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Preface to Dream Babies

Dream Babies

Ever since the first baby threw its first tantrum, there have been people telling us how we ought to look after our babies. Philosophers, doctors, religious gurus, feminists, psychologists, anthropologists, professional nannies, journalists, admen and a fashion model (Paula Yates) have topped the babycare best-seller lists at different times. Experienced mothers and grandmothers have frequently set pen to paper or finger to keyboard; so too have proud fathers. Today they are joined by internet blogs by defiantly imperfect ‘slummy mummies’ and former maternity nurse Gina Ford, whose manuals sell in millions but who has no children of her own. Never in the whole of written history have so many different experts dictated to new parents in such detail. Most confusingly of all, their advice is infinitely varied.

There is no doubt that new parents do need advice, and now more than ever. The small families of the late twentieth century have meant that it is unusual to have cared for a small baby morning, noon and night until you have one of your own. Hospitals chuck new mothers out after 48, or even 24, hours. Summoning a health visitor seems like an admission of failure. Moreover, now that so many women work for a decade or more before having a baby, you are not likely to have a peer group of friends approaching parenthood together. Some chums haven’t got a baby yet, some never intend to have one, and you lost touch with the ones who were surrounded by bawling babies and toddlers from hell while you were still breaking glass ceilings and clubbing.

If granny lives near by, and you get on with her, that’s great. But even granny’s nerve has been shaken by the dramatic swings in baby-raising fashions in the last fifty years. The strict regimes of Truby King suited the years of wartime austerity, but were rejected in favour of Benjamin Spock’s easy-going permissiveness in the never-had-it-so-good years after it. Now that mothers have to go back to work as soon as possible to help pay the mortgage, routines are growing in popularity once again. But such ‘detachment’ is hotly criticised by enthusiasts for ‘attachment parenting’, which calls for babies wrapped round their mums like tiny lemurs, and cosy threesomes in a ‘family bed’.

It feels natural to turn to a book. You learnt to cook from Nigel, Nigella and Jamie; you picked up tips on cleaning your house from Kim and Aggie, and Trinny and Susannah taught you what not to wear. But you trusted your personal preferences too. If you didn’t fancy particular recipes, you ignored them, and roasted a leg of lamb just like Mum used to do. You made common sense compromises on hygiene and picked and mixed among the dictates of the fashion fascisti.

Babies are a different story. Here’s this tiny human person, entirely dependent on you and nobody but you. Every minute counts, the experts tell you. Bonding, breast-feeding, hours of sleep, stimulating intelligence, potty-training: getting these things wrong could lead to lifelong physical and psychological disadvantages. You flip from book to book in panic, agonising over the fact that you can’t keep to Gina Ford’s clockwork routines as well as offer the constant close contact recommended by Bill and Martha Sears. If you put off going back to work to improve your toddler’s cognitive development and emotional attachment, where are you going to get the money from to pay the hundreds of thousands of pounds that the average child is now supposed to cost?

It’s time to get a grip, and treat babycare books to the same critical inspection that you give to cookery books and fashion magazines, or the new novel you select not because of wall-to-wall advertising hype but because it appeals to you personally. The experts themselves are the first to support such selectivity ‘Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do’ were the humble and immensely reassuring opening words of the best-selling babycare title of all time, Dr Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Childcare, first published in 1947. ‘Don’t take too seriously all that the neighbours say. Don’t be overawed by what the experts say. Don’t be afraid to trust your own common sense. Bringing up your child won’t be a complicated job if you take it easy, trust your instincts, and follow the directions your doctor gives you’.

Much of the information packed into today’s manuals is useful, and their authors are humane, sympathetic people who genuinely believe that they help their readers to bring up better babies, or at least to bring up babies better. They can even see their own flaws. ‘Attachment parenting is an ideal’, warns Bill Sears. ‘Because of medical situations, life-style differences, or just plain rough times, you may not be able to practise all these attachment tips all the time’. T Berry Brazelton admits that

Too much is written for the new mother. Most of the literature is aimed at giving her advice. Very little of it offers her support for her own individual reactions and intuitions. Baby books tell her how to become the perfect mother. Eminent authorities intellectualize the process of becoming a mother . . . She finds that many of her instinctual reactions are frowned upon by one authority or another. The literature that was designed to support her becomes an undermining influence. (Infants and Mothers)

Parents who prefer to bring up their own children rather than the dream children of the experts have two defences. One is to use the touchstone of real people, as well as ambitious advice books, to help them bring up their baby. Establish friends in ante-natal classes, and keep in touch with them after your baby is born even when you feel you are the only one failing to parent properly (everyone feels that way from time to time, or indeed all the time). Don’t hesitate to seek advice from your midwife, health visitor and GP: increasing demand will make it more difficult for the NHS to continue its cuts. Talk to other parents in the baby clinic waiting room. Comparing notes emphasises as nothing else does the variations between babies: just looking at the big bruiser in one pushchair and the elfin baby in another makes you realise that their needs are likely to be different. Use local noticeboards and the internet to find kindred spirits.

The second defence, and the aim of this book, is to counter the barrage of information with information of a different kind. If we can understand why baby-care manuals were first written, and how they came to exceed their original brief, then we can confine them to their proper province. If it becomes clear that, while babies and parents remain constants, advice on the former to the latter veers with the winds of social, philosophical and psychological change, then we can see the books we use today as temporary crutches, not eternal verities. It also enables us to put grandmother’s advice into perspective. The history of baby-care books is no substitute for a modern book of baby-care, but it is an essential antidote - and an excellent distraction from the real thing.

Restoring parental sanity is not the only aim of this book. It also has the straight historical purpose of describing how people thought babies should be brought up, from the eighteenth century to the present day. I don’t claim that this is how people actually brought up their children: a comparison of the Newsoms’ Infant Care in an Urban Community with the current edition of Spock would be enough to discourage one from any such assumption. Again, in the historical context, this book is an antidote, rather than a substitute. Too much reliance seems to me to have been put on the extreme and the extraordinary in our picture of past parenthood. Eccentric upper-class Englishmen, or fanatical Massachusetts Puritans dominate the scene. It is at least possible that many parents practised what popular theorists of their day preached, just as most of us conform these days to one school of parenting or another.

I found that the pattern which emerged from the manuals was not at all consistent with the images of heavy father/remote and neglectful mother so often vaguely projected over eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nurseries. Mrs Gaskell’s contemporaries could hardly have been more maternally attentive. Rousseaumania in the 1790s and the Child Study Movement of the 1890s showed that permissiveness and baby worship were not late twentieth-century prerogatives. The I920s were officially more repressive than any nineteenth-century decade. To some extent it seems possible to argue that a strictly brought-up generation turned to its children with determined gentleness, and conversely the indulged child grew up to berate its offspring into submission. But generally profounder changes - new philosophies, economic depression or imperial affluence, the threat of war, women expecting lifelong jobs - have had the greatest effect.

It seemed right to take up the thread of advice on baby-care in the middle of the eighteenth century, because it was then that medical and philosophical events led a significant number of people to write books on the subject. Earlier manuals survive, usually in Latin, and intended for doctors rather than mothers to refer to. The significance of the eighteenth century books was that books began to be addressed to ‘intelligent Parents as well as the medical World’ (Underwood, Treatise on Diseases of Children, 1789), and to be written in English. To set the scene the manuals sought to change, a sketch is given of how the early eighteenth-century baby was cared for. Although on crucial matters like feeding, a continuous story unfolds, it would have been tedious and repetitive to detail at every point how babies were to be dressed, or dosed. Sometimes it was interesting, sometimes it wasn’t, so I have concentrated on such issues when they mattered most.

I wrote that babies and parents remained constants. Of course, they vary in type. There isn’t space in this book to give the evidence for this, the many voices of fathers and mothers revealing their hopes and doubts, and of children reminiscing about their childhoods. But I have used such parents as Cotton Mather, Hester Thrale, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Darwin, Millicent Shinn and Rosalie Watson, who all left minutely detailed accounts of their babies’ lives, to make it clear that there have always been as many ways of bringing up children at any one time as there are mothers and babies. Some are blindly loving, and criticized by their contemporaries for it, others are censured for their unnecessary severity.

Child-care experts show the same variety of personality. Regardless of the time at which they are writing, they can be classified as cuddly or astringent; lap theorists or iron men (or maidens). The latter claim that things are now disgracefully lax, the former that fifty years ago child-care was appallingly strict. In this sense, Penelope Leach has more in common with Lydia Sigourney, ‘sweet singer of Hertford’ of the 1830s, than with her contemporaries, Ronald and Cynthia Illingworth. Hugh Jolly should look to Samuel Smiles for a kindred spirit rather than to Benjamin Spock. Gina Ford has more than a hint of Truby King, and Bill and Martha Sears agree with all that Margaret Ribble wrote on The Rights of Infants in the 1940s. Knowing that personal opinion affects interpretation in baby-care books is an important defence for parents. They have less need to be anxious about their own views if the ‘experts’ are recognized to be subjective.

What right men have to talk about bringing up babies at all is a question which feminists have asked, and it needs to be considered from the moment that the first popular expert William Cadogan crowed the triumph of ‘Men of Sense’ over ignorant midwives and nurses. Men dominated the medical profession, and even intruded into midwifery. Locke and Rousseau felt that their voices should be heard on practical matters like breast-feeding, as well as on the moral side of management. They were healthily balanced by women like Hannah More, Mrs Trimmer and Maria Edgeworth. In the nineteenth century, women writers continued to hold their own, confident in their experience and common sense, although they had to bow to male medical expertise. The scientific approach at the end of the nineteenth century was dominated by men, who pushed women into a subservient place, describing them as fitted to do no more than record incidents in their child’s life which the father, the ‘scientific educator’, could analyse. Ellen Key’s trumpet call for a ‘Renaissance of Motherhood’ died away in face of the implacable masculinity of Truby King’s ‘mothercraft’. But women kept writing: Mrs Frankenburg, Selma Fraiberg and Penelope Leach knitted their own maternal experiences to contemporary physical and psychological science. Today the field is divided between men and women. But there is a nice irony in the fact that best selling babycare expert of our own times is Gina Ford, one of the ‘ignorant women maternity nurses’ whose influence William Cadogan so deplored 250 years ago.

Although the relative influence of men and women as babycare experts has a superficial interest, I didn’t find that it was as important as the wider issues which governed thinking, or as influential as the personality type of the writer, regardless of his or her sex. I would far rather read Brazelton than Edith Buxbaum; femininity is no guarantee of sensitivity. Babies have fathers as well as mothers; perhaps some of the most satisfying and well-balanced books have been written by husband/wife partnerships.

Inevitably the early baby-care manuals, particularly before 1945, show considerable middle-class bias. They were written by and for the comfortably off, for people who could afford to sit back and consider how their children ought to grow up, but who didn’t want to banish their children to a nursery wing in the style of the great aristocratic families. The few written for the working class often revealed an unpleasantly superior attitude, even telling them to bring up their children along rather different lines to those felt suitable for their ‘betters’. Nevertheless, the ideas put forward were the common intellectual currency of their day, and interesting for all their limitations.

What is perhaps most startling about these neglected authorities is how often they anticipate later thinkers. Harriet Martineau could have told John Bowlby about attachment and loss; Andrew Combe was as conscious of early influences as Benjamin Spock. Lydia Sigourney’ ability to communicate with babies rivalled that of Baby Whisperer Tracy Hogg. There are plenty of good ideas for would-be green parents in Maria Edgeworth. We still read Jane Austen or Henry James with profit. Babycare manuals by their contemporaries - James Nelson or Marion Harland, for example - retain a wit and immediacy which the modern parent can enjoy. Reading about the vintage volumes of babycare will, I hope, encourage you to approach modern books in the spirit of connoisseurs, to sample them and select what they feel fits in with their own feelings towards their children. We need information, not prescriptions, from the professionals, ideas, not orders. Telling mothers and fathers how to bring up their children in books is arguably as silly as sending false teeth through the post and hoping that they will fit.

When this book was first published in 1983, it achieved everything I could have hoped for. Historians were intrigued, experts infuriated and feminists shocked at my refusal to deplore women’s domestic captivity. Most important of all, a flood of letters made it clear that it had instructed, amused, and comforted a great many parents. I revised it in 1992, identifying a new world in which the hottest child-care issues were who minds the kids, the contrast between father’s and mother’s styles of parenting, and the need for divorced parents to stay amicable.

In the last three years, I have been blessed with three grandchildren of my own and have had to undergo a crash course to debrief myself from my own chosen mix of Spock and my own mothers 1944 Intelligent Parents Guide and to learn to be a new model granny (using, what else, a most useful new book called The Good Granny Guide). I soon discovered that parents, especially first-timers in the early months, were much less well-supported by perinatal services than they were when I had our children. Moreover, the advice provided for them was more contradictory than it had ever been, and some kind of war seemed to have broken out between stay-at-home yummy-mummies and mothers who wanted to, or more often had to, go back to work soon after their maternity leave expired. The time seemed ripe to thunder to the rescue by reissuing Dream Babies. It now includes an overview of the last 25 years, surveying the latest trends in advice on bringing up babies, and the encroachment of the experts on the lives of parents as well as their offspring. Because of the sheer volume of books on the subject published since 1983, I can’t pretend to have read them all, and I may have missed out your own favourite. But I think that the mood of the times is accurately conveyed.

The good news is that after the first anxiety-loaded few months, parental confidence is quite evidently gathering force as we all get to grips with the changing shape of the working world and the new opportunities that technology is offering us. Being able to join forums and talkboards to see what other parents think, and to google a dozen different solutions to any one baby care problem provides a helpful instant modern perspective - indeed, internet sites may well overtake books as the first choice for advice in the near future. But being able to set the advice we are given into social and historical context is a vital step towards asserting our own opinions as to how we want our children to grow up.

C.H.

July 2007