Featured Interview With Nam Nguyen
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I’m Nam Nguyen, a Canadian author, born and raised in Montreal, strategic advisor, and board director writing at the intersection of childhood, parenting, leadership, institutions, and civilization.
My background combines psychology, neuroscience, business strategy, governance, and fatherhood. Professionally, I have worked on questions of risk, performance, leadership, and institutional decision-making, while my writing explores a more personal but equally important question: how do families and societies shape the next generation?
Over time, I became increasingly interested in the idea that parenting is not only a private family responsibility. It is also one of the ways societies reproduce their values, fears, ambitions, and hopes for the future. That idea became central to my latest book, *KIN: Childhood, Parenting, and the Making of Civilization*.
*KIN* is not a parenting manual. It does not offer quick tips or simple formulas. It is a sweeping nonfiction book about childhood as one of the hidden forces in human history — from the first human families to empires, schools, factories, screens, artificial intelligence, and the future of civilization.
At its heart, the book asks a question I believe is urgent today: What kind of people are we raising — and what kind of world is raising them?
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
My desire to share knowledge has been there for a long time. Earlier in my career, I had the opportunity to teach at the university level, and that experience stayed with me. I enjoyed taking complex ideas and making them accessible, practical, and meaningful for others.
But I started writing more seriously after the birth of my first child. Becoming a father changed the way I looked at knowledge. Questions that had once felt intellectual suddenly became deeply personal: How do we shape a child? What kind of world are we preparing them for? What do families, institutions, and societies pass on from one generation to the next?
That turning point gave rise to my first book, *Raising Future Leaders*, which explored how parents can help children develop confidence, character, resilience, and leadership from an early age.
Since then, my writing has continued to expand from parenting into broader questions about human development, leadership, institutions, and civilization.
In many ways, *KIN* grew from that same path. It began with fatherhood, but gradually became a much larger question: how has childhood shaped the story of civilization itself?
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I tend to read across several genres, but I am especially drawn to big-idea nonfiction — books that connect history, psychology, anthropology, culture, and the future of society.
Writers such as Yuval Noah Harari and Jared Diamond have influenced the way I think about broad historical patterns and the forces that shape civilizations. I also admire authors such as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Philippe Ariès, Neil Postman, Jonathan Haidt, and Steven Pinker for the way they examine human development, childhood, culture, technology, and society from different angles.
What inspires me most is writing that helps readers see a familiar subject differently. That is also what I tried to do with *KIN*: to take something as intimate as childhood and parenting, and show that it is also connected to the larger story of civilization.
At the same time, I also enjoy classic mysteries, especially Agatha Christie. I admire the precision of her storytelling — the structure, the clues, the restraint, and the way every detail eventually matters. Even though mystery fiction is very different from nonfiction, there is something inspiring in that level of discipline and narrative control.
So my reading life moves between two worlds: serious nonfiction that helps me understand humanity on a larger scale, and fiction that reminds me of the power of structure, curiosity, and suspense.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
My latest book, *KIN: Childhood, Parenting, and the Making of Civilization*, is probably the most ambitious book I have written so far.
It looks at childhood not as a sentimental subject, but as one of the great organizing forces of human history. Every era has had to answer the same basic question: how do we prepare the young to survive, belong, obey, imagine, work, believe, lead, and eventually inherit the world?
That question takes the book across a wide landscape — early human cooperation, kinship, ancient households, empires, religion, schools, factories, nationalism, consumer culture, digital life, artificial intelligence, and the future of childhood. I wanted the reader to feel that the story of children is not separate from the story of civilization. It runs underneath it.
What makes the subject fascinating to me is that childhood is both ordinary and enormous. Everyone has been a child. Many people become parents, teachers, mentors, or caregivers. Yet we rarely stop to ask what a society is really doing when it forms its next generation. A civilization does not only build monuments, laws, markets, and machines. It also builds expectations inside children.
*KIN* is written for readers who enjoy big nonfiction questions — the kind of books that make you step back and reconsider something familiar. I hope it speaks to parents, educators, leaders, and anyone interested in history, culture, technology, and the future.
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