Parenting and its many misadventures

Americans supposedly have little patience for expertise these days — except, it seems, when it comes to parenting experts, who continue to churn out guides as quickly as their audience can consume them.

In “Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting,” Jennifer Traig takes solace in how useless, contradictory and downright harmful so much advice has historically been.

As the parent of two children and the author of previous books about obsessive-compulsive disorder and hypochondria, Traig wanted to examine how “developed-world, middle-class Westerners” learned to follow a script that is so culturally specific.

Parents have always found raising children to entail a great deal of work, enlisting relatives and servants — sometimes handing offspring over to religious orders. As Traig says, “the history of parenting is, in large part, a history of trying to get out of it.” This was true even when babies were considered little laborers-to-be.

It was only toward the end of the 19th century — when children became, in sociologist Vi via naZe liz er’ s memorable phrase ,“economically worthless but emotionally priceless” — that parents began to see themselves as wholly responsible for cultivating a child’s intellectual and emotional life. In the 1970s, the term “to parent” emerged as an active verb.

Traig’s book is filled with tales of men telling women what to do, and she’s candid about how furious it makes her.

She isn’t wrong, but there’s a problem with her delivery. Some of her punch lines are so broad that they should be accompanied by a sad trombone.

Parenting is a subject that generates so much piety that you can’t fault Traig for having a sense of gallows humor, though the calibration is off. Part of this has to do with how skillful and fluid a writer she is otherwise — the facts seem to tumble forth, in a way that makes her jokes feel superfluous. Still, it’s a fascinating narrative, tracing the long history of mistakes and reversals and cultural presuppositions that have structured our most intimate relationships.

Traig says that what she wants the most as a parent is some reassurance that she isn’t doing it wrong: “Parenting is so hard; and like our kids, we’re all looking for permission to slack off in some areas.” Sometimes, though, Traig can’t help herself, declining to step away from the kid or the joke. “Doing nothing,” she admits, “is often the hardest thing to do.”