2 of 4
Grant's survey of parenting in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries suggests that parents began to feel inadequate largely because of a change in family makeup. Big extended families, living close together, gave way to small, isolated family units of mother, father, and two children; parents were deprived of the experienced help previously provided by older family members. This increased isolation of parents coincided with the growing availability of jobs that removed fathers from the home all day, and with a widespread social perception of women as less rational, less capable, and thus less competent than men. Mothers, left alone with children all day long without fathers or extended family to make up for their female shortcomings, became the target of child-study groups sponsored by such organizations as the Baby Hygiene Association of Boston, the U.S. Children's Bureau, and the Child Study Association of America. The "traditional kinship networks that supplied child-rearing knowledge," Grant suggests, were "no longer fully functional."
Within this framework, Grant surveys the major schools of parenting expertise: the behaviorism of the thirties, the democratic child-raising practices of the forties, the psychoanalytical fifties, and the Spock years. Although the rise and fall of these schools is presented in stultifying detail, the complex history of expert advice is worth plowing through.
For one thing, Grant's survey of the past reveals that many of the shibboleths we hear mouthed today are merely repetitions of past slogans. "The proper care and training of children," announced pediatrician Edith Jackson in a 1944 radio broadcast, "is as essential to true and final victory as the warfare on our fighting fronts"—a declaration that bears an eerie resemblance to evangelical rhetoric about building Christ's kingdom through the work of mothers at home.
At the other end of the ideological spectrum, in A Mother's Place: Taking the Debate About Working Mothers Beyond Guilt and Blame (1997), Susan Chira writes that a mother can "enrich her children" by pursuing her own dreams (even if this involves a full-time nanny and a 60-hour work week). Grant finds this same rhetoric in the Freudian-focused groups of the past, which assumed that "the better we understand ourselves, the better we understand our children."
Grant doesn't bring her study up to the present, ending her survey sometime around 1978. And she ignores the most authoritative book of all. "In general," she says, in the only paragraph devoted to biblical standards for parenting, "people with a strong religious affiliation will develop child-rearing values that at least partially derive from their communities of belief."
In part, Grant's neglect of biblical influences seems to stem from Scripture's unsatisfactory character as a nuts-and-bolts parenting handbook. The Bible offers a few general instructions for parenting ("Fathers, do not exasperate your children") and plenty of ideals for adults, but specific prescriptions for the everyday raising of children are few and far between (which is why evangelicals can battle to the point of excommunication over the Ezzo method of sleep-training).
The most frequently quoted biblical text on parenting is Proverbs 22:6: "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." In some Christian circles, this declaration is read as a guarantee that children who are raised properly will "turn out" perfectly. Grant's history of parenting advice reveals this interpretation as an echo of behaviorism: supply the correct stimuli, and the desired response will mechanically follow. Yet behaviorism is in tension both with life as we know it (well-raised children do sometimes rebel) and with the God-created complexity and originality of each person.
share this page
RSS Feed
