Healthy Skepticism Library item: 1038

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Publication type: news

Cohen P.
Visions and Revisions of Child-Raising Experts
The New York Times 2003 Apr 5
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/05/books/visions-and-revisions-of-child-raising-experts.html?pagewanted=all

Full text:

Parents have never lacked for expert advice. “Kissing the baby after it has
been fed is very likely to cause it to vomit.” “Never let them sit on your
lap.” “Shake hands with them in the morning.” “It’s your problem, not your
child’s.”
Ever since the science of child development was invented in the beginning of
the 20th century, experts have offered parents a goulash of advice on how to
raise the little marvel (or monster), creating as much anxiety and confusion
as they are supposed to assuage. “I try to do just what you say,” one 1920’s
mother complained, “but I am a nervous wreck just trying to be calm.”
Given the proliferation of books about how Americans should raise the baby,
it was inevitable that scholars would eventually turn to the question of why
Americans are so obsessed with raising the baby. In a string of new books,
social and cultural historians are trying to figure out just what it is
about American parents that makes them so anxious – and so eager to turn to
the experts. Their theories differ, but what they do agree on is that
there’s a lot more to child care advice than simply child care.
Views on family values, cultural trends, social developments and economic
conditions have often turned out to be more important than any research.
(The time-consuming child-centered approach wouldn’t have had a chance in
the 1950’s if affluence hadn’t made washing machines and vacuum cleaners
commonplace in middle-class homes). “It wasn’t firm data that drove child
rearing expertise,” Ann Hulbert points out in her forthcoming book, “Raising
America: Experts, Parents and a Century of Advice About Children” (Knopf),
“but chaning social concerns that seemed to dictate its swerves and
emphases.”
The very development of “modern” child rearing practices was prompted by
industrialization’s disorienting shifts. As far back as 1909, Margaret Mead
declared that “so longstanding and so rapid have been these processes of
change that expectation of change and anxiety about change have been built
into our character as a people.”
She continued, “We have become correspondingly more anxious that they” – our
children – “should be perfectly equipped before they go.”
With these unsettling and rapid turns, early reformers declared it was time
for science to take over and produce well-adjusted children who were
prepared for the brave, not to mention complex and unpredictable, new world.
The Progressive Era was fascinated with science and professionalization, and
child-rearing trends, not surprisingly, mirrored those obsessions.
Intellectuals, too, were preoccupied with replacing hoary traditions and
religious practices with rational logic and science. Scientific education
got further impetus after World War I, when army recruits were given I.Q.
tests for the first time, Julia Grant writes in “Raising Baby by the Book”
(Yale University Press, 1998). Half were graded at below-normal
intelligence, causing an uproar that America was raising half-wits and
incompetents.
The creation of the child development field also proved a socially
acceptable path for the increasing numbers of women who were earning college
degrees. “Educators defined motherhood as valuable work requiring extensive
knowledge and training,” writes Ms. Grant, an associate professor at James
Madison College at Michigan State University. Meanwhile, she continues, “the
notion that the proper practice of motherhood demanded esoteric knowledge
allowed women to reconcile their intellectual interests with their everyday
lives in the home.”
Anxiety over women’s roles was not the only impetus for standardizing
child-rearing practices. So were racial fears. Child-rearing advice became
part of a larger project of Americanization, a way to assimilate immigrants
and African-Americans more quickly, Ms. Grant argues.
Soon bringing up baby was seen as too important to be left to amateurs. “It
is beyond the capacity of the individual parent to train her child to fit
into the intricate, interwoven and interdependent social and economic system
we have developed,” Ray Lyman Wilbur, the president of Stamford University,
told a White House conference on children in 1930.