Baby Steps
Has a century of child-rearing advice taught us anything?
Type "parenting" into the search engine at amazon.com, and you'll get 23,461 entries, books with titles like Parenting With Love and Logic, Parenting With Dignity, and Worried All the Time that promise parents that there is a right way to raise children. Yet so many so-called experts bombard parents with so many right ways it's a testament to parental patience that more parental heads don't spontaneously combust from the parental pressure.
While this frenzy of anxiety and advice has all the markings of a baby-boomer phenomenon, it's over a century old. "The incompetency, the ignorance of parents" was condemned at a conference of the National Congress of Mothers back in 1899. The well-to-do mother of that era turned to such bibles as The Care and Feeding of Children by pediatrician L. Emmett Holt and the two-volume adolescence by G. Stanley Hall. But by the 1920s, one mother was so overwhelmed with child-care instruction that she confessed, "I try to do just what you say, but I am a nervous wreck just trying to be calm." Indeed, the "century introduced a vision of children and of child rearing that entailed a new kind of vigilance," says Ann Hulbert, author of the new book Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children. It also introduced the idea that a good parent is, by definition, an anxious one.
American parents hadn't used to rely heavily on experts, but much in the 20th century was so new that old standbys--grandmothers and religion--seemed to have lost relevance. With more than half of Americans living in cities in 1920 (up from a third in 1890), adults led very different lives from their own parents'. And they were enamored of the idea that science could improve child rearing as it had improved everything else. "It is childhood's teachableness that has enabled man to overcome heredity with history," declared one turn-of-the-century expert.
Women's status was changing, too. The move away from farms freed women from a lot of household labor--and from having to give birth to enough farmhands to keep the crops going. Women were even heading off to college, but since motherhood was still regarded as the only true feminine vocation, experts worried about how to make it palatable to these educated women. The answer, supplied by pioneers in the new fields of pediatrics and psychology, was to professionalize motherhood. Under the guidance of Holt and Hall, and later John Watson and Arnold Gesell, mothers were to put aside instinct and become scientific examiners of their children's behavior. (Fathers, it should be noted, were barely mentioned.) Holt required women to learn the latest research on nutritional matters and adhere to strict feeding schedules, while Hall deputized mothers as his research assistants by issuing lengthy questionnaires on everything from "doll passion" to religious experiences. Gesell issued color-coded charts for tracking urination, playtime, feeding, and weight; anthropologist Margaret Mead's mother (a devout Holtian) filled 13 volumes on little Margaret's development.
According to Hulbert, the experts--from Holt and Hall through Watson and Gesell, Benjamin Spock and Bruno Bettelheim, T. Berry Brazelton and Gary Ezzo--were either "hard" or "soft." The hard expert, she writes, was "a stern father figure of the Lockean nurture-is-what-counts school," the soft a "gentler Rousseauian proponent of letting nature take its course." While Watson advised that hugging and kissing would create weak children, Gesell invented the "it's-just-a-stage" excuse for bad behavior.
No proof. Despite the great claims made for it, however, little of the advice could be proved effective. Some was based on shoddy science: Although Watson said his conclusions on the infinite malleability of infant personalities were based on experiments with thousands of babies, he only ever reported on his work with two, and that in scientifically sketchy detail. By midcentury, an anthropologist reviewing claims for the softer approach found much of the research "meager, indeterminate, conflicting, uncontrolled, [and] misrepresented." And Spock, who urged parents to ignore the experts, admitted that "it really all came out of my head." Yet the experts weren't exactly frauds, either. "Each of the experts do have something to say that is clearly wise and right," says Hulbert. "What doesn't generally hold together is the totality of . . . their vision."
So has modern science made parenting advice any better at the beginning of a new century? Not necessarily. "Children resist easy analysis," writes Hulbert, and questions about nature vs. nurture still aren't resolved. Certainly more is known now about how children develop, but just because scientists understand, say, the growth of baby brain synapses does not automatically mean that playing Mozart for your toddler is going to boost brain power.
So the advice ends up sounding surprisingly similar to that of, well, 1899. The books may be flashier, the titles more apocalyptic, but experts still debate how structured children's lives should be, how much of women's lives should be devoted to them (yup, it's still up to the mothers), and what the best methods are for getting a baby to sleep through the night. Ezzo has brought back the infant feeding schedules that Holt was so fond of, while Stanley Greenspan has "functional developmental growth charts" that would make Gesell proud. And a wave of conservative experts are turning their backs on science and embracing what turn-of-the-last-century mothers rejected: the Bible and common sense from Grandma.
Maybe Dr. Spock was right after all. "Trust yourself," he wrote. "You know more than you think you do." Just cross your fingers that your child's resilient nature compensates for the blows to his nurture inflicted by too many parental hours at the office and not enough baby brain games at home. "Certainly all a mother and father can claim credit for," said Margaret Mead, whose hard Holtian childhood inspired her to turn to the softer Spock when she had a daughter of her own, "is that they have not marred a child in any recognizable way."
What they said
G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924): Up to 7, a child can be a "healthy little savage"; from 8 to 12 should be "the age of drill . . . sacred to habituation, to discipline, training, [and] obedience"; and adolescence is the "new birth, when higher and more completely human traits are now born."
L. Emmett Holt (1855-1924): Toilet training is "easily [done] by the third month," crying is "necessary for health," and as for playing: "never until 4 months, and better not until 6 months."
John Broadus Watson (1878-1958): "Never hug and kiss [children]. Never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night."
Arnold Gesell (1880-1961): Mothers should make "the baby (with all his inborn wisdom) a working partner" by examining "the total behavior day of the baby as it records itself on the daily chart."
Benjamin Spock (1903-1998): "Leave bowel training almost entirely up to your baby. A child will completely train himself sooner or later if no struggle has taken place."
Bruno Bettelheim (1903-1990): "The good family isn't one in which problems don't occur, but one in which the members work together to solve problems as they happen." -R.H.S. -Rachel Hartigan Shea
This story appears in the May 19, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.