“If you could just change one thing in your child’s life, it would be to give them autonomy. Humans spent 200,000 years as hunter-gatherers. That’s where our brains evolved. That’s where we evolved in this context. If you look on lots of different continents, children have enormous amounts of autonomy in these communities, which implies that that’s how the child evolved, right? The child’s brain evolved. … It wasn’t that long ago in Western society that we had autonomy. The evolutionary perspective says that we need it. Then there’s this data that shows that kids that don’t have it are more anxious, more prone to depression. There’s tons of data showing that we need autonomy. Children need autonomy, but I think parents don’t know what it looks like.”
—Michaeleen Doucleff.
