KIN

CHILDHOOD, PARENTING, AND THE MAKING OF CIVILIZATION

by Nam Nguyen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2026

Nguyen presents a sweeping history of human childhood and close kinship through the millennia.

In his latest book, the author of Raising Genius: Mozart, Einstein, Jobs: The Price of Brilliance (2025) draws on his background in psychology, neuroscience, and business strategy to lay out the ever-evolving story of how humans have raised their children over the centuries. “To raise a child is always to wager on tomorrow,” writes, “but in our age, the stakes extend beyond families or nations—to the survival of humanity itself.” This allusion to the uncertain state of childrearing in the modern era threads through the whole book, sharpened by the author’s central contention that the 19th century represented a watershed era in changing attitudes: a time when at least an attempt at systematic humanitarian regulations was in place throughout the Western world. On one side of that moment was “exhaustion, injury, and death,” with countless children scarred, deformed, and outright killed in mines and factories; but the period also saw legally mandated basic education, child labor laws, and punishments for abuses. “Without suffering,” Nguyen writes, “innocence might never have been defended.” Nguyen spends a fair amount of time detailing the infamous era of premodern child factory work; even as Enlightenment-era philosophers were describing the innocence and potential of childhood, “industrial capitalism was preparing to use children in a very different way: not as citizens of the future, but as labor for the present.” Consulting sources in anthropology, archeology, and more, Nguyen traces the story of kin-rearing down to the present day.

Nguyen’s study of this sprawling subject is surprisingly nuanced considering that his book has fewer than 350 pages (there’s a generous endnotes section). His story spans from Neolithic times to the present day, touching on various eras in order to illustrate the dualities that have always characterized motherhood, to pick one example: “Across continents, the maternal archetype embodies both the promise of survival and the threat of loss,” he writes in a typical passage. Inevitably, the amount of compression and summary his format imposes occasionally leads the author into facile reductions or inaccuracies. (“Marriage also reshaped emotions,” goes one such passage. “Love did not vanish, but it was constrained by contract.”) But the book’s most fascinating element is Nguyen’s theories about the nature of the present, when millions of children face starvation while still others seem to spend as much time on tablet screens as they do with their parents. Throughout, he refers back to the powerful communal element that’s crucial to healthy childrearing: “Evolution did not leave parenting to instinct alone,” he writes. “It rewrote our chemistry so that nurturing others became pleasurable, even addictive.” Likewise intriguing is his linkage of parenting with religion, noting that “before humans saw gods in the heavens, they saw parents in their shelters…the gods we made were the parents we already knew.” The book is a formidable combination of informed historical consideration and deeper connections between eras and social theories.

A wide-ranging and thought-provoking study of childrearing throughout human history.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2026

ISBN: 9781069754646

Page Count: 408

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2026

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

HISTORY | PSYCHOLOGY | GENERAL NONFICTION