Free Love at Goon Park by Deborah Blum Page A

mind it; it will soon learn to sleep without having to depend on rocking and nursing.” Dr. Luther Holt took the same stance and his publication, The Care and Feeding of Children, was an even bigger success. There were fifteen editions of his book between 1894 and 1935. Holt believed in a rigorous scientific approach to the raising, or let’s say, taming of the child. The whole point of childhood was preparing for adulthood, Holt said. To foster maturity in a child, Holt stood against the “vicious practice” of rocking a child in a cradle, picking him up when he cried, or handling him too often. He urged parents not to relax as their child matured. Holt was also opposed to hugging and overindulging an older child.
    It’s easy today to wonder why anyone would have listened to this paramilitary approach to childcare. Undoubtedly—or at least we might hope—plenty of parents didn’t take heed. Yet, Holt and Watson and their contemporaries were extraordinarily influential. Their messages were buoyed by a new, almost religious faith in the power of science to improve the world. The power of technology to revolutionize people’s lives was a tangible, visible force. Gaslights were
flickering out as homes were wired for electricity. The automobile was beginning to sputter its way down the road. The telegraph and telephone were wiring the world. There were mechanical sewing machines, washing machines, weaving machines—all apparently better and faster than their human counterparts. It was logical to assume that science could improve we humans as well.
    John Watson wasn’t the only researcher to publicly urge scientific standards for parenting. The pioneering psychologist G. Stanley Hall, of Clark University, entered the childcare field as well. In 1893, Hall helped found the National Association for the Study of Childhood. His own work focused on adolescence and he believed that the difficulties encountered at this time of life were in part due to mistakes by parents and educators in the early years. Hall admired much about what he called the adolescent spirit and its wonderfully creative imagination. But it needed discipline, he said, moral upbringing, strict authority to guide it.
    Speaking to the National Congress of Mothers—a two-thousandmember group organized in 1896 to embrace the concept of scientific motherhood—Hall urged Victorian tough love upon them. Their children needed less cuddling, more punishment, he said; they needed constant discipline. After Hall’s talk to the mothers’ congress, the New York Times rhapsodized in an editorial, “Given one generation of children properly born and raised, what a vast proportion of human ills would disappear from the face of the Earth.” Women at the conference left determined to spread the word. No more adlibbing of childcare, they insisted. There were real experts out there, men made wise by science. Parents needed to pay attention. “The innocent and helpless are daily, hourly, victimized through the ignorance of untrained parents,” said the Congress of Mothers’ president, Alice Birney, in 1899. “The era of the amateur mother is over.” (The mothers’ congress, by the way, changed and grew and eventually became part of the PTA.)
    The demand for scientific guidance was so pressing that the federal government’s Child Bureau—housed in the Department of
Labor—after all, childrearing was a profession—went into the advice business. The bureau recruited Luther Holt as primary advisor on its “Infant Care” publications. Between 1914 and 1925, the Labor Department distributed about 3 million copies of the pamphlet. Historian Molly Ladd-Taylor, in her wonderfully titled book , Raising a Baby the Government Way, reports that the Child Bureau received up to 125,000 letters a year asking for parenting help. The bureau chief, Julia Lathrop, said that each pamphlet was