We are in the midst of a childhood mental health epidemic, and one thing is clear: Our children are suffering.
The causes of the epidemic are multiple and varied. For example, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (2024) has argued convincingly that smartphones and social media have taken a toll on children’s well-being.
The Impact of Shifting Parenting Practices Over Time
Another factor, however, deserves attention: the possibility that in less than a century, modern Western families have drifted away from parenting practices that existed for millennia, which likely helped children become more cooperative, emotionally stable, and resilient.
Journalist Michaeleen Doucleff explored this question in her book Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans, where she spent time with Maya, Inuit, and Hadzabe families and contrasted their child-rearing practices with modern Western norms (Doucleff, 2021).
This article considers how her core insights may intersect with the mental health epidemic: whether some portion of the epidemic is caused by a mismatch between children’s needs and modern family life.
Doucleff argues that traditional families often rely on a different parenting structure: Children are embedded in a wider network of extended family, older children are expected to contribute to household life, and adults tend to guide with calm, confident authority rather than constant verbal correction or child-centered negotiation. Instead of organizing family life around a child’s feelings and preferences, these communities gradually draw children into the shared work and rhythms of daily life.
As well, Nikhil Chaudhary and Annie Swanepoel (2023) suggest that hunter‑gatherer‑like caregiving practices likely protect child mental health, implying that modern deviations from these patterns may create vulnerability.
These ideas point us in the same direction: culture and family ecology may matter more for children’s emotional well-being than modern mental health discourse often acknowledges.
Contrasting Temper Tantrums in Indigenous and Western Cultures
As an example, compare how many Indigenous cultures and modern parents respond to temper tantrums.
Research and clinical experience both suggest that children—whether neurotypical or neurodivergent—often respond poorly when adults become highly engaged during a tantrum. Some parents lecture, reason, coax, or scold, while others follow social media advice and attempt to soothe or “co-regulate” their child. Attention can increase arousal rather than reduce it.
This is one reason Doucleff’s observations are so striking. She describes Inuit parents as remarkably calm and often relatively emotionally unreactive during children’s outbursts. When children cry, hit, or act out, these parents do not typically launch into lengthy explanations or urgent attempts to talk the child down. Instead, they remain composed and wait for the storm to pass. This approach also closely resembles what evidence-based treatments teach parents to do.
Modern parents are also increasingly told to “talk things out” with angry children as if every moment of dysregulation calls for a therapeutic discussion. Not every behavior requires a diplomatic summit.
In many traditional communities, a parent is also less likely to carry this burden alone. Child-rearing is distributed across a wider caregiving network of grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, and other adults. This matters because calm parenting is much easier when adults are not parenting in a state of chronic depletion.
Expectations of Contribution and Autonomy Across Cultures
Doucleff’s work also highlights another major difference between traditional communities and modern Western families: children in those communities are expected to contribute. Maya families, for example, are described as raising cooperative children without relying on bribery, chore charts, threats, or repeated reminders, in part by including children in household tasks from the time they can walk.
Parenting Essential Reads
Modern families, by contrast, often devote tremendous time and energy to entertaining children, protecting them from frustration, and over-negotiating ordinary responsibilities.
Doucleff also argues that children in traditional cultures are often granted more genuine autonomy. They are allowed to observe, explore, and gradually master meaningful roles within the family, all while remaining connected to a larger social group. This kind of autonomy appears to build competence and confidence, whereas modern overinvolvement and adult micromanagement may undermine both (Gray, 2021).
Stressed, isolated, and overwhelmed adults who are urged to overmanage children’s emotions while undermanaging behavior can easily see problems snowball. Children who might have grown into competence with multigenerational support, contribution, and calm authority instead become more anxious, inattentive, demanding, oppositional, or emotionally volatile.
The Role of Diagnosis and Labels in Modern Childhood Mental Health
If these problems continue, parents often seek professional treatment for the child. Eventually, a child picks up a diagnosis—or several. That diagnosis then becomes part of the family story: the child has oppositional defiant disorder, ADHD, anxiety, pathological demand avoidance, and so on.
It is worth asking whether some of what is labeled as psychopathology might instead be a predictable response to how more sensitive children are being raised in the 21st century.
Doucleff’s work is useful here because it makes one point unmistakably clear: Many behaviors that modern Western parents and professionals now treat as disorders might be very different had they grown up in more traditional settings.
That does not prove that modern family structure explains every childhood mental health problem. Still, it strongly suggests that culture and family organization may play a larger role than contemporary mental health discourse often acknowledges.
What Contemporary Families Can Learn from the Past
None of this means modern families need to become hunter-gatherers to raise healthy children. Doucleff and others are not arguing that people should abandon modern life or romanticize the past.
The point is simpler and more practical: Children appear to do well when they are surrounded by calm adults, included in meaningful family life, expected to contribute, and guided with steady, loving authority rather than constant emotional management. Modern families can still move intentionally toward that kind of home.
Nor does it mean that mental health diagnoses are never valid or useful. ADHD is real, but currently, nearly one in five adolescent boys in the U.S. has been diagnosed with ADHD (CHADD, 2025). Shouldn’t we be asking ourselves whether what’s happening around these kids is playing a role rather than only considering what might be happening inside of them?
All of this seems deeply unfair to both children and their families. Kids deserve better than to be labeled as the problem and prescribed medications that sometimes only address behavior on the surface.
This is not only ineffective; it is unjust.
These children are not broken. In many cases, they are responding exactly as one would expect them to in families that are isolated, stretched too thin, disconnected, and following unhelpful parenting advice.