I almost titled this one “The first parenting advice was given by old white men”, but that’s not quite true. While most early written advice was given by old white men - who rarely were involved in the actual day-to-day work of parenting - the earliest verbal parenting advice was passed down through the generations, from mother to mother, father to father, aunt to niece, neighbour to friend. Some of the advice was good. Some of it was questionable by today’s knowledge and standards, but not particularly harmful, such as the idea that if a mother looked at or thought about ugly things during her pregnancy she risked passing on unsightly birthmarks or deformations to her baby. And there was yet more advice that we now know is downright harmful, like offering a child a teaspoon of kerosene to treat croup.
Whatever the advice new parents received, they mostly got by without turning to professionals for help. Indeed, for a long time, the idea of some ‘expert’ telling you how to raise your child was laughable.
Firstly, you were too busy trying to keep your child alive to give any serious thought to how they would turn out. Why stress about whether your parenting choices would impact their mental health or chances of success as an adult, when you couldn’t even guarantee that they would make it to adulthood! For example, in 1900 Australia, infants under the age of one died at a rate of 103 deaths per 1,000 live births, compared to just 5 deaths per 1,000 live births in the year 2000. Across most of human history and around the world, only 50% of children made it to adulthood. In Australia now, more than 99% of children make it to adulthood.
Secondly, you were too busy running your home to give much time and attention to your children. Andrew Bomback, author of Long days, Short Years: A Cultural History of Modern Parenting, says that a 1970s housewife spent the same amount of time with her children as a modern mother who works outside of the home now. And by the 1970s many modern appliances were already invented – imagine how little time a mother in the 1800s had to spend with her children after washing all the clothes and dishes by hand, killing and plucking the chicken for dinner, and tending to all the other chores required to keep the homestead running.
Thirdly, it was likely that you lived either with or very close to extended family. Not only did that mean you had easy access to a trusted source of advice if needed, but it also meant that you weren’t learning how to look after a baby for the first time when you had your own. As a result of the years of experience looking after younger siblings or cousins, very little was a surprise by the time it came to raising your own children.
But then, around the mid-1800s, something changed. A seismic shift that saw the emergence of the parenting expert.
In part, it had to do with growing industrialisation and urbanisation. Many families were leaving their farms and moving to the big cities to work in factories. A consequence was that many people were also moving away from established family supports and structures, and moving to areas with reduced interactions between neighbours.
At the same time as growing urbanisation, a shift occurred in the medical profession, whereby schools of medicine were organised, and laws were passed regulating who could practice medicine. In general, this was of benefit to patients and improved health outcomes, as it kept unqualified people from practicing medicine and improved knowledge of health practitioners. However, there were also economic factors in play. For example, physicians sought out the lucrative business of caring for pregnant women, taking over from the midwives who had been the primary carers during pregnancy and birth for centuries. Hospitals also recognised that a low-intervention, natural childbirth is not as financially profitable as one with interventions, so hospitals soon started to derive additional income from providing services such as anaesthesia, labour inductions, and caesarean sections.
These factors combined resulted in a plummeting rate of home births. Where almost all births occurred at home with a midwife in attendance in the early 1900s, only 0.4% of Australian births in 2020 occurred at home. In fact, it’s now more likely that a mother would accidentally have her baby before arriving at the hospital than it is to have a planned home birth.
As birth was medicalised, the trust placed in a mother’s instincts vanished. At the hospital, new mothers were provided with instructional pamphlets, detailing how to wash, feed, and otherwise care for a baby (much like the brief instruction provided in antenatal classes offered through hospitals now). Doctors and hospitals had realised that if a positive relationship was established, it would influence where a woman would seek advice from for her and her family for a lifetime. Instead of turning to a mother or local midwife for advice, new mothers started to listen to doctors, whose influence began to extend beyond merely offering medical advice and had started creeping towards offering moral advice on how to raise children.
The first real parenting ‘expert’ could probably be considered Dr L. Emmett Holt, who became the head physician at New York's Babies Hospital in 1888. Dr Holt can undoubtedly be credited with significantly reducing the infant mortality rate through his research into milk quality, which found that many infants were dying due to high bacterial counts in cows milk. This is reflected in his book - The Care and Feeding of Children: A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children's Nurses, of which over a quarter was devoted to feeding infants (with a heavy focus on bottle feeding and safe preparation of milk).
Holt covered everything about caring for infants, from bathing infants in a warm room, to a timeline of developmental milestones, to training young infants to empty their bowels at specific times each day. On the whole, the book was well founded on the medical knowledge they had at the time. However, there were also ideas that seem harsh by today’s standards. For instance, he advised that "Babies under six months should never be played with: and the less of it at anytime the better for the infant. They are made nervous and irritable, sleep badly and suffer from indigestion". He also said that “infants should be kissed, if at all, upon the cheek or forehead, but the less even of this the better.”
A few decades later, but in the same vein, came Sir Frederick Truby King of New Zealand. He also advocated that babies should be put on strict schedules from an early age – that babies should be fed by the clock every four hours, and that any cries for food earlier should be ignored. He also imposed a 10-minute daily cap on cuddles. It should be noted that most of his advice was very useful, in fact the work of the Plunket Society (which he founded) has been credited with halving the infant mortality rate in New Zealand over a period of 30 years.
Today, the advice of Holt and King seems incredibly cold and harsh. Yet with the high rates of child mortality around the world at the time, the advice to minimise physical contact did serve to reduce the spread of communicable diseases. It was wise guidance for its time.
Following Holt and King came one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century - John B. Watson. He promoted the same emphasis on regimented schedules, being distant from your child, and limiting affection. However, the concern now was not to avoid the spread of diphtheria and measles, but to avoid the negative impacts that “coddling” would have on a child’s psychological wellbeing. In his 1928 book, Psychological Care of the Infant and Child, which sold over 100 000 copies in its first few years, Watson wrote “When you are tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument”. Watson warned parents to never hug or kiss their children, but allowed a handshake in the morning. John B. Watson was the founder of Behaviourism, a school of Psychology based on the idea that all behaviour is conditioned through interactions with the environment. As such, it promoted the idea that parenting is a ‘job’, and parents should set strict schedules and create a controlled environment so as to shape the child into a healthy adult, with no regard to the child’s own personality, emotions, or preferences. Watson’s work was highly influential, and remnants of behaviourist principles are readily observable today – in ideas such as sticker sheets to reward good behaviour, and time outs and withdrawal of love to punish bad behaviour. However, Watson’s own personal life highlights the negative impact behaviourist principles have on mental health and emotional wellbeing – three of his four children attempted suicide.
Fortunately, in the 1940s there was a shift again, with the development of the school of humanism. Notable champions of humanism were Arnold Gesell and Frances Ilg - who advised mothers “Don’t watch the clock, watch the child” – and Dr Benjamin Spock, whose bestselling book, Baby and Child Care, encouraged a greater degree of flexibility and following of intuition, as well as encouraging parents to show affection to their children. Initially, these ideas were considered alternative to the mainstream methods of routines and withdrawn affection, but over time the school of humanism resulted in major change in standard child-rearing practices.
Through the 1960s, the sands of parenting advice continued to shift. Physicians such as Dr Walter Sackett advocated for the early introduction of solids and warned that breast milk was deficient. He suggested that babies should start on cereal at just 2 days old, and would be ready for bacon and eggs by 9 weeks! Unsurprisingly, his advice coincided with a huge boom in the baby food industry.
We see that in the span of a century, parents turned away from seeking advice from local sources and turned towards health professionals. At the same time, these health professionals and psychologists were frequently offering contradictory advice, with each decade offering a new expert in vogue. Infant feeding recommendations changed from spaced feeding to demand feeding, the introduction of solids was recommended at 12 months, then decreased to less than one month before increasing again. Ideas about infant sleep were frequently updated, and the offering of affection shifted from being morally repugnant to a necessity for healthy emotional development.
In a study of the professional advice to mothers in the 20th century, V. Sue Atkinson wrote
“The advice provided was informed as much by the experts’ own image of what American families should look like as it was by any scientific findings…
The experts changed their ideas, guided not by new professional knowledge about babies, but by the social and cultural environment in which they lived and wrote.”
Pause.
I’ve shared a hundred years of history in a few thousand words. Before I keep going, let me summarise the overall themes I’m trying to highlight.
1. Before parenting books, people mostly got by through receiving advice through their social and family networks. Not all of the advice was good, but the advice was catered for the times in which they were living, and mostly served them well.
2. The first parenting books were predominantly written by doctors and psychologists who were extending their thoughts out of their areas of expertise. While some of what they said has been incredibly valuable, and their advice dramatically reduced the infant mortality rate, some of it just doesn’t apply to us today. For example, the advice not to cuddle and kiss your baby was great when communicable diseases were rampant, but we now have vaccinations and antibiotics to protect us from the effects of these diseases.
3. Most of what was first written reflects societal values more than the actual scientific research of the time. Hence the frequent flip flopping of advice.
Now, back to the original title of the article. Most parenting advice was first written by old white men, who really had no business offering the advice that they did. The reason why that matters decades after they gave their advice is that a lot of it has permeated into our modern culture today. Even with an abundance of modern research, we still have ideas about how you spoil a baby by cuddling them too much (not true, see here). We still feel the need to space out feeds (despite official policies from UNICEF and the WHO pushing for responsive breastfeeding practices). And we still feel like the hospital is the best place to birth our babies (not true again, see here).
The good news is that our modern evidence-based advice is slowly combating the myths that arose throughout the 20th century. Furthermore, where a lot of the original advice was based on the authors’ own limited experiences with a small handful of children, scientific consensus is now achieved through comprehensive, peer-reviewed studies with large sample sizes. Resultingly, official advice doesn’t see-saw as dramatically as it once did.
We also have more varied knowledge than ever before. Where the bulk of advice was once centred solely around feeding, sleeping, and hygiene, we now have best practice guidelines around which toys best support independent play, the amount of time children need to engage in various levels of physical activity, and what limits should be set on a child’s screentime. Indeed, since the 1960s* there has been an exponential increase in the amount of research on parenting. The following graph shows the number of articles published in each 5 year period.
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*It should be noted that there were journal articles prior to the 1960s about how to parent. But parenting wasn’t commonly used in the verb form prior to this time. You could be a parent, but the idea of ‘parenting’ as a job that you did wasn’t something that was really considered.
While having a vast knowledge bank to draw on can be a great thing for parents, it also brings with it the pressure to do things perfectly. After all, we have more understanding of child development than ever before. But with close to 3000 academic articles published every year on parenting, not to mention the dozens of parenting summits, hundreds of books, thousands of podcasts, and tens of thousands of other articles on the topic, how can you possibly sort through all the information and be the best possible parent you can be?
You can’t!
Unless you can somehow devote the equivalent of a full-time job to reading and listening to all this information. Yet you probably don’t need to, because even with this explosion of research into parenting, we still don’t have all the answers. And we never will. While I love science, here’s three reasons why science will never give us the recipe for perfect parenting:
1. Science is slow to conduct. From grant proposal, to gathering participants, to analysing the data, to writing the article, to making it through peer review, the whole scientific process takes at least 3 years. Yet the best we can hope for with these ‘quick’ studies is correlation (saying two things are associated with each other). To measure causation (where one thing predicts or causes another), we need to conduct longitudinal studies, which take even longer! This means it is impossible for the research to keep pace with our rapidly changing society.
2. Science is often slow to translate to the mainstream. For example, the general consensus on spanking for the last 20 years is that it is a poor way to discipline children. While it does have an effect on immediate compliance, it comes at the cost of increased aggression and antisocial behaviour as a child, decreases the quality of the parent-child relationship, and increases the risk of poor mental health and criminal activity as an adult. Yet approximately 61% of young people experienced corporal punishment as a child, and it remains legal in Australia.
3. Furthermore, the type of science that would allow us to really disentangle the effects of certain factors is highly unethical. For instance, planning an experiment to find out just how much a child can be left to cry each day without developing long term negative effects would never make it through an ethics committee nowadays.
4. Lastly, there are too many confounding variables that can’t be controlled. It’s just not possible to hold everything constant while manipulating a single factor when it comes to the messy reality of raising children in real life. As a result, we will never get a solid answer about whether being fed versus being rocked to sleep is preferable in terms of outcomes as an adult.
So most modern parenting research backed advice, while theoretically supported, is really just a best guess. It’s also influenced by what gets funded, what questions we ask, and how we interpret the data. While we might think we have the answer, tomorrow’s research is likely to have us acknowledging that what we thought was good advice today was again a function of the values of today’s society.
We’re almost at the end now. Here’s what I want you to remember and take away from all this information:
- By the standards of most of human history, you’re doing amazingly well. Your children are more likely than ever to make it to adulthood. And they're likely to make it there free of physical and economic burdens that would constrain their life choices. While that brings with it the pressure to ensure that they turn out well, we shouldn’t put all the pressure on ourselves. We don’t judge individual parents of the 1800s for sending their children down coal mines to work. Instead, we acknowledge that the way they treated their children was a product of their time. We need to remember that it’s the same now. In 50 years we may look back in hindsight and see ways that we could have done better, but right now we’re doing the best we can with the information we have available.
- Parents now do a lot more of the hands on work of looking after their children then ever before. ‘Parenting’ has been elevated from being a descriptive position of your place in the family, to a verb describing your job. With this increased focus on parenting has come a major shift in our identities, and increased pressure to live out that part of our identities well. Parenting is part of our identity, but it shouldn’t be our whole identity.
- Even if you did manage to read every bit of parenting advice out there, you still wouldn’t be acting on anything other than science’s best guess.
So relax. Stay informed, but don’t stress about following anyone’s advice precisely. And remember, no one is more of an expert on your child than you are.
Beck xx