by Elizabeth S. Bernstein
From whatever quarter the scientist comes to the study of human behavior – psychology, sociology, education – he finds that the unwise behavior of the mother has had much to do with the wrong starting of the personality trend. —Ernest R. Groves and Gladys Hoagland Groves (1928)1
Childrearing practices in the United States underwent a radical alteration during a period from the last decade of the nineteenth century through the first few decades of the twentieth. In 1929, psychologists William Blatz and Helen Bott looked back on the changes they credited to Dr. Luther Emmett Holt, whose childcare manual was first published in 1894 and continued to come out in new editions every few years:
The publication of Dr. Holt’s Care and Feeding of Children marked an epoch. . . . Previous to this mothers had brought their children up by rule of thumb, the child’s demands being the gauge of the mother’s behavior. Thus, if the baby cried he was fed, if he was fretful he was rocked or dandled, if he had colic he was walked the floor with, this being accepted as all in the day’s work in bringing up a baby. All this Dr. Holt and his followers significantly changed. Instead of the baby’s demands, the rule laid down by the specialist prescribed the rule for the mother to follow.2
The subtitle of Holt’s book was A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children’s Nurses. In it, in question and answer form, he taught mothers to apply in their own homes the lessons which he had learned as the first attending physician at the New York Babies’ Hospital. Those lessons included that all babies were to be fed the same quantities at the same intervals and put to sleep at precisely the same time every day. Infants who were hungry when it was not feeding time would have to wait; those who were sleeping when it was feeding time would be awakened. Practically from birth infants were to be held over chamber pots twice a day, with a piece of soap introduced into their rectums to induce a bowel movement. By this method Holt claimed that the baby could be trained to regular action of the bowels by three or four months of age. Read more »