Compendium of Terrible Parenting Advice: What J.B. Watson Had To Say.

I can't get over how influential J. B. Watson became, given that he felt it was necessary that "love conditioning" must be "scrupulously guarded against." The ideal child would be as "free as possible from sensitivities to other people" and "relatively free of the family situation." Here's what he had to say:

The sensible way to bring up children is to treat them as young adults. Dress them, bathe them with care and circumspection. Let your behaviour be always objective and kindly firm. Never hug and kiss them. Never let them sit in your lap. 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 extremely good job of a difficult task. Try it out. In a week's time you find how easy it is to be perfectly objective with your child and also kindly. You will be ashamed of the mawkish, sentimental way you have been handling it.

Hello, baby monkeys banging their heads repeatedly against the walls of their cages.

If I had to do it over again, the first book on childcare I'd read would be Christina Hardyment's history of childcare advice, Dream Babies: Childcare Advice from John Locke to Gina Ford. Instead, of course, I purchased and dutifully read through at least twenty contradictory manuals. (I remember my friend Nela telling me when I was pregnant that however  you wanted to parent, there'd be a book out there to back you up, which is probably a more sensible way to go about it than attempting to follow someone else's ideas to the letter.)

Quietly and delicously subversive, Hardyment's book reinforces the idea that perhaps mothers should trust their own instincts first -- as Hardyment explains the evolution of the various conflicting schools of parenting advice, you begin to see that none of the experts are absolutely right and that some of them are not just wrong, but dangerously wrong.

And how about that Rousseau, whose book Emile, about the natural education of an imaginary child, is still widely read? Rousseau abandoned his own very real children -- five of them, one for every finger of your right hand -- to foundling homes.

Comments

[Perfectly Disgraceful]

I feel lucky that I couldn't bring myself to read any parenting manuals. I had a book on breastfeeding, a book that had some info on stages and development, and one that had some medical info.

I highly recommend getting a breastfeeding book at the end of a first pregnancy, but other than that, pffft. Ask Moxie is a much better resource.