Step Away From the Parenting-Industrial Complex!
The BEST advice for moms and dads
I suppose there has always been a parenting-advice industry, or at least people who dispensed parenting advice, since human insecurity is hard-wired into the fibers of our being.
Historians largely agree, though, that the parenting advice industry massively gained ground in the Victorian era, when printing became cheap and women novelists were a dime a dozen; many of these women novelists branched out into giving advice to mothers as a side hobby. There were also legions of male physicians waiting to tell mothers how to wean babies, or how much to spank them, or to finger wag over what mothers were, or were not, doing.
One popular doctor suggested rubbing the brain of a hare on babies’ gums to ease teething pain.
I went with frozen cantaloupe, but good to have a hare brain in your back pocket!
Prior to the Victorian era, popular thinkers did, of course, expound on parenting practices, but it was the industrial revolution that gave everyone more free time—at least in wealthy families-- and helped emancipate children from being essentially small servants who either worked in fields or farms or toiled in the house.
During the industrial revolution, many poor children worked long hours—I wrote about this phenomenon and how child labor is linked to our lack of rights for children to this day—and even in 1900, according to the U.S. Census, children still made up 18% of the workforce. But the combination of women and children with more free time, plus widespread printing, gave birth to what we now recognize as the parenting-advice industry.
In the 1600s, parenting advice mostly revolved around variations of ‘beat them into submission’ because people like Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) reminded everyone that children were born with original sin and a parent’s primary job was to beat the evil out of them on a regular basis through “autocratic” methods.
One popular health guru of the 16th century, William Bullein, wrote in his lifestyle-advice book The Government of Health, published in 1558, that parents “must give account to God how they have brought up their children. And they that in these years do spare correction truly be grievous enemies unto their children….” In other words, if you do not beat your children enough, you and the kiddos are going to hell.
Bullein was sort of the Dr. Oz of his day; he also recommended parents and nannies should comb through their babies’ poop to get a handle on the baby’s health.
Keep in mind that there was no chlorinated drinking water, so parents and children often drank beer or mead instead.
I am not sure how this affected children’s behavior but maybe being bombed from morning till night kept them in a quiet stupor? The beer was lower in alcohol and perhaps the tradeoffs (low IQ, stunted growth, versus dying of cholera) made it worth it. I don’t know.
However, dying from ingesting a bee in your beer which then stung your esophagus was not that uncommon, so it was definitely a mixed bag.
In any case, skip ahead 420-ish years and here we are, drowning in parenting advice from the moment the baby’s head crowns.
Populate their microbiomes with vaginal fluid— okay, that seems like a good idea. Do it!
Attach the baby to you 24/7!
Let them cry it out! Don’t co-sleep!
You absolutely must co-sleep!
Let them eat whatever they like!
Prevent them from ingesting junk food until they are 12!
It’s the phones.
It’s the Instagram/Tumblr/Tinder accounts.
Everyone should be in therapy.
No one should be in therapy.
I could go on.
There are even advice websites like Grown and Flown, aimed at parents of… college goers.
From the Victorian era to today, however, one concept is completely consistent, though the advice itself may have changed: the insistence that “it could be a fatal mistake to assume that modern mothers would be able to care for their children “without knowledge or instruction of any kind” [quote is from Tamara Wagner’s essay The Sensational Victorian Nursery, in the book Victorian Literature and Culture). The whole industry rests on this idea, and yes, most of this insecurity-production is aimed at mothers.
Why?
Because insecurity unleashes big bucks—roughly $US 280 million in North America on parenting apps alone in 2021. That does not include the $US 230 million moms alone spend on parenting books yearly. Projections for parenting app expenditures are $US 356 million by 2028. Mothers are the target audience because it is easy to make working mothers feel guilty and because women’s insecurity about, well, everything, is well understood by the advertising world.
Sarah Ellis, a popular parenting-advice-giver in 1843, wrote “There are mothers, and not a few, who appear to consider themselves called upon to do anything, rather than attend to the training of their children; who find time for morning calls, when they have none for the nursery or the schoolroom[.]” She was on a similar bandwagon as the teachers who accused mothers of ‘wanting their babysitters back’ when we said schools should open during Covid lockdowns.
Not only are parents spending hefty sums, said expenditures do not seem to produce good results. It is hard to make the argument that children are better adjusted, more capable, smarter, or any other superlative than they were in previous generations. As Jonathan Haidt and others have argued persuasively, the trends are all in the wrong direction.
What if we actually know how to raise children because we love them and the vast majority of parenting is common sense?
Do you need to know exactly how many words children need to hear before they are two, or is it obvious that talking to babies and toddlers is a good thing to do and sticking screens in their hands is not as good for them as hearing your voice and your laugh and seeing you smile?
Why do we need “evidence” for everything we do? Aren’t there things that parents just know? The Free Press, of which I am a fan, is pitching their new collaboration Raising Parents with Emily Oster, of whom I am fan, as providing “Scientific answers. Data-backed answers. Answers based on peer-reviewed evidence.”
Fan or no, to this I say: NO.
My children are in college now, but one of the things I am most happy I did as a parent is that, for the most part, I relied on my intuition and my belief that I know my children better than anyone else ever could. I also talked to my sisters and my mother and my friends, and occasionally to our pediatrician, and from conferring with those wise (mostly) women I was able to avoid having a lot of “experts” telling me I was doing it wrong or reinforcing the idea that I was incapable or incompetent. I wasn’t, and you probably aren’t either.
Some of the parenting advice dispensed by these people making money—a lot of money— is probably perfectly sound, even “evidence-based”. A lot of it is silly and some of it is downright harmful.
But all of it is predicated on the idea that we parents don’t know what we are doing, and that left to our own devices we are harming our children. Accepting this assertion weakens our power and undermines our bonds with our children, as we outsource parenting to everyone else—therapists, college counselors, and apps that monitor our children in place of us spending time with them.
Unsubscribe from those parenting apps and websites and talk to your friends and family members and, most of all, to your children.
You might be pleasantly surprised at how much you already know.
Being a parent today can seem overwhelming. Even my organization has done parenting newsletters. There is so much information out there and burnout can set in. Thanks for reminding us that we can step away and do what we think is best for our children.
This is great. I think it would do many doctors good to hear this take. We tend to give lots of parenting advice, much of which is belittling and not even well supported by evidence. Intuition is underrated.