|
COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
"Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do."That is how Dr. Benjamin Spock opened his famous child-care manual of 1946, and according to Ann Hulbert's new book, "Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children"(Knopf; $27.50), such reassurance was badly needed. As Hulbert explains, the idea that the development of children might be a subject in itself, something for people to study and write books about, was largely a twentieth-century invention. Before then, parents in the United States, like parents elsewhere, saw their offspring as people who were either going to take over the farm or marry somebody on the farm next door. The wisdom of the race, as dispensed by preachers and grandmothers, would suffice to guide them to that destination. Soon after the Civil War, however, American families were yanked into modern times. The meritocratic promise made by the Founding Fathers came true: if Abraham Lincoln could become President, why not Junior? With social mobility came geographic mobility. People moved to the cities, where they no longer had grandmothers to tell them how to raise the kids. Add to this a few other trends--a falling birth rate, a rising percentage of women going to college, the transfer of faith from religion to science--and people started looking at their children differently. These small beings, who did not know how to speak or use cutlery: could it be that inside their breasts forces were percolating that would decide their fate independently of their families' plans? Worse yet, was it the case that, to influence that process, one needed to bring them up in a special way? Such questions, Hulbert says, gave middle-class parents a daily heart attack. To minister to them, there arose a school of experts, but the experts dispensed conflicting advice. That is Hulbert's story. On the surface, her book is a history of twentieth-century child-rearing manuals. Underneath, it is a history of twentieth-century parental anxiety.
Hulbert has a tidy mind. She divides her book into four parts, one per quarter century. At the beginning of each part, she describes a child-development conference that obligingly took place at the beginning of that quarter, and which announced the central child-rearing problem of the moment. Then, in each quarter, she locates a "hard,” "parent-centered"theorist (an advocate of discipline, character-building) and a "soft,” "child-centered"theorist (a proponent of flexibility, understanding), and lays out the precepts by which they aimed to reassure American parents and ultimately confused them all over again.
In 1900-25, the preeminent hard-liner was Luther Emmett Holt, the president of the American Pediatric Society, the director of Babies' Hospital in New York, a pediatrician to the Rockefellers, and the author of "The Care and Feeding of Children"(1894). Holt seems to have introduced, or at least codified, the sort of by-the-book regimen that liberal baby-care types have been banging their heads against ever since. He believed in strict schedules, for both feeding and sleeping. He said that toilet training could be achieved by the age of three months, "if begun early."He warned mothers against cuddling or playing with their babies; this overstimulated them and gave them germs. (Even a crying baby, Holt said, should not be picked up. Crying was necessary for health: "It is the baby's exercise.”) Most important was hygienic...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
