Raising kids isn’t easy; parenting advice often makes it harder
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. This appetite for counsel inevitably reflects deeper, often unspoken middle-class aspirations and anxieties; as psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips once observed, the appeal of such books goes beyond the immediate need to deal with a sullen teenager or a sleepless newborn. “Our obsession with child development and with so-called parenting skills,” he wrote, “has become a code for our forlorn attempt to find a sanity for ourselves.”
Jennifer Traig apparently agrees. In “Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting,” she takes solace in how useless, contradictory and downright harmful so much advice has historically been. “The things we take for granted as normal and natural strike parents in other parts of the world as absurd and dangerous,” she writes, in this brisk survey of child-rearing tips through the ages.
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, middleclass Westerners” learned to follow a script that is so culturally specific. She ended her research feeling not just informed but relieved: “People have done crazy, crazy things to their children throughout history, and the species continued all the same.”
The species may have survived, though the fates of individual children were another matter. The history recounted in this book is studded with violence and death. Child abandonment was once routine; in ancient Rome, 20 to 40 percent of babies were left to die of exposure. Even the advent of foundling hospitals in European cities didn’t help much; the mortality rates in some institutions (understaffed, suffused with disease) could reach 90 percent.
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, expected to contribute within a few years to the family livelihood.
Philosophers like Locke and Rousseau published treatises on childhood education, but it was only toward the end of the 19th century – when children became, in sociologist Viviana Zelizer’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.
A lot of parenting advice has historically had to do with the physical needs of the mother and child; a lot of it also turned out to be fatal. Colostrum, for instance, was once considered so toxic that mothers were instructed to feed their newborns honey instead, thereby trading the antibodies in breastmilk for botulism.
It was often male doctors who dispensed such advice – the same cohort that was