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Ann Hulbert is the Harvard-educated, Eastern-based author of
The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean Stafford, and
mother of two children. In Raising America she describes,
criticizes, and tries to capture the essence of late 19th-
and 20th-century child-care philosophies and parenting
practices popularized in America. She attributes different
familial shifts back and forth between the absolute poles of
"parent-centered," authoritative, conservative, moral
approaches and "child-centered," permissive, developmental,
liberal, social-emotional orientations.
The author's unstated premises for this book appear to be
"look at how these experts got their foot in the door and
their message out to the public. Look how the public
accepted them hook, line, and sinker, then became
frustrated, angry, and disillusioned by the lack of
practical child-raising effectiveness. Look how these same
experts had serious conflicts and problems with their
parents, marriages, and parent-child relationships and look
how they all, at times, contradicted themselves. And look at
how these 'experts' were eager to sell millions of books,
learned from each other how to sell popular books, and how
they, like their predecessors, exaggerated claims and, at
times, used unethical means or hypocritical methods to
appease and keep up with cross-pressures impacting
themselves, their home life, and their paternalistic,
educational roles towards an always needy, dependent public
attempting to understand and apply these lofty experts'
biased, scientifically weak, and often unfounded
conclusions."
Hulbert suggests that L. Emmett Holt, one of the nation's
first and finest pediatricians, and his book, The Care and
Feeding of Children (1894) generated a great deal of early
focus on nursing mother's milk, strictly measured baby
formulas, and rigidly timed feeding schedules prescribed
without mother's cuddling and playing with babies. Babies
were to be toilet-trained in three months. Babies' crying
should be accepted as merely physical exercise allowed up to
thirty minutes before a caretaker would be expected to
investigate. Little playing was to be allowed and never
before bedtime. Holt's goal for mothers was to always stay
calm, consistent, and reduce any stimulation around the baby
on a consistent basis. The illusionary promise being that
precise feeding and regulated infant care would result in
healthy, happy mothers and children. Holt's model was a
popular early example of an authoritarian, parent-driven
focus on what mothers (but rarely fathers) should do when
raising a child by the clock.
Conversely, G. Stanley Hall, America's first Ph.D.
psychologist, ushered in a competing proto-Freudian view of
development including an original stage called
"adolescence". This stage was a physical/psychological
interlude wherein youth explores emergent, exciting sexual
and rebellious desires and, conflicted, conscience versus
behavioral choices. Hall's child-centered perspective
suggested natural forces and biological rhythms underlying
the awareness and unfolding of behavior which he proposed
could be studied more scientifically by watchful, trained,
sensitive, and permissive eyes.
The author presents biographical snapshots of popular
experts whose books and lectures followed either a quasi-Holtian
or Hallian line, like the radical behaviorist,
mother-centered John B. Watson, (Behaviorism), the
child-centered maturationist Dr. Arnold Gesell (The Mental
Growth of the PreSchool Child), the child-centered
psychoanalyst Erik Erickson (Childhood and Society), the
ambivalent neo-Freudian pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock
(Baby and Child Care), the mother-centered psychiatrist Dr.
Bruno Bettelheim (Dialogues with Mothers), the
child-centered pediatrician Dr. T. Berry Brazelton (Infants
and Mothers: Differences in Development) and others. None of
these experts had the benefit of rigorous scientific studies
beyond close, at times photographic observations, nominal
rating scales, personal/family/patient experiences, and
anecdotal case records acquired along the way.
By implication, if they had only been able to do
sophisticated social-psychological and developmental
research, they may have been better able to manage and
temper their (and the reading public's) zeal and tendency to
generate sweeping generalizations and unfounded,
Victorian-like parental applications. These practices were
talked about and maybe accepted by many, otherwise educated,
professional, upper-class women, mothers, enlightened
feminists, and "flower children."
This reviewer found Raising America an unnecessarily long,
tedious read because of the fragmentation of details and
mental jumping back and forth across decades, people, and
quotes from newspapers, magazines, and supplemental
materials (c.f., sixty-three pages of over one thousand page
notes organized by chapter at the back of the book). I will
leave it to the reader to draw their own conclusions
regarding the author's organization, methods, and purpose(s).
Hulbert concludes her sample of experts "aim to hide their
wisdom, but that it can be found in reading between, and
across, the experts' lines." Hopefully, you will find more
of what you what you need by reading and exploring this book
in a more focused, goal-oriented manner.
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Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children by Ann Hulbert