Terrible parents of yore

How intensive parenting became an aspirational status symbol

When I want to feel better about my own, sometimes lackluster, parenting, I enjoy reading about terrible parents of the olden days, of whom there were many. I don’t just mean the bad individual parents of literature, like Ernest Hemingway’s mother, who put him in a lacy dress and pretended he was his sister Marcelline’s twin, or Charles Dickens’s father, who got sent to debtors’ prison, leaving the family destitute and forcing his son to go work in a boot-blacking factory at age 12. I’m talking about bad parenting en masse. The practice of “baby farming” – sending children out to the country to be wet-nursed and raised from infancy to toddlerhood – was commonplace among elites for centuries. In 17^th-19^th century France, it was widely practiced; it’s been estimated that 80-90% of Parisian infants were sent to the country to be breastfed for the first four years of their lives. This wasn’t unique to France. “Wet-nursing” occurred in England, Italy, Spain, and Germany. Only poor women breastfed their own children. If you were very wealthy you might have an in-house wet-nurse, but it was much more typical to send an infant off entirely, often to a cottage in the countryside. I learned recently that as an infant, Jane Austen was sent off to live in a cottage in a nearby village from about six months of age until she reached “the age of reason” at around three, at which point she was returned to her family.

A “baby farm” postcard from the early 1900s

By the late 19th century, baby farming had percolated its way down to the working classes, with predictably horrific consequences; indigent or unwed mothers sent their babies to low-budget baby farmers who took in large groups of infants at a time, and cases of child neglect and even infanticide were rampant. After several widely publicized baby farmer murder trials, the practice faded away, and adoption and foster care became much better regulated by the state.

Even after the practice of baby farming went out of vogue, the wealthiest continued not to raise their own children. English aristocrats outsourced parenting to paid staff and spent an average of an hour a day with their offspring. This practice continued well into the 20^th century. In fact, John Bowlby himself, the British pioneer of attachment theory, was raised primarily by his nanny Minnie, and only saw his mother at teatime. When Minnie left the family when Bowlby was four, he mourned the loss as though he had lost a parent. At age 7, Bowlby was sent off to boarding school, like many young boys of his generation.*

Bowlby’s family was not unusual. “I have seen too many children brought up without Nannies to think this is all desirable,” proclaims the narrator of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, a novel that dryly captured the mood of the British gentry during the second world war. At the opening of Mitford’s novel, the decidedly Nanny-reared Radlett clan sits for a family photograph, the matriarch Sadie surrounded by her brood and balancing her youngest child on her knee. Although Sadie has borne six children at this point, she still “seems uncertain about what to do with the infant’s head,” and so Nanny looms protectively in the background “waiting to take him away.” Years later, Sadie’s daughter Linda gives birth to a newborn whom she “loathes” and promptly turns over to her in-laws. As the novel’s narrator reflects, children raised by their own mothers would inevitably behave like “barbarians,” while the hapless mothers “would gradually become morons themselves.”

When mothers feel guilty about their failings, they often compare themselves to an idealized past, one in which gender roles were more traditional, women did not work outside the home, and children were nurtured lovingly, within the bosoms of their families. The historical record begs to differ. Until quite recently in our cultural past, parents, including and especially the most privileged parents with the greatest access to leisure, have shown precious little interest in rearing their own children. For the majority of at least the last thousand years, the prevailing belief was that too much parental affection would lead to soft and overindulged children. Childrearing in medieval Europe was seen through a Christian moral lens: children came pre-contaminated by original sin and needed strict discipline to have it knocked out of them. John Locke, the 17^th century philosopher, cautioned that too much “fondness” would spoil children. In 1928, the behaviorist John Watson wrote in the widely influential book, Psychological Care of Infant and Child, “Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night and shake hands with them in the morning.” Watson believed that excessive parental love bred dependency and neurosis.

But what of the 1950s happy housewife, pushing a vacuum cleaner with a smile plastered on her face, serving dinner to her dapper husband and her 2.5 children? We’d see her as terribly neglectful today: she frequently sent her children outside to play unattended, and unless they were very young, expected them to walk themselves to school or to the playground. David Sedaris tells the story of his mother locking him and his four sisters outside the house for hours on a freezing-cold snow day so she could watch television alone.

Here’s a stylized graph using (crudely extrapolated) synthetic data to show general time trends of childcare, housework, and paid work among mothers, from the 1950s to the 2020s. Childcare time has increased over the last 75 years, even as paid work time has also increased.

The point here is that despite all the guilt that contemporary working mothers might feel, they are devoting more time to hands-on childcare than typical mothers of the previous thousand years. Intensive parenting, of the empathetic, time-consuming, play-with-your-children variety, is not natural or fundamental or a normal state of affairs. It’s actually quite unusual, at least by the standards of the last millennium. (It’s also unusual globally, with parents in the U.S. spending more hours per day on childcare than parents in other countries).

What changed? First, starting in the early 20th century, the infant mortality rate dropped dramatically, thanks to vaccines and better hygiene, so parents could afford to get fonder of their children. But that doesn’t totally explain the shift from the laissez-faire parenting of the 1950s to the much more intensive, “concerted cultivation” style of parenting that caught on once women started to enter the workforce in large numbers in the 1970s and 1990s.

This shift is explained, in part, by new insights from my own fields of psychology and neuroscience, finding that children soaked up formative influences from their early environments. This new science helped shift the word parent from a noun - something you simply are - to a verb - something you do. It is also explained by a shrinking of extended family and neighborhood networks that once supported care and a declining tolerance of children in public spaces, combined with a moral panic about women in the workforce. But it is perhaps best explained by class and inequality: we parent intensively because we live in a winner-take-all economy in which we are desperate to get a leg up for our children. Moreover, in the USA, a country in which only 27% of mothers get paid maternity leave, intensive parenting has become a luxury item, an aspirational class marker.

Today, we’d look down at a wealthy parent who outsourced all their child care to nannies and spent less than an hour a day in the company of their children. That’s no longer rich people stuff. In the age of intensive parenting, only affluent women have the economic freedom to overparent as lavishly as the culture demands.

Parenting intensively has become a status symbol. To torture a metaphor for a minute, it’s like the suntan and the European aristocracy. Back when working-class laborers toiled outside in the fields, tanned skin marked the working classes, and highborn ladies wore parasols to keep their skin as pale as possible. Gentlemen prized their lily-white hands. But when work moved into factories and the poor became pasty, the suntan became a symbol of the leisure class instead. I remember coming back to college after winter break; you could always tell the rich kids from their ostentatious golden glow. (These days I teach at USC, where everyone has a tan). Now we wear bronzer in the winter, and the wealthy are the most ostentatiously doting parents of all.

The interesting shift that’s taken place over the last half-century is that hands-on, emotionally available parenting is now the provenance of the affluent – specifically, the moms with designer strollers who take their kids to “Mommy and Me” classes and chair the fundraising committees for the children’s preschools. Neglectful parents – the kind who plop their kids in front of the TV or drop them off in all-day daycare – are likelier to be lower class, or at least styled that way in the media.

In tracking the mommy guilt wars, perhaps we should be thinking less about gender and more about class: class envy and class aspiration. In keeping up with the maternal Joneses, let’s remember that a century ago, back in the days when you gave your children a handshake in the morning, we’d all seem like bizarrely hovering parents.

*For more on Bowlby’s life and his own family, I recommend Nancy Reddy’s fascinating book, The Good Mother Myth. The journalist Deborah Blum wrote another awesome book on the history of attachment theory that focuses on Harry Harlow: Love at Goon Park.

MUSIC RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Past recs: Broncho // Alvvays // Capitol Years // The Cairo Gang and Hard Quartet // The Beths // Ballerina Black

James Mercer collabs

I like it when artists do rando mashup collaborations, because you can sort of get a purer ground truth for their musical DNA when you see it remixed in different combinations. I still remember the first time I heard The Shins’s Oh, Inverted World in the early aughts, which I bought because my friend Caroline told me it was the greatest thing since the Beach Boys (I might be paraphrasing a little here). The album was packed chock full of earworms and recorded in basement-studio low-fi that made you wonder where in the world these guys came from. (Alberquerque, it turns out). The band’s frontman James Mercer started stretching his wings in the decade that followed, and did a 2012 song with one of the other great songwriters of her generation, Aimee Mann. It sounds like a Shins song until Mann comes in and makes it into an Aimee Mann song. There’s a Bastards-of-Young video for it, too:

Mercer also did a 2014 collab with Danger Mouse and made an apocalyptic video for it. The hypnotic last minute of this song is one of my favorite minutes of any song, ever.