Why reclaiming connection is the solution to the world's challenges. A Happy Hour Conversation with Darcia Narvaez

This week's show is with Darcia Narvaez, Professor of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame. Darcia publishes extensively on moral development and education. Author or editor of 13 books, her most recent authored books include Embodied Morality: Protectionism, Engagement and Imagination, and Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom, which won the William James Book Award from the American Psychological Association.  She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Educational Research Association. She is executive editor of the Journal of Moral Education. She also writes a popular blog for Psychology Today (“Moral Landscapes”).

Her academic scholarship has moved from work on nonconscious moral rationality, to moral character education in the schools, to the neurobiology of moral development, to the study of evolved parenting practices, and the study of small-band hunter-gatherers who represent the type of society in which humans evolved.

All this comes together in a moral developmental systems theory that emphasizes the ongoing epigenetic plasticity of how we develop our humanity and our morality. We are co-constructed by our families and our experiences. Ultimately, Darcia's concerns are for developmental optimization and fulfilling human potential—actionable communal imagination.

In this show we spoke about how a sense of  connection is so vital to humans ability to thrive (so much so that 'Tribe' is one of our 7 Primal Fundamentals in our Primal State Formula). What's morality and cooperation like in our ancestral, indigenous setting? What can we do to reconnect in this crazy modern world?

Darcia takes us through the experience of children who are raised in line with ancestral indigenous ways, what this looks and feels like, and what kind of adult that results in. We then got into the consequences when children aren't raised in this way (ie the norm for most of us being raised in a typically Western way). And lastly, what we can do to change things for the better - how we can become more connected.

What you'll learn from this episode:

• When we're raised in an 'evolved nest' (which is typical of our ancestral, indigenous way of parenting) then we grow with a sense of deep connectedness to everything (literally everything!)

• To move away from this disconnected and egoic way that most of us are living we need to change how we're raising babies and children - we need to make them our true priority.

• Follow your instincts... that you're connected to everything, play more, be silly, use your imagination to have empathy for others. That way we can create a better world for us all.