Michaeleen Doucleff, PhD is a science reporter, who covers cross-cultural parenting, psychology and neuroscience. She’s constantly on the search for easy, fun and overlooked solutions to our toughest parenting problems.
Her second book, Dopamine Kids, tackles screens and ultraprocessed food. It comes out in March 2026.
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.
Want to raise helpful, confident kids?
Sign up for Michaeleen's newsletter and have tips, tools and fresh insights delivered straight to your inbox.*
