Parents have long been bombarded with conflicting advice on how to bring up their babies: from Locke, Rousseau, and Truby King to Spock, Penelope Leach and Gina Ford. Behaviourist warnings in the 1920s about physical contact (‘Never hug and kiss them. Never let them sit in your lap’) swung to Jean Liedloff’s ‘continuum concept’ that babies should be wrapped round mum and fed on demand. Today enthusiasts for the ‘family bed’ are at war with Gina Ford’s call for a return to the strict routines of pre-Spock days. Who is right and who is wrong? In this updated edition of her classic account of how and why the experts’ advice ‘From Locke to Spock’ changed with changing times, Christina Hardyment analyses the anxieties of our own age and gives parents much-needed confidence in their own ability to choose the advice that best suits them and their babies.

Olga

Welcome to The Caring Instinct podcast. This is a conversation with Christina Hardiman, the author of Dream Babies, a unique book that looks at the history of childcare advice through the centuries. Ever since the first baby, through its first tantrum, there have been people telling us how we ought to look after our babies, she writes. So of course we wanted to talk to her. And now everything that could go wrong with this interview did. And it was my fault. My Internet died. And when I managed to fix it and we were talking again, I realised ten minutes in that I'd forgotten to press record. So you know what Christina said? She said, don't worry, Olga. I once interviewed Roald Dahl and forgot to start my recorder, which was very kind of her, but I was still gutted. I only had about 25 minutes of this amazing interview for you, and then she emailed me and graciously offered to record a part two. So enjoy this and we'll have more for you soon. Christina, welcome.

Christina

Hello. Nice to be here. Thank you for asking me.

Olga

I'm so curious. You are a historian and you say that you began writing this book as a young mother. So my question is, where did it come from, the idea? Because especially young parents can be so vulnerable to parenting advice, just taking it without questioning it, often because we don't have the confidence to take it with a pinch of salt. But you had the confidence to say, you know what? I'll do a history of that.

Christina

Well, I think one reason I wrote the book is because my whole habit of writing is researching and looking at the background of things. As I was beginning to have children, it made sense to look up the history of childcare advice. And although the accepted belief is that parents were very often very hard on their children and very cruel, and in the modern world, we do it all much better. What I discovered was that actually parents divided really between what you might call iron grip and comfortable lap parents. So people are different. That's one thing. The sort of parent that you're going to be, it depends on the sort of person you are. Nor is there any rule, I realise, for bringing up a particular child in the right way. It's a bit, reading a parenting advice book and expecting it to make fit your child is a bit like ordering false teeth through the post and hoping that they'll fit. You all know, looking round at other parents and their children, how very different their children are from each other and how they are probably from you. So I think the one message I hope people would take away from the book was that the great thing is to think about yourself and what sort of parent you're like, you want to be or you plan to be, and sticking to your guns, really, because through the centuries, parents have taken completely different attitudes. Surprisingly, at the end of the 18th century, they were particularly affectionate and allowing their children to do whatever they liked, because this was a time when the Enlightenment sent said, you should let children grow up absolutely naturally. And so there's one famous politician whose baby son stamped along the dining table when everyone was eating and it was regarded as quite acceptable. Times changed. And when the church had a revolution and became much stricter, then parents became very anxious about their child going to heaven. There's one rather blood chilling book which said, parents, as long as there is a grave in the churchyard shorter than your child, it is not too soon to begin strictness and bringing them up the way they should go. Not only does parenting advice change according to the times, if it's a time of great economic uncertainty, parents will both be working, probably, and looking after children is likely to be something that's done more from a distance. Whereas when, after the war, when everything became rich again and we all gained money, everybody became really spoiling, perhaps, and indulging their parents, their children, just because they could. One needs to consider the times we're in, as well as the fashions, the social influences that make people think they should do things one way or the other.

Olga

What I think your book shows so brilliantly is that parenting advice exists on several continua, one of them being between gentler parenting and harsher parenting, something you mentioned at the beginning. And, of course, it also depends on the personality of the parent and on the family. But at the same time, there is a trend that is set in time. Is that so?

Christina

Yes. There's a very sensible book called Toddler Taming, written in the 1960s, and what it points out is that parents have their limits. I mean, you can give so much to your child, you can take so much, but there comes a point where you're feeling really pressured by behaviour that really goes beyond what you think is acceptable. And what the books very sensibly says is the great thing is to put down a marker that that's not acceptable before it gets so close that you end up in a tantrum yourself, which never works well, although it often happens. As a parent.

Olga

What it makes me wonder is, I think. I wonder if that's your estimation as well. In the last 15 years, we've been in the time of gentle parenting, the more gentle approaches and what I have been noticing recently, the advocates of gentle parenting are now starting, for example, their posts on social media start with things like, gentle parenting is not permissive parenting. And then they basically start apologising almost and saying, no, we do have boundaries for children and all that. I wonder if this is the start of the pendulum swinging back to harsher times. And I'm worried about that.

Christina

Well, in a sense, as you know, one of the metaphors I use is a pendulum swinging. Depending if times are prosperous economically, in which case you can afford to be gentler and give way more and give your child more of the things they want to harsher parenting, which would mean that the economy was getting under pressure, which of course, just at the moment it is now. But I think that the business of both parents going out to work and feeling guilty. I think one should bear in mind that through the centuries, children have very often not been given total attention by either one or both parents because they have been probably working harder than we do. Mothers used to have to work very hard around the home and the garden and so on, and men were out in the fields and away. It probably isn't ideal for parents to sit with their children all day, not being in any way subservient to them. I always think it sort of important that children, rather than being the centre of attention, which very often upsets them, they see their parents getting on with so, and they've been given occupations that they can do, the parents do have lives and that the child is learning from watching those lives.

Olga

So that is another continuum. The more parent centred approaches and the more child centred approaches.

Christina

Yes, that's right. As you say now, we are probably maximum child centred approach. The number of outings children make to different groups or occupations or learning the violin or skating, parents seem to be almost sort of racing around all the time because these things seem to be on offer, they feel they must offer them to their children.

Olga

And I wonder if it's also our view of human nature that is reflected very often in parenting advice. And the one that's informing this approach is that there's so much potential in the child and it's up to the parent to foster it, to help the child discover it, or to discover it without helping anyone to take the lead there.

Christina

Yes. And yet parents, particularly as the children get into nursery or into early years of school, they often have a sense that they're losing touch with their child, that somehow the system is taking over the whole role of the parent. It's going to be a sense of loss.

Olga

Yes. That's a cultural thing too, because, for example, in the UK, homeschooling is quite an established practise, but there are countries like Germany that do not allow it at all, where the system takes over, in a way. And there's also another continuum is how much trust is given to families in a particular culture and in a particular country.

Christina

That's right. The extreme is the kibbutz system where the children are sent completely away from the parents. And that's not something that's often happened in Britain. But of course, because we're now a very diverse society, there are a lot of almost competing traditions of parenting, that parents may find it quite difficult to go along with the state tradition when they've got completely different ideas coming from their own cultures.

Olga

Yes, we had, and we still have boarding schools. The same idea, I suppose, sideline the parents, the family, completely.

Christina

Well, they rose up in the 19th century and they were. One aspect of the fact that parents had so many children, and particularly when health conditions were getting better, more and more children were surviving. And it's very interesting now that, in a sense, one reason parenting used to be much stricter than it was was because there were more children in the family. I can remember going to see a friend, my daughter's primary school, and she had eleven children and the house was organised like a military camp, you know, with notices everywhere, necessarily. And bearing in mind that now people have far fewer children, there is a problem, in a way, that all your eggs are in one basket and so you get much more anxious. You've only got one chance or two chances to do your best. What do you feel? Do you feel that a new consideration is whether you should have children at all?

Olga

I love the freedom of choice. We're not, by any stretch of imagination, an endangered species. So on a large scale, I suppose if there's fewer people in general, that's not the end of the world.

Christina

Well, I mean, one of the anxieties, of course, is the end of the world. And if we're really heading for disaster, should we commit children and grandchildren to that? I think. I think therse are quite depressing considerations. I mean, the only comfort I can offer is that having studied history for various centuries, people have always thought that. They've always thought we are the end of the world. Yeah, this is the end. I have a feeling that it's something you do when you realise that you're coming to your own end and you don't really want the world to go on without you. That's very flippant. But I think that it's quite easy to be a bit too economically minded about children. I mean, clearly, if you, for some reason, perhaps in your own childhood, you really don't like the idea of having children. That's absolutely your privilege. But it's worth listening to people who have had children. And of course, there's so many joys of having children that the sad thing now is that there's been an awful lot of concentration on the problems. But in fact, the quiet joys of parenthood are manifold and continue for a very long time. And then there's grandchildren and life getting more and more interesting, and then the prospect in your old age of having children and grandchildren and maybe great grandchildren, you feel a little bit like a tree, you know, with your roots going right down and somehow holding firmly to be part of.

Olga

And you're branching out.

Christina

Yes. Yeah. The opposite of a family tree. Yeah.

Olga

Oh, that's wonderful. The involvement of fathers, is this also a continuum, or can we millennials actually take credit for that?

Christina

I think that is a tremendous achievement. And from the time when I was married, fortunately, my husband, in fact, took up teaching, whereas I was sticking to writing. So we were both in jobs where we had a lot of time to spare for our children. And one thing that now happens, and I'm hugely impressed by having got four sons in law, is how much they do with the children and how part of the children's lives, on every level, you know, not just nappy changing, you know, going out shopping with them, feeding them all sorts of levels. I think there's been a much more move to equality of taking responsibility as a parenthood, and not always, and not in all society, parts of society. But I do think, as you say, it is a terrific achievement and it's.

Olga

A true new, isn't it? That's not happened before in the west.

Christina

Well, what's made it possible again are those domestic improvements with all the machines that the shops, the supermarkets, all right, make. Reducing the work in the home has made it much easier for both parents to be at work and for both to take responsibility. After all, I mean, if the mother isn't at work, it's quite reasonable for her to take domestic responsibility, but what else is she going to do? Embroidery or something? So.

Olga

Exactly.

Christina

I think that if both parents, then a sense of fairness arises, and that's one reason why men, if they have a heart at all, are doing their bit.

Olga

Absolutely. And at the same time, women are taking a bigger role in parenting advice, because it used to be women do all the childcare, but the experts are, of course, men and a lot of them doctors. I love that you point that out, that when a medical doctor takes on the role of parenting advice, they've got even more weight to throw about.

Christina

Yes, I think that's a very happy change. Although there were. But they were few and far between. The writers on childcare who were women, most of them were men and most of them were doctors. And of course, one reason was, one priority then was keeping children alive. And so a doctor's medical knowledge was important. So it wasn't without reason that. But it did lead to a sort of idea that, you know, you bring up a child for that reason only, and that's what the emphasis is. Whereas there are so many different aspects of bringing up a child. That's right up through till. Well, doctor Spock was probably a very forgiving and permissive father and parent, but after that, interestingly, some of the first prominent women childcare writers, like Miriam Stoppard, being a working woman, she took quite a sort of organised and strict approach to how you should bring up your children. Whereas Penelope Leach, who didn't go out to work, she got an awful scare, one of her children got meningitis and nearly died. And that sort of startled her, but made her intensely concerned with parenting. And her very long and detailed books and excellent in many, many ways, do, in a sense, reflect her position. I always found it fascinating to look into the background of the people who were writing the childcare books, because that is very illuminating. That's worth doing.

Olga

One of my favourites in your book is the biography of John Watson, the father of behaviourism, and what a biography it is. What I found really curious was with behaviourism. He, as you say, jettisoned the mind, the inner world, the emotions that was completely gone. It's stimuli and response. You get a particular behaviour by positive reinforcement and negative consequences. And then when his turbulent life threw him into advertising, what he thrived on was the understanding that we make emotional choices, not rational ones, and we buy a product, you say, because how it makes us feel, not any kind of a rational assessment of whether we need it or not. So an example you give of his marketing is, Caring mothers use J&J talcum powder for their babies. Poor mothers flock to buy the talcum powder because it was outside.

Christina

Yes, yes.

Olga

Yeah, that's. That's what you do if you want to be a better mother, that you had to use these products and that's.

Christina

That's been, of course, a hallmark of advertising ever since. I mean, advertisements for so many.

Olga

Absolutely.

Christina

Child products are built around the smiling mother being wonderful and the child grateful and so on. Yes, the whole marketing industry is quite depressing.

Olga

Yeah, absolutely. And his own book, he marketed as the book dedicated to the first mother who brings up a happy child.

Christina

Yes.

Olga

Manipulative, is that?

Christina

Yes, it's very, very manipulative.

Olga

The idea of happiness.

Christina

I think it's connected with him as well. The story of letting your child be playing in the yard, messing around, but not letting it be seen that you're watching it, but having a sort of periscope arrangement so you could actually be watching it when it couldn't see you be watching it. I love that story.

Olga

That's. I like it.

Christina

Well, we could consider it. The idea was, one of the other books said, we want our children to be self starters. This is at that time, the 1920s. We want them to be able to take responsibility, to act on their own, not always to be told what to do by us. That's actually something. Wouldn't be a bad idea to revive, actually.

Olga

That's quite reasonable, isn't it, to take our influence off a little bit, especially knowing just how much we have in this close relationship over our children. And, yeah, even though missing out completely on the emotions in the mind is a big one for me. And yet. And yet behaviourism is so logical that it just won't die nearly 100 years later.

Christina

Horribly predictable that people will react in those sort of ways. How many children have you got, Olga?

Olga

I've got two. I've got an eight year old and two year old, two boys.

Christina

That's two completely different lives you're looking after, aren't you? Eight and two.

Olga

Absolutely, yes. I wonder how it was for you doing the research for the book, writing the book, having written the book, this is an absolutely unique perspective. I don't know of another book like this, the history of parenting advice written for parents as well. I know sort of professional books that are part of courses in psychology, like the Developing Mind, the Theories of Mind, but something that's written for parents. What perspective did it give you?

Christina

Well, it was, in fact a wonderful distraction from my own children that I was studying all these mad theories of parenting. And occasionally I got a bit infected. So they'd have a very strict month when I was reading about John Watson, and then they had a very indulgent month when I was reading about Benjamin Spock. I think what my book tries to do is it's very lighthearted, it's got lots of points out lots of jokes and contradictions. And it is very easy reading, and it led me into a lovely life of journalism and talking about children and that sort of thing. Although it was not a book of advice, it is not a book of advice. I think implicitly it lets you make your mind up of. Oh, I see. All right. Well, I don't need to take that necessarily to heart. I can see the thing in perspective, which is what history does for you. And I think I end up by saying with Doctor Spock, who's often reviled, but he starts off his books, his famous book, "When you're a mother, trust yourself. You know more than you think you do."

Olga

Absolutely. And I love the name of the book. Dream babies, as opposed to your very real babies.

Christina

Yes. Remember, it comes from a book by a now very forgotten essayist called Charles Lamb. We remember Charles and Mary's Lamb's tales from Shakespeare. But Charles Lamb wrote a book, a very wistful book called Dream Children because they, he had no children. And it struck me that actually the idea of perfect children or indeed perfect parents was a dream, and that the books, the manuals on baby care encourage you to think you can create a dream baby, which, of course, you can't, but they're very fun anyway.

Olga

And it's just such a reminder that a baby from the book is a dream baby, and it's the author's dream baby. Even if you buy into that dream, your child is a very real person.

Christina

Yeah.

Olga

Thank you so much, Christina.