Episode 6: Lessons From “Parenting Advice” From 1880 to 2022
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:02] NV: Sawadee ka, and welcome to the Come Back to Care podcast. I am your host, Nat Nadha Vikitsreth, a decolonized and licensed clinical psychotherapist, somatic and social justice practitioner, and founder of Come Back to Care. Adopt connector, norm agitator, and lover of liberation.
If you're on a journey to transform your daily parenting into a social justice practice that nurtures your child's development and promotes intergenerational family healing, I am so glad that you're here. On this podcast, we explore how social justice, child development science, parenting, and family systems intersect with one another. If you've been looking for ways to align your parenting with a social justice values, you're in the right place. Together, we find our way back to our true home. We come back home to our body and the goodness within. We come back to our lineage and come back to care together. So come curious, and come as you are. Let's move at the speed of care, and let's do this.
[EPISODE]
[00:01:27] NV: Welcome to the sixth episode of the Come Back to Care podcast. In the previous episode, we talked about how expert parenting advice and parenting “commonsense” are shaped by social, cultural and political forces. When we follow this commonsense parenting advice, simply because everyone's doing it, or we believe it's what we're supposed to do, we might unintentionally model white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist and colonial behaviors to our little ones, when in fact, we want to teach them the opposite values, like compassion, equity and liberation.
In this episode, I want to take a trip down memory lane to look at how systemic oppression affected parenting advice throughout US history. We'll start back in the 1880s. Then we'll take a look at parenting advice in 1920s. The 1920s always make me think of the flappers and the rising hemlines, which invited women to be more daring, expressive and liberated. But as we'll see, most of the parenting advice from medical professionals of the era had quite the opposite effect, because it was mostly about disempowering mothers. And I'm saying mothers because the literature and the gender expectations at the time focus on motherhood and parenting.
Next, we're going to look at baby beauty pageants and contests, which are the OG toddlers and tiaras, if you will, and how these pageants we're not shy about perpetuating white supremacy and ableism. Well then fast forward to the 60s, and 80s, and the present day to unpack how economic forces have been shaping our parenting and our little ones’ daily schedules, regardless of class and racial background.
I feel like I'm a journalist running an expose piece live from the stolen land of the Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi nations, or Chicago. But my intention for this episode is for you to detangle the knots of systemic oppression from your own parenting by taking a look at how capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism and white supremacy have been shaping parenting commonsense throughout history.
We're going to unpack how we arrived at this moment where the majority of us actively organize our children stay around playdates, music classes, clubs, and extracurricular activities so that they get good grades, go to good college and get good jobs.
Dr. Amber McZeal said, “To dismantle something, you must know it well.” So let's look at the social, cultural, political context these historical versions of parenting advice came from so you can exercise discernment and find ways to play by your own parenting playbook in our present context.
As you might have already guessed, understanding the context is key to avoid shaming and blaming others and ourselves. At Come Back to Care, we practice what's called contextualize, not condone, where we believe that we did the best we could with what we knew at the time, then we hold ourselves accountable to know better, and do better.
Before we jump into the time machine, though, I want to get on my soapbox for a hot minute about parenting tips and strategies in general. Please don't get me wrong. There's certainly time and place for strategies, especially when you're at your wit's end trying to put your crying 15-week-old nugget to sleep and it's 2:22am. Or when you just came home from the hospital with your newborn and you just needed concrete answers to the 1 million questions you have about how to take care of this baby so that you can build your own parenting expertise and intuition later on.
I know you want all the strategies you've vetted and validated, because you don't want to risk even the slightest chance of “messing your kid up”. Out of love for your child, you might turn to apps and google first before turning inward in consulting with your own parental knowledge. Yeah, that's a thing, and you have it. I mean, who else spends as much time with your baby and knows what they want with a single glance? Most of the time. You're an expert on your child, even when you don't have a clue what you did yesterday that help your toddler eat their first solid food. Still checking on your sleeping baby three times to see if they're still breathing? Yeah, you're still the expert on your child.
I'm saying all of this to say that your data, your observations and your intuition count as well. You've got the cred and legitimacy too. Please grant yourself the power to own your power. Because in all my therapy sessions, almost all families I serve start with something like this, “I want to do a Ferber method for sleep training.” Or, “I want to do floor time to help my kid play better and talk more.” Or, “I want to try casting method to decrease tantrums.” Or, “I want to do a baby-led weaning.” Sound familiar?
Then we peel back, like all the way back to questions like, “So what do you exactly want to do?” What does it look like with you and your family?” Although we started out with baby-led weaning, at the end of the day, you adjust it and make it your own. So the baby-led weaning becomes the Ryan method, the Denise method, or the Yolanda method. Yours.
When you don't take into account your expertise, it's so easy to fall into the trap of anxiously finding some authority with Ph and D behind their name to validate your parenting capacity. Or you may force yourself to try this trendy “research-based sleep strategy” that your gut is begging you not to, because you already know deep down that it won't fly with your life loving toddler. When the tips and tricks don't apply to you and your child to begin with, you try your best to implement them anyway. You even keep a spreadsheet and track every single detail. And here comes the heartbreaking part, then those strategies don't work out. And you think it's because of you. And you feel like a terrible parent. And the self-doubt tape in the back of your head goes, “I'm not consistent enough. Or I should have been more disciplined. And now my child's going to need behavioral therapy.” And that tape goes on and on.
You are not a terrible parent. It's like you're running a marathon but you're wearing your partner's shoes instead. And on top of that, you put them on the wrong feet too. Chances are, you're a decent runner, but the tools aren't even a great fit or great. Research-based doesn't mean the best strategy for you and your child. It only means the strategies worked for those people who participated in the research studies. Most of the time, these research participants are white, middle class, hetero normative.
So many of the queer transgender parents I've served have to adjust what they've read and make it their own anyway. Also, these so-called evidence-based and research-based tips are so Euro-American centric, that they are biased for one type of knowledge, cognition, and they don't take into account other ways of knowing, like ancestral, cultural, body-based, movement-based and spiritual technologies that many ancestors have used to enrich their survival and build community. Instead of honoring both your intuition and current research, you stop listening to your gut and ancestral knowledge and follow guidance of research, all because you love your child so much. You don't want to risk the smallest chance of messing them up.
Okay, I'm hopping off my soapbox now so we can look at the history together. Here we go. Back in 1894, Dr. Luther Emmett Holt published a parenting manual to teach parents how to take care of babies’ physical needs at home. The emphasis was on physical needs. For example, he taught mothers to feed their babies strict quantities at rigid intervals only. If the babies were sleeping, wake them up and feed them anyway. He also discouraged mothers from kissing the babies and paying any attention to them when they cried. I know. I know. Deep breaths.
And fast forward to 1928, John Watson, who was a psychologist and a behaviorist published another parenting manual to teach parents how to apply the behavioralist approach with their babies. Watson advocated for parents to train their infants to be independent by not giving them too much love. Just considering these two examples alone, you might notice that the themes then were disempowering mothers and disqualifying their love and instinct for their children.
Back then, without social media, mothers received messages from professionals through magazines and newspapers all the time, that their knowledge didn't matter. Here's a direct quote from the federal government in 1925 pamphlet, “The very life of the mother for her child may be the stumbling block that prevents her from successfully fulfilling the obligations for her parenthood.” And again, I'm not here to shame Holt, or Watson, or experts back then. So let's look at the social, cultural and political forces that set the stage for this disempowerment of mothers.
The first factor is the advancements in the field of medicine in the late 19th century. The medical professionals knew more about germs and bacteria. That era from 1880 to 1920 was called the golden age of public health and bacteriology. Some scholars argue that when Dr. Holt was discouraging parents from kissing their babies, it was because medical professionals were only beginning to understand germs and bacteria. So not kissing equaled not spreading germs, which made a lot of sense, when Dr. Holt was trying to emphasize the physical care aspect of parenting. But unfortunately, at the cost of emotional care.
Paul Starr, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University asserted that psychology got integrated into medicine during the first half of the 20th century. Watson's behaviorism was his attempt to make psychology more credible by making relationship between mothers and children objective, measurable and quantifiable.
Back then, society was so occupied with these advances of science that other ways of knowing were discredited. Ways of knowing, like parenting wisdom that mothers have cultivated and shared across many generations. It's understandable that these medical professionals were trying to address high rates of infant mortality by applying hard science to child rearing practices.
But as Johnson and Quinlan wrote in their brilliant book, You're Doing It Wrong!: Mothering, Media and Medical Expertise, these parenting recommendations weren't exactly backed by Science. To choose one example, Dr. Holt recommended holding a baby over a chamber pots two times a day, and using soap around the anus to induce a bowel movement so that the baby was toilet trained by – Wait for it. Four months. Toilet trained by four months. Whoa!
And the second factor, the social factor, was the Industrial Revolution, which forced many families to move into the city and away from their extended family members who were at the very important social support system. So the idea of training their infants to be independent as early as possible and following the expert medical advice, the promise to help do that made a lot of sense to.
In this era, social, cultural and political factors, like the advancement of medical sciences, the integration of psychology into medicine, the high infant mortality rate, the emerging understanding of germs and bacteria, the Industrial Revolution, and the urbanization of the nuclear family all set the stage for parenting commonsense to be about following expert advice based on hard science.
An overemphasis on logical, linear, either or thinking at the expense of other ways of knowing and thinking is one of the characteristics of white supremacy. So parents in the early 20th century who were trying to follow commonsense parenting advice wound up parenting according to white supremacist ideas. In addition to all the other ways, white supremacy was intentionally foster in the Jim Crow era.
To understand how this information got communicated to families and communities, we must look at baby contests, which became common and popular by the end of the 19th century. These contests were at state fairs across the country. Quite popular. Parents would enter these contests as a way to learn about parenting. But at the same time, these contests, Johnson and Quinlan wrote, “Perpetuated early 20th century eugenic ideals of white supremacy and ableism.” These baby beauty contests would look for “glossy golden curls, muscle development, age appropriate intelligence, racial superiority, physical ability, and adequate nutrition.”
I mean, racial superiority. What was that? If not a racist, classist, an ableist. And the winners of these beauty pageants, these white plump babies with glossy golden curls were featured in newspapers and magazines as the gold standards for babies. In 1908, some of the organizers were trying to be more scientific in these events, and not focusing too much on appearance and beauty. So a contest called the better baby contest was born.
The organizers of the better baby contest had pediatricians and psychologists conduct examinations and test as they scored babies. The better baby contest were so popular, and they became another common way for parents to receive health information and parenting guidance for free.
Even though the focus shifted to be more scientific, the white supremacist and eugenic undertone, however, and sadly, remained the same. It was evidenced in the charts and scorecards that emphasized the idea that healthy looking white babies symbolized perfection.
Laura Lovett, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, wrote about how 50% of the score was based on the baby's ethnic heritage, with full points only going to white babies. Does that scream, “Let’s perpetuate racial and class oppression?” or what?
The side effect in the poor, non-white, immigrant communities was a sense of discouragement from having children, because their bad genetic traits would supposedly create more crime and social ills.
This calls in our idea of intent versus impact. I can see that the intention was to use science to empower mothers so that they could raise healthy babies. But the impact was a perpetuation of white supremacist ideals through the eugenic standards in the contests, measurements and judging materials. All of this added up to create powerful social expectations.
To quote Johnson and Quinlan again, “The scientification of better babies contest influenced the 20th century system of pediatric norms upheld through scorecards, charts, graphs, and measuring tools.” These standardized development tools set the stage for child development milestones that parents used back then, and are using today to monitor their baby's progress and measure the effectiveness in parenting.
Dr. Arnold Gesell published Monthly Milestones for Babies back in 1925. He actually did cautioned not to use the milestones as a definitive all or nothing tool. But many well-meaning medical professionals and parents used his milestones to evaluate babies’ normal development without much consideration for their social, cultural factors. And this still happens today.
Now, parents learn the milestones from apps and push notifications instead of newspapers and baby contests. But this approach of checking off a list of behaviors based on a baby's age still doesn't look at a baby as a whole person embedded in a social context.
The next major shift in good parenting norms arrived in 1946, thanks to a pediatrician and psychoanalyst named Dr. Spock. He wrote his own parenting books, and his message was radical in the medical community at the time. Spock went against the grain of strict, methodical rules about child rearing. He advocated for parents to love their children and attune to their needs. I know that doesn't sound new to us now. But at the time, a shift to focus more on the emotional care of children was quite radical.
Around that time, the field of psychology knew more about attachment relationships between parents and young children too, thanks to the work of Mary Ainsworth, and John Bowlby and others. Any guess of what critics were saying about Spock's approach? Yeah, that his approach was very soft, and too permissive. People were really worried about how too much affection could spoil children. And I guess it was really hard to unlearn what Spock’s predecessors taught parents about the value of medical scientific parenting advice, at the cost of their own parent or wisdom, expertise and intuition. Can you imagine how hard it must have been for parents, mothers and femme identifying caregivers back then to feel competent to own their parenting authority?
Before I continue on to the 1960s, and current era, I hope you can see that throughout history, no matter what the experts said, be strict and methodical, or love your kids and follow their lead. Many mothers weren't given a lot of luxury to parent by their own parenting playbook. There was a lot of pressure to perform parenting for the white medical male expectations.
It breaks my heart every time I picture a lack of support parents had back then. But it would be remiss of me to not talk about black birth workers and midwives who were supporting black mothers in the rural south, because they were still denied care post emancipation.
Black birth workers, like Bridget, or Biddy Mason, or Mary Frances Hill Collie, or pillars of their communities, black birth workers also served as a bridge between health care and community, especially in under resourced and underestimated areas. The depth of care they provided seems to surpass those rigid, methodical “scientific parenting advice” given by those guys in white coats.
Okay. Ready to jump to the 60s and 90s? Awesome. Let's talk about boomers. Boomers growing up in the 60s and 70s experienced a very different version of the middle class than what we have now. Back then, the middle class was much more stable. Starting in the 70s, waves of economic deregulation began to erode this stability. So parenting became more and more like preparing children to survive under potential economic hardship. Jump forward a few decades, and this trend was magnified by the Great Recession.
Millennials are born between 1981 and 1996 entered adulthood with much less job security and much more student loan debt. You might have already been connecting the dots between this economic pressure and parenting. Parents had to push harder for success in their children.
An American journalist, Malcolm Harris, argued that child rearing under these conditions can look a lot like job preparation, where children are optimized for the highest efficiency. Malcolm wrote, “Efficiency is our existential purpose. And we are a generation of finely honed tools crafted from embryos to be lean, mean production machines.”
When we work hard to optimize our children and fill their schedules with so many activities. It might be hard to enjoy care and connection in the present moment. There is no time. You cross off one to do item, and you have to move on to the next item. The joy of parenting gets squeezed into a never ending to do list. No wonder why we're so exhausted.
I hope that this stroll down the memory lane has highlighted different ways colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy have been shaping parenting common sense throughout history. One parent that I have the honor of working with in the in, out and through program last year, Christine, said that a big part of being a decolonized parent is understanding how society affects her parenting decision. She said it's so beautifully. I'll let you hear it from her.
[00:27:37] C: For me, two things. One, really thinking about our parents as people and helping to increase that compassion and the context during sometimes stressful conversations where I'm asking myself, like, “Why does this feel so intense or loaded?” And just seeing our parents in more of that context. So that's definitely one. And another is so validating to discuss the ongoing impacts of systemic oppression and to put our behaviors in context of survival resources. Yeah, and helping us understand a little bit better about why the desire to – As Net taught us, as you taught us, to contort, conform, and perform, and how that can be so strong. Like, I never thought that I would consider sleep training my kid. But here I am, like Googling it and looking for like sleep consultants. And I'm definitely tired. But like, “Is it really that that's motivating me? Or is it this societal pressure that I need to produce for the capitalist system, or I need to lose the baby way and look good for the patriarchy system?” [inaudible 00:28:50] instead of actually reading my baby, and her cues and my cues and what feels and is right for us.
I often find myself asking, like, “Whose goal is this?” And I already kind of touched on this, but just kind of reevaluating like why I have this urge to do something or why something feels so important. And sometimes it is like, “Yeah, this is really like what I want to do. But sometimes it's also like, “Wait, who says that this is important?” And like why is this feeling so urgent right now? They think it really helps me to have compassion on myself too about how hard it can be to make intentional parenting choices.
[00:29:35] NV: Thank you, Christine. And, you know, at the end of the day, parenting strategies informed by the common sense of the era isn't what your child's going to remember. I don't think your baby is going to remember if you use the single or double swaddling technique, or the snoo sleeper or hand me down crib, or a homemade or store bod puree. Your child and their emerging nervous system, however, are going to remember that you show up and love them even when they're not at their best.
Your child's going to feel it in their bodies, that they can really count on you. They're going to feel familiar with the physical closeness that brings warmth, trust and connection. They're going to know this deep sense of, “I got you,” that tells them the world can be a safe place with people like you in it.
Before I go, I'd love to leave you with an invitation. When you need a strategy, I support you to find whatever you need. Before you implement the strategy though, I invite you to cross check the information with your parental knowledge and your intuition first to see how you feel about each option. Perhaps ask yourself three questions. What would a professional do? What would I do? What would my own parents and grandparents do? This way, you have three sources of information, the research you found, your own expertise, and your own ancestral or family knowledge. You equip yourself with a variety of information and implement strategies with your own style and wisdom.
I never want you to make yourself small just to fit the “good parenting box” that something, something association of whatever is trying to sell you your messy resilience, your imperfect grit and grace are all too magnificent for that tiny box. When in doubt, leave room for your intuition too.
I believe in you. As always, in solidarity and sass, until next time, please take care.
[OUTRO]
[00:32:13] NV: Thank you so much for spending your time with me today. You can find all the resources links and complete show notes over at comebacktocare.com/podcasts. If there's something you want to check out, you can find it comebacktocare.com/podcast.
[END]