"If a young mother were to ask me what I consider the keynote of successful baby training, I should say, without hesitation, regularity. This means regularity in everything, eating, sleeping, bathing, bowel habits, and exercise. Each event in a baby's daily life should take place at exactly the same hour by the clock until the habit is established...
It is quite possible to train the baby to be an efficient little machine, and the more nearly perfect we make the running of this machine, the more wonderful will be the results achieved and the less trouble it will be for the mother.The time to start training is at birth. But one need not despair if the ideal is not accomplished immediately. It is best, though, to make out a schedule that you expect to carry out under ordinary circumstances, and then follow it without deviation until the habits become automatic."
-Myrtle Eldren and Helen Le Cron, For the Young Mother, 1921."At the beginning of this century, the morality of the middle class was still tied to Victorian ideals,
but technology was carrying the parents and children into another world. A time of optimism, everything seemed possible. If science could prevent disease, as Koch and Pasteur had shown, why couldn't it also prevent psychological disorder? And social disorder? Personal failure and poverty? If technology could guarantee consistency in manufactured goods, why couldn't it also guarantee the production of consistently wonderful children?"
-Daniel Beekman, The Mechanical Baby, A Popular History of the Theory and Practice of Child Raising, 1977, page 112.As director of the Orthogenic School in Chicago, Illinois, a residential treatment center for young people with severe emotional disturbances, Bettelheim became fascinated by autistic children, whose avoidance of social contact reminded him of the withdrawal he had seen among concentration camp prisoners...Bettelheim had little doubt that Joey’s behavior represented his response to parental rejection. He related how his mother had first denied her pregnancy and after his birth wanted neither to see nor nurse him. She kept him on a rigid 4-hour feeding schedule (typical at the time for formula-fed infants), oblivious to her infant’s crying. Joey’s father was less patient and sometimes “discharged his frustrations by punishing Joey when the child cried at night.” From Bettelheim’s perspective, Joey had no choice but to withdraw into his own world...
For many in the autism community, the popularity of the refrigerator-mother hypothesis before the 1970s continues to be remembered as an example of what might be called “the tyranny of expertise”—the danger of giving professionals too much power...Although significant questions have been raised regarding Bettelheim’s own credentials as a psychoanalyst, he did function as a public intellectual representing his profession in popular media. His story provides a bitter reminder that experts do not always listen and cannot always be trusted. "The publication of Dr. Holt's
Care and Feeding of Children
marked an epoch. It conveyed to the mothers of the generation to which
it was addressed the idea of a positive regimen of right physical habits
as essential to the child's health and well-being.
Previous to
this mothers had brought their children up by rule of thumb, the child's
desires being the gauge of the mother's behavior. Thus, if a baby cried
he was fed, if he was fretful he was rocked or dandled, if he had colic
he was walked the floor with, this being accepted as all in a day's
work in bringing up baby. All this Dr. Holt and his followers
significantly changed. Instead of the baby's demands the routine laid down by the specialist prescribed the rule for the mother to follow.
Regular
times of feeding and hours of sleep, freedom from distraction, were all
secured for the child with startling results in his health and
happiness. Besides demonstrating the importance of a good
routine for health, such a system of training did more;
it taught
mothers to respect the welfare of the child and to make this their first
consideration...Once the importance of regularity and consistency in
physical care was grasped, the old, careless practices stood condemned.
We may hope to see an analogous respect for the
mental integrity of the child as a result of improved methods of mental training."
-William E. Blatz and Helen Bott, Parents and the Pre-School Child, 1929.Rutter, M., Sonuga-Barke,
E. J., Beckett, C., Bell, C. A., Castle, J., Kreppner, J., ... &
Stevens, S. (2010). Deprivation-specific psychological patterns: Effects
of institutional deprivation by the English and Romanian Adoptee Study
Team. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 75(1), 1-252.
Our early findings indicated that the main outcomes that were strongly
associated with institutional deprivation were unusual and distinctive:
Namely, quasi-autism, disinhibited attachment, inattention/overactivity
and cognitive impairment. We postulated that these might constitute
possible deprivation-specific patterns. Accordingly, this monograph is
focused on these postulated deprivation-specific patterns and their
association with more general patterns of functioning and impairment.
Ambert, A. M. (1994). An international perspective on parenting: Social change and social constructs. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 529-543.
Three general areas of research and social concern pertaining to parenting are discussed within an international perspective focusing on recent social changes as well as on constructs of parenting. First, I critique ideological biases arising out of a particular Western definition of parenting—in this case, mothering—that affect research paradigms. This critique is then expanded by linking it to current international social changes in order to offer a glimpse into areas of parenting that could be addressed empirically. And, third, consideration of socioeconomic changes and upheavals leads to the suggestion that the experience of parenting may become more difficult in the near future in most countries of the world. This discussion is informed by a critical analysis based on perspectives that view childhood, and hence parenting, as social constructs evolving with sociohistorical changes....
...In the behavioral and social sciences, there is a danger that one can fail to carry on a discourse on parenting as an evolving construct, as opposed to a fixed entity that is viewed as "nature bound" within one particularly dominant type of society. Yet, obviously, the social definition of "nature" itself shifts, even though each new definition is believed to be the definitive one. In the past century, under Western masculine hegemony, parenting has been successively encoded in religious strictures, then moralized, medicalized, psychologized, psychiatrized, and more recently legalized-frequently all of these together in the past decade, in what Habermas (1987) would call the colonization of parents' lifeworld.
Parenting is constantly being constructed according to the ideologies and the paradigms of those sciences and professions that happen to dominate at any point in time in terms of dictating what is good for children. Once what is "in the best interest of the child" has been defined, what parents should be and should do is implicitly and explicitly constructed...
This linkage between what we conceive to be the nature of childhood and that of parenting is based less on the natural unavoidability of parents for children's survival and well-being as on society's structure and socioeconomic requisites, which not only place children in the context of family, but "parentalize" and, I will add, "maternalize" them. Thus, where one sees children, one "sees" parents. When one sees children who have problems, one looks for parents, especially mothers.
Davis-Floyd, R. E. (1994).
The technocratic body: American childbirth as cultural expression. Social Science & Medicine, 38(8), 1125-1140.
The dominant mythology of a culture is often displayed in the rituals with which it surrounds birth. In contemporary Western society, that mythology--the mythology of the technocracy--is enacted through obstetrical procedures, the rituals of hospital birth. This article explores the links between our culture's mythological technocratic model of birth and the body images, individual belief and value systems, and birth choices of forty middle-class women--32 professional women who accept the technocratic paradigm, and eight homebirthers who reject it.
The conceptual separation of mother and child is fundamental to technocratic notions of parenthood, and constitutes a logical corollary of the Cartesian mind-body separation that has been fundamental to the development of both industrial society and post-industrial technocracy. The professionals' body images and lifestyles express these principles of separation, while the holistic ideology of the homebirthers stresses mind-body and parent-child integration. The conclusion considers the ideological hegemony of the technocratic paradigm as future shaper.In technocratic reality, not only are mother and baby viewed as separate, but the best interests of each are often perceived as conflicting. In such circumstances, the mother's emotional needs and desires are almost always subordinated to the medical interpretation of the best interests of the baby as the all-important product of this "manufacturing process." Thus, individuals operating under this paradigm often criticize home-birthers as "selfish" and "irresponsible" for putting their own desires above their baby's needs. But under the holistic paradigm held by these home birthers, just as mother and baby form part of one integral and indivisible unit until birth, so the safety of the baby and the emotional needs of the mother are also One. The safest birth for the baby will be the one that provides the most nurturing environment for the mother.
