Parents and Children
January 2009
Banner photo: © Frans Lemmens/Getty Images
Advice to Parents
British author Christina Hardyment shows how expert advice on how to bring up babies has changed through the ages, and puts current concerns about raising children into perspective.
Parenting is now a buzzword, and improving it by books, classes and Internet advice is touted as a panacea for all social ills. In the process, perfectly adequate parents are made overanxious, and dealing with the root causes of failing families--poverty, drink and drug addiction and illiteracy--is conveniently shelved. Just how high expectations of parenting are is revealed by this challenge on the website of a commercial parenting coaching class run by a mother who is also a medical practitioner: "If your child never whinges, never argues, never answers back, always does everything that you ask them the first time, has perfect table manners, then lucky you--otherwise try this course." Or, one might add, consider the possibility you'd prefer a robot to a child.
A glance at the past puts muddled modern thinking into perspective. The idea that parents needed advice on bringing up children began, in the West, when the old certainties of religion and an agrarian economy, as well as the Hobbesian vision of the father as the head of the family and the mother as its heart, were challenged in Europe by 18th-century Enlightenment rationalism. At that time doctors thought that "Men of Sense" rather than midwives should instruct mothers. John Locke (1632-1704) saw the infant as a blank slate for experiment rather than a soul to be saved. Very small children were not susceptible to reason and had to be trained "by fear and awe," but as they grew older, "esteem and disgrace" should replace the usual rewards and punishments of sweetmeats and beatings. Beds should be hard, and clothes and shoes thin, to toughen up the child and teach it endurance. Sensible parents took the childless Locke with a pinch of salt. James Nelson, the author of Essay on the Government of Children, remarked dryly that "Among much good sense, Mr. Locke has some notions a little rigorous."
Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), darling of the French and American Revolutions, who famously said that "Man was born free but everywhere he is in chains," looked to Buffon's Histoire Naturelle rather than the Bible to inform his ideas on the noble savage. His Emile: or, On Education created a sensation. Babies too were born in chains. "From birth you are always checking them, your first gifts are fetters, your first treatment torture." He urged mothers to throw away swaddling bands, to breastfeed, and to follow the path traced by Nature: "Experience shows that children delicately nurtured are more likely to die. Accustom them therefore to the hardships they will have to face . . . Dip them in the waters of the Styx."
Mother as Gardener
Emile's romantic appeal to instinct and nature was hugely popular at a time when industry was threatening to engulf the old ways. But unschooled children of nature were ill-suited to the businesslike new world. It was not long before gardening became the preferred metaphor: "as the twig is bent, so the branch is inclined." Mother's word became law as industrial society saw the large-scale exodus of fathers of all classes away from the home and into factories, mills and city offices. She had to absorb the latest medical views once advances in anatomy and clinical observation informed a new science: physiology. It taught that the human body was a divine design, a mechanism ruled by laws. Once understood, they could be followed to ensure perfect development, both physical and mental. Andrew Combe mapped the brain into 35 "powers and organs of the mind," each of which had a potentially "morbid" or "benevolent" tendency which had to be developed or curbed.
Mother was also responsible for her child's soul. Religion made a comeback in Britain. Evangelicalism and the Oxford Movement led to a rediscovery of faith. Its influence in the family was paramount, argued Jacob Abbott's 1871 Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young. Toward the end of the 19th century, the birthrate fell, and a generation of women educated in the new girls' schools began to question whether motherhood was their only future. "Let no mother condemn herself to be a common or ordinary 'cow' unless she has a real desire to nurse," said Marion Harland in her 1885 Common Sense in the Nursery.
A fashionable 18th-century mother gets to grips with Rousseau's naturalist approach to child rearing
[James Gillray]
But by the early 20th century, psychologists and doctors concluded that much could be done to improve a child's chances. "The clay is moist and soft, now make haste and form the pitcher, for the wheels are turning fast," wrote Helen Campbell in her 1910 Practical Motherhood. The possibility of improving "racial health" led governments to take a hand in child-rearing, a response both to the rise in working-class political clout and the poor quality of recruits for their growing armies. As storm clouds descended over Europe, classes in bringing up babies began to be offered to working-class mothers.
Between the wars, austerity made the rigid disciplines advocated by Frederic Truby King for the child's body and J. B. Watson for the child's mind generally popular. Feeding by the clock, not by guesswork, became the rule, and mothers were warned that there were "rocks ahead for the over-kissed child." Play alone stimulated independence: children were to be "self-starters." Such advice was well suited to the disappearance of younger children into education and servants into other jobs. Mothers had more to do, and less time in which to do it.
New Roles for Men
A new age dawned after World War II. Benjamin Spock's 1946 Commonsense Book of Baby and Child Care was as much a clarion call for freedom as Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile. It was also an ideologically attractive counterweight to the spartan disciplines of Russia under Stalin. America, Land of the Free, could indulge its children the more because of a domestic revolution: gas and electric power ran heating appliances, washing machines, fridges, electric cookers and irons, and meant that mothers could once more find time to perfect their children both physically and mentally. In truth, once the contraceptive pill allowed families to be limited easily, they had a lot of time. Educated to expect careers of their own, housewives rebelled. The feminist movement called for careers for women and easily available daycare, and soon childcare advice books had chapters on how to manage nanny and how to juggle between work and home. Fathers, an obvious and hitherto underutilized resource, were declared essential elements in upbringing, and in 1970 a new word was coined: parenting.
Substituting the word parenting for mothering has a cosmetic aspect--mothers still undertake the brunt of the load of childcare. But it has also heralded much more involvement of men with their children, and broadened their brief from the traditional one of discipline. However, men's role is limited by the long working hours of modern business culture and the increased financial burden that falls on them when women give up their jobs to have children. Meanwhile, parenting advice emphasizes the need to promote even tiny children's intelligence (one course is only half-jokingly called Baby Einstein) with constant stimulation, and our current climate of fear delights in scares over chemicals in food, cot deaths, stranger danger and hazardous toys and nursery equipment. A flood of advice of all varieties confuses conscientious parents and is still ignored by less adequate ones. All this at a time when responsibility for children has never been taken more seriously and when they have never had better medical treatment and educational opportunities.
No parent can ever be complacent: it was the philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) who pointed out that children were "hostages to fortune." But we need to put the business of parenthood into perspective. The coming recession may well witness a brisker approach to children's upbringing, with more emphasis on their duties to society and less on their rights as individuals. John Locke could enjoy a new vogue, and a shortage of worldly goods could lead to new emphasis on spiritual ones.
Christina Hardyment is a British author and journalist and mother of four. Her books include Dream Babies: Childcare Advice from John Locke to Gina Ford and Malory: The Life and Times of King Arthur's Chronicler.
