... I didn't have it kind of figured out. It was just, you know, many ways I feel I was kind of graced with what I needed at the time. And like you, I learned as well and, you know, made mistakes. But I think in the main, I look back and I think, firstly, I feel very fortunate that I was able to parent in the way and continue to behave the way we have. The other thing that I didn't have much of then, and I kind of the reason I'm about to say this now is I think when you're parenting very differently to what is the norm out there, you can question yourself and think like, if this, you know, basically, even though this is how we've parented for most of human history, it feels like I'm doing some crazy experiment here, because no one else is doing this. And there isn't really anyone else I can look to if you're not in that kind of community. And

Arthur Haines (56:54)

Right.

Lian (56:59)

I can say, you know, it's not like my children are grownups, but say my son's 16 and so far the crazy experiment seems to be paying off. And I wish I'd had more parents of older children being able to tell me that then. And so I'm kind of like passing it on now. So far, the experiment seems to be working out beautifully.

Arthur Haines (57:20)

Yeah, and that's sort of crazy to think that when we try to go back and do our best to mimic our evolutionary norms, and it is sort of a fuzzy target, right? We don't know exactly because we weren't there living with Indigenous people, we've got anthropological reports that we can take information from. We're shooting for this fuzzy goal, and now it is, It's an experiment to sort of regain our ancestral roots.

Lian (57:30)

Hmm

Hmm.

Arthur Haines (57:47)

And In fact, it will get looks and it will get criticisms and judgment, unfortunately, from people who are doing very harmful things sometimes, but just not realising it. And I just, encourage people to go back to if your child is sovereign the way you will interact with them will change. And I get criticism. It's like, you do that sovereign thing. Your child gets to do anything they want. And that is absolutely false because an adult that comes into my house doesn't get to do anything they want. They can't break things. They can't put themselves at risk of serious mortal harm. They can't put others at risk of serious injury and harm. I would intervene in those cases, like I think any compassionate person would, and I would do the same for my child. But so long as we're outside of those bounds, I need to speak to them with respect and an understanding that they have a central nervous system that won't be fully mature until age 25. How can I expect them to do everything perfectly now? And so it isn't that they're trying to get you.

Lian (58:53)

Mmm, wow. Mmm.

Arthur Haines (59:01)

You know, American parents are well known to believe that your children are in this power struggle with you, and the only way to succeed is to tamp that down with force. They're not. They're just learning how to interact. And if they're doing something really crazy, like, who did they learn it from? As a parent, you have near complete control who they interact with. This is on you. It's not on them, right?

Lian (59:22)

Mm-mm.

Arthur Haines (59:29)

So as a parent, we need to take ownership that that behaviour that's being expressed is partly, in this case, say, my fault. And if I want it fixed, if I'm constantly yelling all the time when something doesn't go well, eventually my children are going to say, this is the way I'm supposed to respond, and they're going to do the same thing. And if you want them to act calmly, you have to role model that behaviour. So sovereignty isn't you get to do anything you want.

Lian (59:50)

Mmm.

Arthur Haines (1:00:00)

There are bounds to what normal human behaviour, when we're interacting with people, they're bounds to what that is. And your children need to adhere to those. But they need to do it like they need to be led into that kindly and respectfully. Because let's face it, if someone is acting, an adult is acting really disrespectful in your home, you don't immediately go to hitting them. There's a talk, we want to calm things down. We want to deescalate.

Lian (1:00:26)

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Arthur Haines (1:00:29)

But Parents just immediately hit their children sometimes. But you wouldn't do that to the adult. So treat them the same. ⁓ If you're just willing to try to treat them the same, you will start moving in the direction of personal sovereignty for your children. And it just changes the way you interact with them. And they can experience it. They know it.

Lian (1:00:49)

Yeah, think that's such a It's such a lovely note to end it on because it really, it may not always be easy and there's going to be times where it's not quite clear what to do. But I think just as a, as a guiding principle to, as you say, treat your children as though they have hopes, dreams, rights, wishes, just like any adult does, you know, as you say, we'll go in the right direction. So.

Arthur Haines (1:01:12)

Yes.

Lian (1:01:18)

Thank you so much. This has been gorgeous. really has. really has. Where can listeners find out more about you and your work?

Arthur Haines (1:01:18)

Hey. ⁓ Well, like I always say, I'm easy to find. know, ArthurHaines.com is the website. And of course, I'm on social media ⁓ like Facebook and the community here is Wilder Waters Community, which is on Instagram. So really easy to connect with and love hearing from people. ⁓ anybody who has any questions, if I can help, I would love to.

Lian (1:01:51)

⁓ thank you so much, Arthur. I so appreciate you and who you are in the world. Thank you.

Arthur Haines (1:01:54)

Thank And thanks, again, like I I warned you, thank you for allowing me to have another opportunity to speak on this sort of ancestral child rearing, because it's something that I feel really set children up for failure by leading them down a particular path. It makes everything harder right from the beginning. And wouldn't it be nice if we could just raise children so that they don't have a lot of trauma that they need to figure out how to work through as adults like they just. have this beautiful start to their existence. And this is one of the ways that we accomplish that.

Lian (1:02:35)

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Thank you so much.

Arthur Haines (1:02:39)

Thank you.

Lian (1:02:42)

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