In the world of childcare books, stern routine has given way to sympathetic flexibility
When our first child was five weeks old, we took her to the South of France. It was as much motivated by determination to prove that a child would not change our lives as by any urge to enjoy ourselves. Despite our blasé attitude, however, and just in case anything went wrong, we took Dr Hugh Jolly's Book of Child Care. We did have one mishap. On the train back, the book fell from the luggage rack onto the baby's head.
New parents faced with the profusion of conflicting advice might be tempted to draw a moral from that episode. Along with manuals on gardening and cookery, baby books top the bestseller lists. Doctor Spock's Commonsense Book of Baby and Child Care, after the Bible, has outsold all other non-fiction works. No cribside bookshelf is complete without Spock, Jolly, or Leach.
Baby books in the first half of this century tend to present the child/parent relationship as a battleground. One of the earliest mass-produced books and one of the most influential was Dr Luther Holt's The Care and Feeding of Children, first written in 1894. He described the Machiavellian instinct of a bawling infant. It is easy, he said, for a mother to recognise the cry of indulgence or from habit.
"This is often heard in very young infants who cry to be rocked, to be carried about, sometimes for a light in the room, for a bottle to suck or for the continuance of any other bad habit which has been acquired."
If a child stops crying as soon as it is given what it wants, says Holt, that is the cry of indulgence. "Never give a child what it cries for."
In 1928, in his much-acclaimed work Psychological Care Of Infant And Child, John B. Watson advocated the deliberate avoidance of love in order to fully develop the child's potential. "Treat them as though they were young adults. Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinarily good job of a difficult task... You will be utterly ashamed of the mawkish sentimental way you have been handling it."
Today's brand of baby book is altogether more gentle (though quite as domineering in its own way). A more liberal attitude is encouraged. The image of the baby as a well-oiled piece of machinery has disappeared. No rigid formula is to be followed. The important thing is not which method to adopt but the frame of mind of the parent. But perhaps the biggest difference is the licence for pleasure.
Penelope Leach was, she says, motivated to write her book Baby and Child (first published in 1977) because of her fear that "the whole baby business was in danger of becoming unnecessarily grim and forbidding. We are in danger of taking away the joy and leaving only guilt and hard work in its place." Leach's book is described as "the baby book that is written from the baby's point of view," an accurate summing up if the following somewhat censorious passage is anything to go by.
"Parents are told that the baby is crying 'because she wants you to pick her up.' The implication is that she is making an unreasonable demand on you, and that if you give in, you will start bad habits. In fact, the reverse is true. The baby is not making unreasonable demands, you are. She is not crying to make you pick her up but because you put her down in the first place."
The great flaw in baby-care books is that whatever the format, they present as fact what is often merely conjecture. However much is researched and written, the small human being is still largely an unknown quantity. Dr Spock wrote in his first edition, "You know more than you think you do." But it is not easy for anyone confronted with a small baby to believe that. That's why the baby books continue to sell.
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