¹ Ariès, Philippe, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York, 1962); Stone, Lawrence, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York, 1977); Shorter, Edward, The Making of the Modern Family (London, 1976); Goldthorpe, J. E., Family Life in Western Societies (Cambridge, 1987); Pollock, Linda A., Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge, 1983).Google Scholar

² Pollock, , Forgotten Children, 12. Sociologist Viviana Zelizer suggests the twentieth century brought major changes in American family life, with the development of what she calls the “sacred child”; such children are economically useless but emotionally priceless. See her Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York, 1985).Google Scholar

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⁷ Bourdieu, Pierre, “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction,“ in Knowledge, Education, and Cultural Change, ed. Brown, Richard (London, 1973), 71–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁸ See Parkin, Frank, Marxism and Class Theory: A Bourgeois Critique (New York, 1979), 60–61, for a discussion of the problematic nature of class transmission through education. Parkin writes, “The continuous raising of academic hurdles and certification barriers as a means of controlling entry to the professions carries with it a strong element of risk that large numbers of children from professional families will not make the grade” (p. 61).Google Scholar

⁹ Pollock, , Forgotten Children 43–46: Jay Mechling, “Advice to Historians on Advice to Mothers,” Journal of Social History 9 (Fall 1975): 44–63.Google Scholar

¹⁰ On who reads advice literature, see Clarke-Stewart, K. A., “Popular Primers for Parents,“ American Psychologist 33 (Apr. 1978): 359–69. Smith Blau, Zena explores how this varies by race and class in “Exposure to Child-Rearing Experts: A Structural Interpretation of Class-Color Differences,” American Journal of Sociology 69 (May 1964): 596–608. She argues, “Reliance on experts’ writings is part of a larger complex of orientations and modes of behavior that differentiate the child-rearing patterns of middle-class mothers from those in the working class in white society” (603). Also see her Black Children/White Children: Competence, Socialization, and Social Structure (New York, 1981), and Urie Bronfenbrenner, “Socialization and Social Class through Time and Space,” in Readings in Social Psychology, ed. Maccoby, Eleanor, Newcomb, Theodore, and Hartley, Eugene (London, 1958), 411. One researcher reports there are greater class differences in parent reading of child-rearing books than of magazine articles; Martha Sturm White, “Social Class, Child Rearing Practices, and Child Behavior,” in Personality and Social Systems, ed. Smelser, Neil J. and Smelser, William T. (New York, 1963), 292.Google Scholar

¹¹ Stone, , The Family, Sex and Marriage in England; Ariès, Centuries of Childhood; see also Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child, and Alwin, Duane F., “From Obedience to Autonomy: Changes in Traits Desired in Children, 1924–78“ (Paper delivered at the American Sociological Association, Washington, D.C., 1980), for accounts of changes in attitudes toward children that pay attention to class differences.Google Scholar

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¹³ “The Needless Deaths of Babies,” Survey 25 (11 Mar. 1911): 969–70; Williams, M. E., “Infant Feeding,” journal of Home Economics 3 (Apr. 1911): 158–59.Google Scholar

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¹⁵ See, for example, Henderson, C. R., “Infant Welfare: Methods of Organization and Administration,“ American Journal of Sociology 17 (Jan. 1912): 458–77; Enright, H. G., “Census to Save the Babies,” Technical World Magazine 19 (June 1913): 539–42; Emmett Holt, L., “Artificial Feeding of Infants,” Delineator 101 (Dec. 1922): 15.Google Scholar

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¹⁷ The pattern became less consistent during and after World War II. In some decades, doctors continued to write a large proportion of the articles, but in the 1980s doctors wrote only 26.5 percent. During the early decades, academic child development experts made only a small dent in the popular advice literature. The doctors’ dominance was most complete in articles advising middle-class mothers how to care for their own children. Social workers did not venture onto the turf of middle-class mothers, so doctors did not face much competition. Such popular magazines as the Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping published monthly advice columns by doctors.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Grant, E. H., “The Unskilled Profession,“ Woman's Home Companion 38 (May 1911): 4.Google Scholar

¹⁹ The quotation is from Bruère, “Babies in Summer,” 15; Phillips, W. C., “Community Planning for Infant Welfare Work,“ Conference on Charities and Corrections (1912): 40–48.Google Scholar

²⁰ An article written by a Swedish baby nurse in 1953 showed how times had changed. While earlier parents had been accused of endangering their babies’ health if they did not keep a flow of fresh air through the house, the baby nurse inveighed against fresh air fanatics and ascribed the death of one infant in a 60–degree house to exposure. See Ostlund, S., “I've Had a Thousand Babies,“ Saturday Evening Post, 6 June 1953, 68.Google Scholar

²¹ See Wheeler, Marianna, “Baby's First Summer,“ Harper's Bazaar 36 (July 1902): 647–51; also, Tow, Abraham, “The Rationale of Breast Feeding: A Modern Concept,” Hygeia 12 (May 1934): 406–408, on how conditions had changed by the 1930s.Google Scholar

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³¹ Alsop, G. F., “The Right to be Well-Bred,“ The Woman Citizen 8 (Feb. 1924): 27.Google Scholar

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³³ Wrigley, Julia, “Children's Caregivers and Ideologies of Parental Inadequacy: The Rise of Preschool Education,“ in Circles of Care, eds. Abel, Emily K. and Nelson, Margaret K. (forthcoming).Google Scholar

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³⁸ Stoddard, , “Nursery Schools,” 148; Inez Ross is quoted in “CWA Nursery Schools for Children,” Literary Digest 117 (24 Feb. 1934): 21. Heinig is quoted in Michel, Sonya A., Children's Interests/Mothers’ Rights: Women, Professionals, and the American Family, 1920–1945 (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1986), 175. Michel argues the early childhood movement did a great deal to shape the federal program and helped turn it in an educational direction (177).Google Scholar

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⁴⁰ Kenyon, Josephine H., “Health and Happiness Club: The Job of Motherhood,“ Good Housekeeping 99 (Sept. 1934): 103. Kenyon is quoting M. Beatrice Blankenship. See also Tow, “The Rationale of Breast Feeding,” 406–408.Google Scholar

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⁵⁰ Langdon, Grace, “How a Baby Learns,“ Parents’ Magazine 19 (May 1944): 27.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Wessel, M. A., “Healthy Children Need Doctors, Too,“ Parents’ Magazine 38 (Oct. 1963): 70, 148–50.Google Scholar

⁵² Wessel, , “Healthy Children,” 150; Edith Sunley, “Your Baby Doesn't Need a Clock,” Parents’ Magazine 38 (March 1963): 52–53.Google Scholar

⁵³ Greenblatt, , Responsibility for Child Care; Sar A. Levitan and Karen Cleary Alderman, Child Care and ABC's Too (Baltimore, 1975).Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Mothner, I., “Julie Wants to Learn,“ Look 10 Mar. 1964, 54, 58.Google Scholar

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⁵⁸ Bernath, Maja, “No More Bedtime Battles,“ Parents’ Magazine 39 (June 1964): 55.Google Scholar

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⁶² In the 1970s and 1980s, the percentage of articles discussing young children's intellectual development dropped somewhat from the peak decade of the 1960s (see Table 1). The federal government's retreat from its educational programs of the 1960s probably contributed to this. It might also reflect not so much a real change in the long-run trend as the intrusion of particular new, emotionally charged issues in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1970s, there was a rash of articles dealing with federal attempts to regulate doctors’ treatment of handicapped infants, the famous “Baby Doe” cases. In the 1980s, child abuse in day care centers became a new national concern. Only one article touched upon this in any other decade, but in the 1980s, fifteen of thirty-three articles dealing with child care covered the topic. Each decade, in short, had its own issues. It should be noted, though, that the percentage of articles dealing with cognitive development remained far above what it had been early in the century.Google Scholar

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⁷³ This pattern having been identified, perhaps a content analysis will be unnecessary for identifying key child-rearing issues in other time periods; a glance at areas where maternal incompetence is emphasized may do the job.Google Scholar

⁷⁴ Alwin, , “From Obedience to Autonomy: Changes in Traits Desired in Children, 1924–78.” For previous content analyses, see Vincent, “Trends in Infant Care Ideas”; Stendler, Celia B., “Sixty Years of Child Training Practices,“ Journal of Pediatrics 36 (Jan. 1950): 122–34; and Wolfenstein, Martha, “Trends in Infant Care,” American journal of Orthopsychiatry 23 (Jan. 1953): 120–30.Google Scholar

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