Exploring Childhood Rearing, Moral Development, and Nature's Influence

My guest today is Darcia Narvaez. Darcia is Professor Emerita of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame. Born in Minnesota, U.S., she grew up living around the world as a bilingual/bicultural Puerto Rican-German American but calls Earth her home. Her earlier careers include professional musician, business owner, music teacher, Spanish teacher, and seminarian, among other endeavors. Darcia uses an interdisciplinary approach to studying evolved morality, child development, and human flourishing.

Her most recent books include Restoring the Kinship Worldview, and The Evolved Nest: Nature’s Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities both of which I’ve read and highly recommend.

Darcia explores how compassionate morality in humans unfolds and what we can do to nurture it. In our conversation, we talk about how early life experiences are SO critical because they shape and mold our personality, our desires and values, and our capacities. Darcia says when you undermine early experience, you’re setting up the brain to be a dominator brain because you don't develop all the social skills that naturally emerge from an immersed and nested experience early in life. 

Darcia and I talk about how we’re living in ways that are very disconnected from the Earth and that the disconnection starts at birth.

We actually evolved for cooperative child raising with kin AND non kin (meaning animals, plants and other living matter) all actively participating in raising our children, not just one or two parents as is the case in many industrialized nations.

And if you think about it, there’s no society unless you’re taking care of mothers and children. Imagine if we created a society around caring for mothers and children? What might that world look like? How might we act today to support the emergence of that world?

Each one of us has a gift to give the world and in this episode, Darcia and I invite you to consider what your unique gift might be and how you might share it with the world.

I think this episode will resonate particularly if you’re a parent who feels like you’re struggling day to day, just trying to survive. Human history tells us we’ve actually evolved to live a very different way than the way many of us who are caught in the web of modernity are living.

I invite you to listen to this episode with an open mind and an open heart.

Watch the video episode on YouTube 

Darcia Narvaez’s Links & Resources:

EvolvedNest.org & KindredWorld.org

Restoring the Kinship Worldview, Darcia Narvaez & Four Arrows

The Evolved Nest: Nature’s Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities, Darcia Narvaez & G.A. Bradshaw

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