Half a Banana, Two Baked Beans, and Zero Kisses: Parenting Advice in the Early Twentieth Century

Intro

Welcome to Talk Spock! The podcast The podcast that explores:

• What’s the deal with Dr. Benjamin Spock?
• How did Baby and Child Care become the preeminent parenting guide of the 20th century?
• Who gets to tell parents how to parent?

Who are we?

First of all, who are we? And why are we talking about Dr. Spock?

I’m Deborah

And I’m Katie

And we co-host another podcast, It’s My Screen Time Too, where we review television and movies made for kids. It’s really fun, you should subscribe and listen to it!

We met in library school, a long time ago, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And for a while we worked as a reference librarian and an archivist. Until we each had kids and the demands of parenting made full-time work impossible. Now, besides hosting our other podcast, It’s My Screen Time Too, Deborah is a freelance writer, and I, Katie, am an early childhood music educator.

Deborah. Why Spock?

Good question! Why talk about Dr. Spock at all? He’s not even of this century. He was born in 1903 and died in 1998. He never listened to a podcast! Spock was the author of a book titled The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, published in 1946, which was revised into ten different editions over the course of the 1900s and 2000s as Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care. The latest, the 10th edition, was published in 2018.

Let me center myself in this discussion for a moment. My first child was born in 2009 and I got a copy of the 8th edition as a baby gift. Which was published in 2004. Since I had my first kid, there have been two more editions of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care. Katie, did you read any Spock when your kids were babies?

The parenting books that loomed large in my early parenting life were Dr. Sears books rather than Dr. Spock. William Sears’ The Baby Book was first published in 1993 and popularized attachment parenting, which was certainly the de rigeur parenting style when my kids were born. I also, as a francophile, read and loved “Bringing Up Bebe” the 2014 parenting book by Pamela Druckerman. Dr. Spock was not a presence on my bookshelf, though I was aware of his existence.

Now. We want to explore the life and legacy of this old guy from the 1900s because what is the deal? Why are his books still being revised and published? Was his parenting advice really that great? About a year ago, having been out of the baby game for many years, I noticed that the baby care or parenting trends that were a big deal when I was a new mom NOT THAT LONG AGO are not even a thing anymore. “Attachment parenting” has been rebranded as “Koala parenting.” There’s a trend on Tik-tok about “gentle parenting” or maybe that’s over, I don’t know, I’m not on Tik-tok. Are there any parenting trends that are passing you by?

 It definitely feels like the pendulum is maybe swinging away from the super-extreme permutation of attachment parenting (essentially all needs of the parent are ignored in favor of those of baby) to one that recognizes parents’ need to maintain their own lives again. It felt like there were some really goofy trends taking off there for awhile that we’ve maybe backed off on. Self care is such a buzzword that has permeated our culture. It’s natural to assume that it’s making its way into parenting literature.

Parenting trends go fast, and we want to understand what it is about Dr. Spock’s work that endures. Why is he around, or why is his brand around, twenty-five years after he died?

In this first episode, we’ll take a look at parenting guides written before Spock’s seminal work. Subsequent episodes will examine Spock’s childhood, education and early career in pediatrics and psychoanalysis, political activism, his attitudes toward women, the post-industrial professionalization of the domestic sphere -- we’re going to get into all of it! Who was this guy? Where and when did he accomplish his work? How did he get so popular? And how vast was his influence?

Now let’s get into our first question: 

Was Spock popular because the advice written before Baby and Child Care was pretty bad?

As we try to answer the question, how did Dr. Benjamin Spock become the preeminent and enduring parenting expert of the twentieth century and beyond, Our thesis, to begin with, is simple. The parenting manuals and the parenting experts that came before Spock were…just pretty bad.

So let’s set the scene of what parenting advice was like in the beginning of the 20th century, the 1900s. 

First, there were experts who are classified as authoritarians or hygienists.

In 1894, a pediatrician named L. Emmett Holt published  a book titled “The Care and Feeding of Children.” Pediatrics was kind of a new field, and Holt was a founder of the American Pediatric Society. Some highlights: Throughout his book, Holt referred to the baby as “it”. He advised against rocking. He advocated for crying writing, “‘It is the baby’s exercise’” (Atkinson, p. 131).

I’ve often heard (or read, though I can’t remember specific sources) that the concept of childhood as a time of exploration free from responsibility is a relatively recent one, and that early parenting advice seems to track with that - adults didn’t have time to drop everything to cater to their children’s developmental needs, and the emphasis was on encouraging children to fit into the routines and expectations of the adult world as quickly as possible, no matter how detrimental to children’s mental health.

It sounds extremely harsh, but pediatricians were dealing with a lot of disease and death in that time period! Holt’s intention was to address serious health issues of the day, like polio, typhoid, meningitis, scarlet fever, and, terribly, “summer complaint” which was basically diarrhea caused by a dirty milk supply. When Holt worked in New York City hospitals, the mortality rate for infants who had to be hospitalized was FIFTY PERCENT (Shulman). Louis Pasteur had made his discoveries about bacteria by then, but it “had not yet impacted child health (Shulman).

So maybe Holt was so busy trying to save babies that it just saved time to call them “it?” Or there’s a sense of self-preservation in not getting too attached. Aren’t there some cultures that delay even naming babies until a fairly late date in part to avoid getting too attached lest the baby die in infancy?

Yes! I remember learning about that when reading a Toni Morrison novel in college.

Spock himself writes critically about strict and inflexible schedules enforced upon babies in the first half of the 20th century, which doctors recommended in order to avoid “serious intestinal infections that afflicted tens of thousands of babies yearly. It was believed that these infections were caused not only by the contamination of milk but also by wrong proportions in the formula and by irregularity in feeding” (Common Sense Book, p. 52).

Even Spock himself had “‘summer complaint,’ a term that was used for severe diarrhea in infancy. Babies used to die by the thousands every summer before the care of milk had been perfected” (Spock on Spock, p. 31)

Remember “elimination communication” and how it made the parenting article rounds in the mid-20teens? 
 YES! 

Or maybe that’s just when I was paying attention to potty training options because that’s what phase of parenting I was at?

Okay, so Authoritarians like Holt were ALL OVER elimination communication. Another parent advice author named Ray Beery, who authored an early Parents Association publication, recommended beginning toilet training early and with regularity, aided by suppositories if necessary” (Atkinson, p. 134). Can you imagine?

That’s interesting because I always thought of that as  one of the goofier, impractical practices that made its way into this philosophy of parenting that seemed to be 100% based on the needs of the children and never on those of the adults or the family. Because it seemed like so much effort up front on the parents’ part. But I suppose diapers were less convenient back then.

Yes! People didn’t have washing machines! Much less disposable diapers.

At this period in history, home births were becoming less and less common and hospital births were increasing, and “hospitals provided new mothers with instructional pamphlets” (Atkinson, p. 136). This shift created a market for parenting literature.

Then, in the 1920s, came the Behaviorists like John B. Watson, a founder of Behaviorism. These parenting “experts” advocated that parents show little to no affection to their children, (from This Day In History pod)

I’m going to read to you a summary of Watson’s work, from an article by Professor Sue Atkinson “Watson’s advice against touching, cuddling, or rocking the baby to sleep was similar to Holt’s advice several decades earlier, but while Holt justified his directives with concern for the baby’s physical health and survival and mother’s workload, Watson gave a psychological rationale. He believed that too much handling and kissing was detrimental to babies, as this treatment would condition children to expect such behavior as they grew up. A boy might become a ‘mama’s boy’ and expect undue attention and affection from his wife” (Atkinson, p. 135).

Another writer, Margaret Talbot, writing a New York Times Magazine article in 1999 described Watson’s book, ‘Psychological Care of Infant and Child’ as “a staunch behaviorist blueprint that stressed regimentation in eating and elimination, warned parents not to hug or kiss their children and blamed mother-love for a generation of mollycoddled complainers unfit for the rigors of modern capitalism” (Talbot, p. 20).

This is so funny to me because as GenXers and Milennials, we were supposed to be the mollycoddled generations unfit for the rigors of modern capitalism! But I suppose it would be our grandparents’ generation coming up during this time, so geez, we call them “the greatest generation” so I guess it must have worked?

So, where the Authoritarians, like Holt, were coming from a place of just preventing infant mortality, Watson was coming more from a behavioral psychology point of view, and he was concerned that too much coddling would set a child up for failure.

I can’t help noticing that all these early advice givers were men who felt the need to stick their noses into a process that had - prior to the professionalization of the medicine - largely been the domain of midwives and women in general. Was this advice just borne of their experience of what was appropriate as fathers of the time? Spare the rod, spoil the child and whatnot?

I mean, babies had it rough!

Another author of widely circulated parenting advice was Dr. Herman Bundesen, a pediatrician and Chicago health commissioner. He also favored a strict schedule, training a baby to sleep by making them cry it out, fresh air - especially cold air, which was considered strengthening (Atkinson, p. 136).

Spock’s childhood/mother

Dr. Spock, who wasn’t a doctor when he was a baby, was born in 1903. And his mother was an adherent to Dr. Holt. and she “followed exactly” Holt’s The Care and Feeding of Children. 

Lynn Bloom, an early Spock biographer wrote that Spock’s mother “wanted her children to be hardy, so they slept, year-round, in an unheated canvas tent erected on the roof of the front porch.” “Although the chamber pot iced up in the winter, the children survived” (Bloom, p. 16).

Here is Spock, on his mother’s strictness, from an October 1, 1973 interview in the WNYC Archive Collections.

I believe that this was probably done out of love and fear, like, many many babies and children died, and these poor turn of the century parents, they were just trying to keep their children alive, right?

But my takeaway is that the kids of parents who followed the Holt advice had really weird diets!

Here’s an example:  Spock’s mother believed, because of Holt, that “bananas were a dangerous food for young children. She said that we couldn’t even taste a banana until we were twelve, and then we could only eat half a banana” 

Also Dr. Holt “vigorously condemned” cucumbers. “Once when I was on a small excursion steamer on the Damariscotta River, I saw a boy about my age (ten) sitting at the stern and munching a whole cucumber. I watched, absolutely horrified, expecting him to keel over dead.”

(Spock on Spock, p. 25)

His diet was really weird! On the kids having separate dinner from the parents, Spock wrote in his memoir: “Supper would typically be cereal and applesauce. It was served always at 5:30pm…We had to have our baths and be in bed and quiet by 6:45 pm because seven was the time my mother and father would be downstairs starting their candlelit dinner served by the Irish maid…They allowed me to join them at this dignified ceremony when I was twelve…it was quite a jump from cereal and applesauce to meat and potatoes and a vegetable and then dessert. And always salad: a slice of canned pineapple on a leaf of lettuce and a little ball of cream cheese with mayonnaise on top” (Spock on Spock, p. 7)

He also writes that, “Baked beans were never allowed by Dr. Holt.” During childhood summers spent in Maine, “My mother felt she was rash enough in giving each of us TWO BAKED BEANS and one small lobster claw” (Spock on Spock, p. 35).

In an early biography of Spock, I read that the Spock children were vegetarians. Which, fine. But “Dr. Holt recommended that children abstain from raw vegetables, salads, ready-to-serve cereals, hot breads, griddle cakes, pastry, nuts, candy, dried fruits, cherries, berries, bananas, pineapple, lemonade, cider, soda-water, tea, coffee, and alcoholic beverages. So the Spock youngsters lived largely on milk, stewed fruit, oatmeal and eggs” (Bloom, p 16).

It’s nice to know that even these blowhards didn’t know how to get a kid to eat a balanced diet. I am also jealous that they presented these things that are fairly easy to get a kid to eat - fruits, milk, eggs, oatmeal - as the ideal diet as opposed to today when we are encouraged to freak out if our kids aren’t eating kale salads

For all the weird and strict diet and meal regimens, his mother, Mildred Louise Stoughton Spock, was an interesting lady who took impeccable care of her kids, for the time. This is an anecdote that comes up in more than one book about Dr. Spock. He writes about it in his memoir, Spock on Spock:

[His mother] “sometimes made her own diagnosis first, and then asked Dr. Steel, our pediatrician to agree with her. She had read that pallor, fatigue, and whining can be a symptoms of mild malaria, but Dr. Steel, our pediatrician, pooh-poohed her suggestion that there could still be malaria in New Haven. So Mother took us all to a laboratory herself and they reported that we all had malaria” (Spock on Spock, p. 5).

Later on, Spock’s younger sister had Scarlet Fever, which the pediatrician denied, but later turned out the mother proved that she had had it. (Spock on Spock p. 5)

Sometimes I scare myself with how badly I want my doctors and my family’s doctors to have all the answers. Especially since Covid, I so deeply want to trust them. But then I hear stories from friends whose doctors swear they need invasive knee surgery when really they've just been walking around with an easily curable infection for literal years and I despair. I am not quite to the point in parenting confidence when I confidently flout a doctor’s diagnosis, and I’m not always sure that’s a bad thing.

It’s so disconcerting to learn about misdiagnoses and medical mistakes!

So, We’re really doing a fast forward through the 1900s here, but this is a podcast about parenting guides, and not a detailed history of pediatrics, right?

In the 1940s, there’s a new school of thought, Child Development.

Arnold Gesell, who was a psychologist and pediatrician, and Frances Ilg, who was a pediatrician, published Infant and Child in the Culture Today in 1943

Brief pieces on Spock will contrast him with Holt and Watson, and portray Spock as a radical departure from these strict rules about scheduling babies and raising children, but Spock was building upon and responding to Gesell and Bundesen. 

V. Sue Atkinson, a professor at Binghampton University in New York, writes [in Shifting Sands: Professional Advice to Mothers in the First Half of the Twentieth Century] “While Spock’s book is popularity credited as a radical departure from the strictness of the past, it built on Gesell’s work in the early 1940s and the mood of the postwar years away from the behaviorism of the late 1920s. In fact, both the Infant Care pamphlets and Bundesen’s work predate Spock’s landmark book, suggesting that Spock reflected, rather than pioneered, new ideas about parenting.

Spock describes “mothers, who had to sit listening, biting their nails, wanting to comfort their babies but not allowed to do so” because they had to wait for exactly four hours to pass between feedings. Strictness in feeding schedules bled into affection. Spock writes, “Doctors and nurses feared irregular feeding so strongly that they came to disapprove of it psychologically, too, and taught mothers that it would lead to spoiling the child. In the general enthusiasm for strictness, mothers were usually advised to IGNORE THEIR BABY EXCEPT AT FEEDING TIME [emphasis mine]. Even kissing was frowned upon [by a few]” (Baby and Child Care 1957 ed, p. 52).

Again, such a topsy turvy upside down world this was. The prevailing wisdom when my kids were little was HOW DARE YOU NOT IMMEDIATELY ANSWER YOUR BABY’S CRY NO MATTER THE CIRCUMSTANCE?! I remember using Ferber for sleep training and being strongly berated by other moms I considered friends for neglecting my baby. 

(Spock on Spock, p. 133). Spock says he didn’t do a lot of research, he just drew upon his 10 years of pediatric practice. But. “I did crib two ideas from recent books.” He cribbed the “chatty style that was comforting to mothers” from Bartlett. And he tried for Gesell and Ilg’s reassuring style, not giving earliest or average ages for development.

So, was Spock popular because the advice written before Baby and Child Care was pretty bad?

I mean, yes? The world was so different between when Dr. Emmet Holt was trying to save the lives of babies who drank spoiled milk, right? 

If we just take the text of Holt’s advice it sounds awful. But when we put it into the context of babies dying because of inadequate and unsafe food storage, it makes sense.

And with the invention of pasteurization, and more homes having refrigerators, the food supply was much safer, babies weren’t dying of summer complaint. By the time Spock was writing Baby and Child Care, it was a new era. Because of industrialization and urbanization, and the Depression, more babies were being born in hospitals, more young parents were living away from extended family and matriarchal support. And who wants to let a baby go four whole hours between bottles, right? 

So, let’s say the advice written before Spock’s Baby and Child Care wasn’t bad, it was different, it was for an earlier era of parents and society.

New Spock / Old Spock

Before we wrap up, let’s go to a segment we call “New Spock, Old Spock. In this segment we’ll take a look at early Spock advice and see what has changed since the mid-1900s.

For this episode, we’re going back to the delivery room--oops, no, we’re not! Because this is about dads, and dads weren’t allowed in the delivery room!

The 1957 edition of The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care describes dads in the hospital waiting room while the mother gives birth:

“The father is apt to feel particularly left out during the hospital period with his first baby. He helps to get his wife safely to the hospital, where there are dozens of people to take care of her. Then he’s really alone, with nothing to do outside of working hours. He can sit in the waiting room with some old magazines and worry about how the labor is going, or he can go to his unbelievably lonely home. It’s no wonder that a man may take this occasion to drink in company at a bar.” p. 17.

What do later editions say about fathers and hospitals?

The 10th edition was published in 2018 and was updated and revised by Dr. Robert Needlman. Needlman didn’t work directly with Spock but was a student of Steven Parker, a pediatrician Spock worked with on the 7th edition before Spock’s death.

There is absolutely no consideration given to the idea that the father might not be in the delivery room.

“A generation ago, most fathers would never have dreamed of reading a book about raising babies. Now it almost goes without saying that fathers participate at every stage. They go to prenatal visits, attend childbirth classes, and support their partners in labor and delivery. They aren’t lonely, excluded onlookers anymore.” p35

“Consider hiring a doula for your delivery…Doulas can help fathers, too. It’s the rare father who can soothe a laboring woman’s pain and anxiety as well as a trained doula, especially when the father is anxious himself. A doula frees up the father to be with his partner in a loving way rather than as a coach. Most fathers feel supported by the doula, not replaced.” p.36

Thanks for listening to this episode of Spock Talk! Please subscribe so you are sure to get our next episode, in which we’ll explore how Dr. Benjamin Spock’s privileged background helped him establish himself as an authority on childrearing!

See this episode’s show notes for our references.

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Special thanks to the WNYC Archive Collections!

We’ll see you soon, the next time we Talk Spock!