Abstract
The above comment appears at the start of the final section of Dream Babies, Christina Hardyment’s influential history of childcare advice in Britain and North America. Her account begins in 1750, indicating that the issuing of ‘childcare advice’ is certainly not new. However, the present seems notably different to the past. The volume and scope of childcare advice today is remarkable, as is the extent to which ‘intimate’ matters which were previously not the subject of public discussion have ‘spilled out’. Hardyment gave the final chapter of her book, which examines the years from 1981 to 2001, the title ‘Spotlight on Parents’, suggesting that, in particular, the parent has become the target of advice in a distinct way.
A vast industry of childcare advice has arisen. Bookshop shelves groan under the weight of warring theories about the best way to bring up baby, guides for fathers, grandmothers and even aunts. Parents spill out intimate details of conflict in the kitchen and crises in the bedroom in magazine columns, blogs and internet forums. Information overload is turning parenthood into a nightmare of anxiety and stress. (Hardyment, 2007, p. 283)
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Further reading
Ehrenreich, B. and English, D. (1979) For Her Own Good: 150 years of the experts’ advice to women (London: Pluto Press).
Chapters 6 and 7 of this book, ‘The Century of the Child’ and ‘Motherhood as Pathology’, are most directly relevant for the study of parenting culture. They form part of a larger study of the relation between experts’ advice and women, which stands as the seminal feminist history of the relation between scientific expertise and gender.
Hardyment, C. (2007) Dream Babies: Childcare advice from John Locke to Gina Ford (London: Francis Lincoln).
This is the most recognized ‘must read’ for those who want to find out about the history of advice to parents. While written for a wider market, it contains both excellent historical material going back to the eighteenth century, and social analysis.
Hulbert, A. (2004) Raising America: Experts, parents, and a century of advice about children (New York: Vintage).
This work focuses on twentieth-century America, and provides a very detailed account of experts, their arguments, the context, and the response from parents at different points in time. It provides an excellent account of the ‘famous names’ and what they had to say, but its great strength lies in its contextualiza- tion of expert opinion in wider scientific, social, and cultural developments.
Kessen, W. (1979) ‘The American Child and Other Cultural Inventions’, American Psychologist 34(10), 815–820.
This short journal article is by William Kessen, Professor of Psychology and Paediatrics at Yale University. Kessen was a genuine expert, whose pioneering contribution to understanding early child development is widely recognized, as was his work exploring the nature of developmental psychology as a field of research and its relation to the wider culture.
Wolf, J. (2011) Is Breast Best? Taking on the breastfeeding experts and the new high stakes of motherhood (New York: New York University Press).
This recent work explores a specific area of parental experience – feeding babies – and provides two sorts of analysis. One is an account of the scientific literature and what it does actually tell us about the relation between health and breast or bottle feeding. In this respect it shows us the value of science, properly defined. The other is a sociocultural account of why expert claims about how a baby should be fed, centring on ‘breast is best’, depart so widely from what science actually tells us. This account rests primarily on an analysis of how we have come to think about risk, and is invaluable for those wanting to understand this concept better.
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© 2014 Ellie Lee, Jennie Bristow, Charlotte Faircloth and Jan Macvarish
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Lee, E. (2014). Experts and Parenting Culture. In: Parenting Culture Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137304612_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137304612_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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