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Do Young Children Need Intellectual Stimulation? Experts' Advice to Parents, 1900–1985

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Julia Wrigley
Julia Wrigley*
Affiliation:
Departments of Education and Sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles
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Extract

The field of family history has been in creative ferment in recent years as historians have debated whether or not the early modern era brought a fundamental change in family life. While historians such as Philippe Ariès, Lawrence Stone, and Edward Shorter have claimed that families became closer and more child-centered, others deny major changes in the emotional lives of families have occurred. The skeptics suggest the impossibility of deriving any conclusions about the level of attachment family members felt for each other. They also point out that those emphasizing increased intimacy and attachment cite different time periods when this change is supposed to have occurred: estimates range from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, with most historians settling on the eighteenth century.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , Spring 1989 , pp. 41 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 by the History of Education Society 

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References

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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34 Greenblatt, Bernard, Responsibility for Child Care (San Francisco, 1977).Google Scholar

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

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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

55 Smart, M., “The Magic of Mothering,“ Parents Magazine 40 (Jan. 1965): 35.Google Scholar

56 Bernath, Maja, “Your Baby Is a High Achiever,“ Parents’ Magazine 39 (Feb. 1964): 94; see also Smith, N., “Your Baby's Five Senses and How They Develop,” Parents’ Magazine (Sept. 1963): 64–65, 136, 138.Google Scholar

57 Wessel, M. A. and Simon, N., “Is Your Baby a Sparkler?“ Parents’ Magazine 38 (Feb. 1963): 148–50; Hechinger, Grace, “Getting to Know Your Baby,” Parents’ Magazine 39 (July 1964): 36–37.Google Scholar

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

59 Weiss, , “The Mother-Child Dyad Revisited“; Bauer, F., “The Plight of the Brand-New Parent,“ New York Times Magazine, 7 Apr. 1963.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

63 Fagan, J. F., “Infant Color Perception,“ Science, 8 Mar. 1974, 973–75; “Babies: More Aware than We Think,” Science News, 6 Apr. 1974, 222–23. Critics of stress on infant learning include David Elkind, Miseducation: Preschoolers at Risk (New York, 1987); Lacayo, Richard, “Getting off to a Head Start,” Time, 8 Oct. 1984, 62; Moore, Gaylen, “The Superbaby Myth,” Psychology Today, June 1984, 6–7.Google Scholar

64 On the Better Baby Institute, see Elkind, , Miseducation; Hughes, Felicity, Reading and Writing before School (New York, 1971); Doman, Glenn, Teach Your Baby to Read (London, 1963). The Doman quote is from Paula Span, “Can You Raise Your Baby to be a Genius? Should You Try?” Glamour, August 1984, 293.Google Scholar

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69 Collins, , The Credential Society; Bowles, Samuel and Gintis, Herbert, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York, 1976); Mickelson, Roslyn A., Race, Class, and Gender Differences in Adolescent Academic Achievement Attitudes and Behaviors (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1984).Google Scholar

70 Wrigley, Julia, “Servants and the Transmission of Cultural Capital from Parents to Children“ (Unpublished, 1987).Google Scholar

71 Lubeck, Sally, Sandbox Society: Early Education in Black and White America (London, 1985).Google Scholar

72 Kohn, Melvin L., Class and Conformity: A Study in Values 2d ed. (Chicago, 1977).Google Scholar

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

75 See Richardson, , “Inventing Age Status, Infancy to Adolescence.”Google Scholar

76 Kahn, Alfred J. and Kamerman, Sheila B., Child Care: Facing the Hard Choices (Dover, Mass., 1987).Google Scholar

77 Joffe, Carole E., Friendly Intruders: Childcare Professionals in Family Life (Berkeley, 1977); Lubeck, Sandbox Society; Julia Wrigley, “The Implications of a Class Divide: Professionally-Employed Mothers and Their Children's Day Care Providers” (Paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Washington, D.C., 1987). These class differences may be intensified, because researchers have suggested middle-class parents are more likely to read and follow the advice of experts (many of whom stress young children's cognitive development). The effects may be further intensified among those parents who hire caregivers, as Clarke-Stewart found that parents who use nonfamilial caregivers are particularly likely to read advice literature. She suggests, “The increasingly common use of nonfamilial help with child rearing may also be forcing parents to seek experts’ confirmation of their child-rearing ideas when their ideas are different from those of the supplementary caregiver. The present data show that parents using nonfamilial care read more child-care books” (“Popular Primers for Parents,” 365). This greater reliance on expert advice may in turn increase parents’ anxieties about the abilities of the caregivers to meet their children's presumed needs for intellectual stimulation.Google Scholar