ONE of the first symptoms of pregnancy — along with nausea and fatigue — is an increased appreciation for the saying, “Opinions are like a–holes, everyone has one.” (This is doubly true for me. I’m pregnant with twins.)
Once you’re visibly with child(ren), strangers will throw their two cents in your direction like you’re a waddling wishing well. Everything from how you plan to give birth to how much weight you’ve gained to whether or not you should really be ordering that cappuccino are suddenly open season.
There are judgments about sleeping arrangements (“God forbid in a crib!” vs. “Of course in a crib!”); about parenting style (attachment! vs. free range!); about feeding (“Breast is best!” vs. “Fed is best!”); even (in my experience) where to put the freaking changing table.
It’s no wonder that Freud called child-rearing one of three “impossible professions” — along with governing and psychoanalysis. Indeed, raising a baby seems as baffling to me as negotiating with North Korea or navigating the darkest regions of our psyche.
So it was a breath of fresh air to come across the book “Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting” (Ecco) by Jennifer Traig, out Jan. 8.
Traig won’t teach you how to parent. She’s more anti-guide than self-help guru. You’ll learn instead how we’ve been pathologically stupid about how we raise children throughout history, while maintaining the smug certainty that everyone else is wrong.
Over the years, we’ve rolled our kids in snow, plied them with alcohol, thrown them in cages outside our windows to sleep — and these were the actions of the more engaged, responsible parents.
“Dr. Spock’s famous line: ‘You know more than you think you do’ had it almost right — as a parent I know what to do most of the time, but I don’t think about why I do it, or if it’s such a good idea after all,” Traig writes.
The verb “to parent” only hit the lexicon in the 1970s. For thousands of years, babies were “reared” — often disastrously.
One of the first parenting advice books “Gynecology” written in 1 AD by Greek physician Soranus weighed in on heady topics like “Up to What Time Females Should Be Kept Virgins.” The book offered this advice about newborns for the few literate men who could read his words: Salt your newborn babies to harden their skin.
He also advised that parents should be picky about which babies they actually choose to salt. In a chapter titled “How to Recognize the Newborn that is Worth Rearing,” Soranus outlines the various indications that you have a winner that should be raised to adulthood or a loser that should be dispensed with. (Spoiler alert: Having a penis was a huge leg up.)
In ancient Rome, an estimated 20 percent to 40 percent of infants were “exposed,” a nice term for kicking your newborn to the curb. “Romans actually expressed surprise when a woman did not expose any of her children,” writes Traig.
Some families left children out in the elements where they were eaten by wild animals; others sold their children as slaves or prostitutes. Some were even adopted as pets. “We treat our dogs like children; Romans were known to do the opposite,” Traig writes.
It goes without saying that infant mortality was high — a quarter of babies in the first century did not reach their first year and about half of children died before 10. And so infants (this word applied to children as old as 7) weren’t really viewed as fully human. If you wanted to get rid of a baby you could “accidentally” on purpose kill one by falling asleep on her, a practice so common it had its own term: overlaying.
As parents started to hold onto their children (religion frowned on killing children for the sake of convenience), new issues emerged. One that still haunts us today was how to feed them.
Before the invention of bottles and formula, wet nursing, which anthropologists say started around 2000 BC, was often the preferred way to feed a baby.
Though the pendulum swung back and forth between wet nurses and baby mamas, there were long stretches of time when no rational (or rich) mother breastfed her own baby. Just for some perspective: Of the 21,000 infants born in Paris in 1780, only 700 were nursed by their own (weirdo) mothers.
Trouble was that not all wet nurses were even wet — some were preteens. In this case, these kids received “pap,” basically bread soaked in water, which resulted in malnutrition and even death. Some wet nurses had syphilis that they passed on through breast milk.
Feeding devices — such as cow horns, pewter cups and goat skins — allowed for babies to be fed away from the breast, but according to “A History of Infant Feeding” published in The Journal of Perinatal Medicine, these often weren’t cleaned properly and spread bacteria that killed one third of all “artificially”-fed infants in their first year.
What to do with the babies that survived? The milestones that parents obsess over today — rolling over, smiling, standing up and crawling — went undocumented until the last century.
This is partially because parents weren’t too invested in their brood (“Talking to a baby made as much sense as talking to a moccasin,” writes Traig) and partially because babies spent their early lives “essentially bubble-wrapped.”
They were “bundled into swaddling so tight and thorough they could be (and sometimes were) thrown like a football from room to room,” writes Traig. Combine that with the copious amounts of alcohol and “soothing syrups” fed to them to help them sleep through the night and babies couldn’t do much of anything.
We still don’t have a clue what we’re doing. And maybe that’s okay.
Often these hog-tied babies would also be strapped down to their cradles — wooden contraptions placed perilously close to open flames. The result was that “a third of infant deaths in medieval England were caused when baby was burned in a cradle,” writes Traig.
These dangerous but socially acceptable parenting rites changed at the start of the Enlightenment era, when “the first modern parent” was born. Two men in particular, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “introduced the West to the revolutionary idea that parents,” i.e. mothers, “should raise their own children,” writes Traig, not just swaddle them into oblivion and cross your fingers that they make it out alive.
Locke advocated for a simple diet, fresh air, exercise and rest. He condemned swaddling. Rousseau shared many of Locke’s beliefs, including his hatred of swaddling, but he went a bit off the deep end with his views of “hardening” babies.
Rousseau outlined what this meant in his allegorical novel “Emile.” Parents should “wear fright masks and fire pistols near their children’s heads to make them less skittish,” and children should spend as much time in the elements to toughen up, he advised. Progressive parents took on his recommendations with zeal — rolling infants in snow, for example — until their babies started to die.
By the Victorian era a host of “scientific” theories abounded — and science seemed pretty darn masochistic.
American pediatrician Luther Emmett Holt’s 1894 “The Care and Feeding of Children” recommended that toilet training start at 1 or 2 months. (For some perspective, the average child today is potty-trained between 35 and 39 months.)
Holt also denounced intimacy: “Infants should be kissed, if at all, upon the cheek or forehead, but the less even of this the better,” he wrote. And added, “Babies under 6 months old should never be played with.”
(Holt advocated for sleep training and provided the building blocks for the “cry-it-out method” that would later be popularized by Richard Ferber in his 1985 “Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems,” a technique called “Ferberizing” that is still popular today.)
By the turn of the century, a new solution emerged: Put baby to sleep outside in “open-air storage compartments,” basically window-mounted baby cages. Eleanor Roosevelt was a fan of the baby cage and had a cage installed for her daughter Anna at East 36th Street in Manhattan — until her neighbors threatened to call the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
By the 1920s behaviorists argued that babies needed a firmer hand in rearing — and that nurture had a greater role than nature. Infamous psychologist John Watson agreed with Holt and argued that children should not be hugged and kissed. “If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinarily good job of a difficult task,” he wrote.
A backlash to the harshness of the behaviorists arrived via Benjamin Spock’s 1946 “The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.” The reassuring guide offered plaintive advice in non-judgmental ways. Traig sums up the appeal: “Don’t worry too much about schedules. Feed them when they’re hungry. Put them to bed when they’re tired. When they cry, pick them up. Kiss them as much as you like.” This was, as he and others called it, the “child-centered approach.”
Many post-war families found comfort in this “indulgent” approach to child rearing. Some did not. Social historian Christopher Lasch in 1979 blamed Spock for spreading a “culture of narcissism.” Florida pediatrician Walter Sackett Jr. attributed Spock’s parenting advice to an uptick in baby Bolsheviks: “If we teach our offspring to expect everything to be provided upon demand, we must admit the possibility of sowing the seeds of socialism,” he wrote in 1962’s “Bringing up Babies.”
If you measure the battle over child care in number of books sold, Spock won (who even knows Walter Sackett Jr. anymore?). His manual, now in its 9th printing, has sold more than 50 million copies.
But we all know that the battle over parenting is still going strong.
Now, instead of discussing whether to put the baby on the fire escape, we argue about co-sleeping and bottle feeding, about the dangers of plastic bottles and organic food.
And yet we still don’t have a clue what we’re doing. And maybe that’s OK.
“If I learned anything, it’s that barring the really awful stuff, things mostly turn out OK,” Traig writes, “and the ones that don’t were beyond our control anyway.”