Helping parents raise respectful and confident kids
March 3, 2026
Dopamine Kids
From the New York Times bestselling author of Hunt, Gather, Parent, an operating manual for setting limits around screens and ultraprocessed foods that bring more joy and pleasure into your kids’ lives.
With 5 steps, Dopamine Kids teaches you how to setup your home routine so kids naturally reach for foods and activities that make them feel good afterwards.
Michaeleen Doucleff, PhD, is the author of the New York Times bestseller Hunt, Gather, Parent.
While traveling on assignments for NPR, Michaeleen began to realize that parents around the world don’t struggle with their children in the same way that we do in America and Europe. In many cultures, parents raise helpful and confident kids, with ease.
Why? What’s their secret?
With her toddler in tow, she traveled to three of the most venerable cultures around the world, where parents taught her an ancient method of parenting. She learned how to calm down fiery tantrums, how to raise a child who wants to be helpful, and how to protect children from anxiety and depression.
She described her findings in her first book, Hunt, Gather, Parent, which became an instant bestseller and has been translated into 30 languages.
Her second book, Dopamine Kids, comes out March 3, 2026. It explains how limiting screens and ultraprocessed foods isn’t about depriving kids of pleasure, but actually bringing more fun, excitement and joy into your family’s lives. Learn more.
As a science journalist for over a decade, Michaeleen studies and reports on cross-cultural parenting, psychology and neuroscience, primarily for NPR. Michaeleen began her career as a research chemist, completing her postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health.
Read
Article
Are We Raising Unhelpful, Bossy Kids? Here’s The Fix
Psychologists have figured out how some cultures raise extraordinarily helpful children. They use two important tools.
Article
Secrets Of A Maya Supermom: What Parenting Books Don’t Tell You
If you look around the world, you can find a universal way of raising helpful, kind children. But you can’t find this method in popular parenting books.
Article
How Inuit Parents Teach Kids To Control Their Anger
Back in the 1960s, a Harvard graduate student made a landmark discovery about the nature of human anger.
Article
Is Sleeping With Your Baby As Dangerous As Doctors Say?
New parents are warned not to sleep on the same surface with their infant. But what are the risks of co-sleeping for a healthy baby?
Listen
Radio
Storytelling Instead Of Scolding: Inuit Say It Makes Their Children More Cool-Headed
In northern Canada, near the Arctic Circle, the Inuit have developed sophisticated tools to teach children how to regulate their anger. NPR’s Michaeleen Doucleff explains how these tools work and what they can teach us.
Radio
Bringing up a baby can be a tough and lonely job. Here’s a solution: alloparents
A squishy, slippery blob that’s incredibly needy – that’s how pretty much every person is born. And we all needed a huge amount of care. In America, much of that responsibility often falls to one person: the mother. But a new study with a group of hunter-gatherers suggests that human moms probably didn’t evolve to take care of babies all on their own. Michaeleen Doucleff has the story.
Radio
How do you get siblings to be nice to each other? These Latino families have an answer
Over the past few decades, psychologists have begun to understand how parents, across many cultures, teach their children to build deep and nurturing relationships with their siblings
Radio
A Lost Secret: How To Get Kids To Pay Attention
Every month, it seems there’s a new study out suggesting that kids are losing their ability to pay attention. We hear a range of possible causes – video games, smartphones, social media. But some scientists think that what some kids are actually losing isn’t attention but motivation. As part of the NPR-wide project How To Raise A Human, NPR’s Michaeleen Doucleff explains the connection and what to do about it.
Now in Paperback
Hunt, Gather, Parent
The oldest cultures in the world have mastered the art of raising helpful and anxiety-free children. What can they teach us?
