Selling advice to the hands that rock the cradle

Despite what one might wish to suppose, the experience of raising children only rarely proves to be a wellspring of communicable wisdom. What most parents secretly know is that the only advice that they can offer a new mother or father is to avoid those manuals that traffic in advice. More often than not, these well-meaning books provide instruction on how to produce the happy baby and the compliant toddler -- thus magnifying the anxiety of parents whose child refuses to follow the prescribed developmental stages. Yet parents continue to buy these books, perhaps because it has come to seem unimaginable that raising a child is something an ordinary human being can do, relying upon instinct, love and common sense without the admonitions of a certified child-rearing expert.

“Raising America,” Ann Hulbert’s lucidly written and thought-provoking new book, suggests why. By tracking the steps by which, over the last century, unassisted and improvisational parenthood became an almost impossibly daunting challenge that drove many Americans to seek help, she shows how imprecise this science actually is. “The expert emerged as the missing link: the modern parent’s modern parent. He would do more than discover a new model of childhood. He would himself serve as the new model of parenthood for mothers who, like the children they were in charge of, were demanding and receiving more social status than ever before.”

Each section of the book begins with an account of a public and widely publicized conference (in 1899, 1925, 1950 and 1980) where parents, pediatricians, psychologists, educators and other soi-disant experts exchange the latest research and newest theories on parental responsibility, on the nature of children and childhood and on the ways in which the young should be treated in order to maximize the chances of producing a healthy, happy, high-functioning, successfully socialized adult.

So Hulbert takes us first to the National Congress of Mothers, which was held in Washington, D.C., and at which the predominantly female conferees were addressed by a series of male authorities on the subject of motherhood. The two most prominent speakers, Dr. Luther Emmett Holt and Dr. G. Stanley Hall, offered two widely divergent sets of answers to the bothersome question of how much the child should be regimented or indulged, disciplined or cosseted. Interestingly, the distinction -- between the “soft” and “hard” approaches to every stage of child care and development from breast-feeding to toilet training to coping with adolescent rebellion -- would turn out to be the essential split that, for the remainder of the century and into our own era, would divide the armies of experts into two opposing camps.

Beginning with the first edition of his popular manual “The Care and Feeding of Children,” Holt in the 1890s advised a strict adherence to schedules that governed feeding and sleeping, crying and playing. He advised regulating the exact fat content of the milk a baby drank and the extent to which the advice of grandmothers must be avoided. Of course, most parents will marvel at the loony optimism of Holt’s belief that an infant can be toilet-trained at 3 months old and will quail at the unintentional sadism of his views on infant nutrition. Children, he wrote, should dine “at an early hour on mashed, strained, boiled foods, nothing fresh ... nothing colorful, nothing flavorful -- again, nothing ‘unduly stimulating or exciting’ for the child in a distracting world.”

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Hall focused on adolescence, which, he argued, should be a time of experimentation and freedom. “Immoderation, irregularity, irresponsibility: that was the Hallian mantra for youth during adolescence, which he called the ‘infancy of man’s higher nature, when he receives from the great-all mother his last capital of energy and evolutionary momentum.’ ” In addition, Hall advocated sex education and a liberal approach to masturbation and emphasized the importance of helping young women appreciate the true glories of menstruation.

Hulbert makes a convincing case for the observation that the Holt-Hall debate has been revived, with variations, in each succeeding generation. By the late 1920s, John B. Watson, the notably harsh but popular behavioral psychologist, combined rigorous views on child care with a dire estimation of the dangers of maternal affection. “Mother love is a dangerous instrument. An instrument which may inflict a never healing wound ... which may make infancy unhappy, adolescence a nightmare, an instrument which may wreck your adult son or daughter’s vocational future and their chances for marital happiness.” Parents were advised to “never hug or kiss [their children]. Never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when you say goodnight.”

Meanwhile, Watson’s contemporary, Arnold Gesell, advocated exhaustive and exhausting studies of a child’s developmental stages -- and an ever-attentive regard for the child’s desires and needs. The ideal mother, wrote Gesell, never strives for “executive efficiency” but rather “aims first of all to be perceptive of and sensitive to the child’s behavior. Thus she becomes a true complement to him; alertly responsive to his needs. The child is more than ... a treasured possession. He is a living, growing organism, an individual in his own right to whom the culture must attune itself if his potentialities are to be fully realized.”

Closer to our own time, Dr. Benjamin Spock became perhaps history’s most famous model of the reassuring professional, “the confiding companion whom suburbanizing mothers yearned for, living as they did miles away from their parents and a well-manicured lawn away from everybody else. And unlike an in-law or a nosy neighbor, America’s first truly pop Freudian urged mothers to loosen up and get in touch with their feelings and their children’s.” At more or less the same time, Bruno Bettelheim was echoing Watson’s gloomy predictions about the perils of over-involved motherhood when he blamed childhood autism on “parental inadequacies” and favored Israeli kibbutz nurseries over the nuclear family.

Finally, in our own time, doctors such as T. Berry Brazelton continue to advise a sensible, generally tolerant attitude toward children, while conservatives, such as James Dobson, campaign to save the young from, in his words, “Eastern establishment, liberal, secular humanists.” Citing John Rosemond’s “A Family of Values,” Hulbert characterizes the belief that the “ ‘child-centered’ view and psychological research had dominated, and distorted, parental counsel for too long. At stake was the preservation of adult authority and family integrity, the last defense against an ‘overweening state’ and a decadent society.”

Without stooping to easy psychologizing, Hulbert delves into a number of the experts’ biographies as a means of understanding how a particular upbringing might predispose an individual to form certain ideas about the most efficacious method of bringing up other children. Many of the authorities described in these pages had long and complex careers; interestingly, the strict behaviorist Watson would go on to deploy his gift for shaping response and personality at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. And one of the book’s most illuminating chapters examines how Spock became a vocal anti-Vietnam activist and a generational icon.

For all the missionary zeal and clinical objectivity with which these scientists pursued their research projects and, in a few cases, mistreated their hapless young research subjects, the effects of child-rearing techniques are (as the experts themselves know all too well) remarkably hard to quantify. Slyly, Hulbert tracks the arc and the outcome of the experts’ own failures and successes as husbands and fathers. With surprising (or perhaps unsurprising) frequency, these accounts of their domestic lives feature resentful wives and troubled children -- and provide a counterpoint to the certainty and assurance with which the confident professionals advised their followers on how to manage their households.

One of Watson’s sons committed suicide and the other had a breakdown and suffered from suicidal impulses. Spock’s first wife, Jane, whom he divorced in 1976, told an interviewer that “I might have been more of a somebody. But I don’t think he could stand it, sharing the spotlight.” Gesell’s daughter-in-law Peggy wrote him a letter, which is a humorous, reasonable and quietly devastating critique of her father-in-law’s schedules and systems: “There are feedings in the early a.m. when I have omitted the weight readings,” she told him. “That is because the scales make quite a distinctive loud noise and Pete at that hour is easily wakened by it. And frankly, science is as nothing to me when compared to a few minutes more sleep.”

At times, I found myself wishing that Hulbert had said more about the economics of the child-rearing business. Quite a few of the authorities have produced bestselling books, and it’s always instructive to follow the money to discover, for instance, if and how parental anxieties are exploited for profit. But that’s a minor complaint.

What’s most engaging about “Raising America” is how the book succeeds in adding up to more than the sum of its parts. It’s not merely an account of a “century of advice” but also a history of the ways in which our ideas about families, women, childhood and adult responsibility have and have not shifted over the course of a hundred years. Hulbert’s achievement is to examine our hopes and fears as they are played out in the lives of our children and to understand how we have come to determine the proper time to pick up a crying baby.