Volume 45, Number 12 · July 16, 1998
My Blue Heaven
By Diane Johnson
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE
Raising Baby by the Book: The Education of American Mothers
by Julia Grant
Yale University Press, 309 pp., $30.00
Dr. Spock: An American Life
by Thomas Maier
Harcourt Brace, 520 pp., $30.00
Baby and Child Care
Seventh edition, by Benjamin Spock, by Steven Parker
Dutton/Pocket Books, 939 pp., $7.95 (paper)
Maybe One: A Personal and Environmental Argument for Single-Child Families
by Bill McKibben
Simon and Schuster, 254 pp., $23.00
Family Man
by Calvin Trillin
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 184 pp., $20.00
Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality
by William Wright
Knopf, 303 pp., $27.50
The War Against Parents: What We Can Do for America's Beleaguered Moms and Dads
by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, by Cornel West
Houghton Mifflin, 302 pp., $24.00
Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent
by Meredith F. Small
Anchor Books, 292 pp., $24.95
Raising Baby by the Book is a history of bringing up American parents. In it, the author, Julia Grant, describes a discussion in one of the many child-study groups organized by the federal government, universities, and local institutions in the 1930s and 1940s, about what to do with a child who is jealous of the new baby. The mothers suggest putting the child 'in a barrel every time he hits the baby,' or maybe packing his things and sending him to a relative: 'Make him think you didn't want him around if he didn't want the baby.' These remedies, today rather startling, may serve to remind us that commonplace psychological assumptions—for instance that an older child will be jealous of a new baby—were by no means widespread before the Second World War. In a country of such great cultural diversity, child-rearing practices were also wildly divergent, and this posed problems in education and in law. How to transmit American social values to such disparate folks? And what are they?
Review, 5331 words
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