On childrearing manuals
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a new parent is in need of Advice, and there are no shortage of authorities willing to provide it. The hard part is looking beneath it and deciding whether or not the philosophical underpinning of the advice is something that fits your own values. There seems to be a huge quantity of crypto-fundamentalist religious indoctrination masquerading as parenting advice out there.
My first encounter with this was Ian and Mary Grant's Growing Great Girls, which seemed like a good idea to have a look at, given that we were about to take responsibility for our very own wee girl. It's an incredibly popular book in NZ, along with its companion publication for boys. If I'd been looking closer, though, I would have had my suspicions raised by endorsements on the back cover by a conservative radio host and NZ's best known virgin until marriage.
The contents of the book were 80% self-evident common sense, laced with 20% dodgy unsubstantiated nonsense with the underlying premise that the goal of every parent of daughters is to make sure they don't turn out sluts. Of course they don't say "sluts" but talk about the misery of unwed parenthood, domestic violence, drugs, promiscuity, eating disorders and pop culture's emphasis on sex, which is apparently teh feminists' fault, since it's not the right context to talk about feminists as frigid manhaters. It's the utmost in concern trollery. There are pages and pages of how not to condone teenage sex, and not one word on how to help girls negotiate their early sexual relationships so that when they happen, they're safe - except to set the expectation that it will be in the context of a "permanent committed relationship", since waiting until marriage is a definite fundy giveaway.
Another in this genre is Gary Ezzo's Babywise series - a well-meaning relation lent me a copy, which had me worried for about four hours that I was Doin It Rong letting Ellie decide when she gets fed, until my common sense returned. What tripped the bullshit detector was the amount of time the book spent dissing librul parenting, getting a grudge off its chest that the authors have been apparently carrying since the time of Dr Spock. Apparently the materialistic me generation thing is all the parents' fault for not spanking their kids enough. Also, it had dead wrong info about NZ's public health campaign against Sudden Infant Death - the campaign was about not tummy-sleeping, which Ezzo thinks is ok, rather than not co-sleeping, which Ezzo thinks is terrible.
The factor both these books have in common is the powerful religious underpinning to them (Ezzo is a preacher of some sort, the Grants have been involved in church education in NZ) that is all but completely obscured to the reader unless you can spot the shibboleths - the Dr Laura quotes, the dodgy sexual health scare statistics, etc. This is a front in the Culture Wars, and I'm surprised given the amount of teh internets I read about the fights over reproductive health and creationism in schools that more attention hasn't been given to this, given Ezzo's explicit aims: "We gave the last [two generations] over to the ideological humanists; they have our tax dollar and the public classroom to bring about their agenda. We cannot collectively capture the minds of the next generation without educating the minds of today's parents."
What I'd like to know is where the fightback is on the other side - there's a fair bit on the internet but little on the mainstream publication shelves. Kaz Cooke's Kidwrangling has a brief reference to it as being wrongheaded, cruel and fundamentalist.
Aside from that, practically all the pregnancy health books I've read devote far more time to organic food and homeopathy than can be justified. There's a huge body of what Americans might call "crunchy" parenting culture - while religious dogmatism focuses on sex and discipline, the hippy orthodoxy focuses on food purity, environmental concerns and freaking out about Big Pharma and their nasty antibiotics and vaccines. I haven't ventured into the parenting sections of this philosophy - perhaps having an official manual is counter to the free-range philosophy. The Skeptical Obstetrician (whose tone I often don't like, but whose ideas seem more sensible than most) spends a great deal of time whaling into alternative health, birth as a performance art and the naturalist fallacy. She takes on the fundamentalists with equal vigour.
Then there's the strictypants routine rather than kid-centred approaches - my latest acquisition from the library's shelf is Gina Ford's Contented Little Baby book. My experiment with her suggestions lasted 18 hours - when the promised results failed to materialise, it became pointless to continue. Plus there's some seriously weird things in there - who washes clothes in 90C water, or laces their baby's cooled boiled water with a "hint of peach juice" rather than giving them plain old boob juice? Madness.
They're all selling the message that they can make parenting easier, but the orthodoxy books are doing it by making it harder - enticing parents to go against their natural instincts, taking risks with their babies' health, spending hours and dollars sourcing the right food or cleaning nappies the environmentally friendly way, setting up fortifications against the slings and arrows of hormones and pop culture, and so on. To me, it seems that this works by a sort of instinctive irrational economics - you pay more for something, or it's harder to achieve, then it's obviously a better thing to have. They're no different from the magazines marketing the $80 organic cotton bassinette sheets* in that respect.
To finish up, I thought I'd post a link to this wee gem which was written recently, not a century ago, much to my surprise. Little mortifications indeed.
*which will get spewed upon relentlessly for three months then put away.
My first encounter with this was Ian and Mary Grant's Growing Great Girls, which seemed like a good idea to have a look at, given that we were about to take responsibility for our very own wee girl. It's an incredibly popular book in NZ, along with its companion publication for boys. If I'd been looking closer, though, I would have had my suspicions raised by endorsements on the back cover by a conservative radio host and NZ's best known virgin until marriage.
The contents of the book were 80% self-evident common sense, laced with 20% dodgy unsubstantiated nonsense with the underlying premise that the goal of every parent of daughters is to make sure they don't turn out sluts. Of course they don't say "sluts" but talk about the misery of unwed parenthood, domestic violence, drugs, promiscuity, eating disorders and pop culture's emphasis on sex, which is apparently teh feminists' fault, since it's not the right context to talk about feminists as frigid manhaters. It's the utmost in concern trollery. There are pages and pages of how not to condone teenage sex, and not one word on how to help girls negotiate their early sexual relationships so that when they happen, they're safe - except to set the expectation that it will be in the context of a "permanent committed relationship", since waiting until marriage is a definite fundy giveaway.
Another in this genre is Gary Ezzo's Babywise series - a well-meaning relation lent me a copy, which had me worried for about four hours that I was Doin It Rong letting Ellie decide when she gets fed, until my common sense returned. What tripped the bullshit detector was the amount of time the book spent dissing librul parenting, getting a grudge off its chest that the authors have been apparently carrying since the time of Dr Spock. Apparently the materialistic me generation thing is all the parents' fault for not spanking their kids enough. Also, it had dead wrong info about NZ's public health campaign against Sudden Infant Death - the campaign was about not tummy-sleeping, which Ezzo thinks is ok, rather than not co-sleeping, which Ezzo thinks is terrible.
The factor both these books have in common is the powerful religious underpinning to them (Ezzo is a preacher of some sort, the Grants have been involved in church education in NZ) that is all but completely obscured to the reader unless you can spot the shibboleths - the Dr Laura quotes, the dodgy sexual health scare statistics, etc. This is a front in the Culture Wars, and I'm surprised given the amount of teh internets I read about the fights over reproductive health and creationism in schools that more attention hasn't been given to this, given Ezzo's explicit aims: "We gave the last [two generations] over to the ideological humanists; they have our tax dollar and the public classroom to bring about their agenda. We cannot collectively capture the minds of the next generation without educating the minds of today's parents."
What I'd like to know is where the fightback is on the other side - there's a fair bit on the internet but little on the mainstream publication shelves. Kaz Cooke's Kidwrangling has a brief reference to it as being wrongheaded, cruel and fundamentalist.
Aside from that, practically all the pregnancy health books I've read devote far more time to organic food and homeopathy than can be justified. There's a huge body of what Americans might call "crunchy" parenting culture - while religious dogmatism focuses on sex and discipline, the hippy orthodoxy focuses on food purity, environmental concerns and freaking out about Big Pharma and their nasty antibiotics and vaccines. I haven't ventured into the parenting sections of this philosophy - perhaps having an official manual is counter to the free-range philosophy. The Skeptical Obstetrician (whose tone I often don't like, but whose ideas seem more sensible than most) spends a great deal of time whaling into alternative health, birth as a performance art and the naturalist fallacy. She takes on the fundamentalists with equal vigour.
Then there's the strictypants routine rather than kid-centred approaches - my latest acquisition from the library's shelf is Gina Ford's Contented Little Baby book. My experiment with her suggestions lasted 18 hours - when the promised results failed to materialise, it became pointless to continue. Plus there's some seriously weird things in there - who washes clothes in 90C water, or laces their baby's cooled boiled water with a "hint of peach juice" rather than giving them plain old boob juice? Madness.
They're all selling the message that they can make parenting easier, but the orthodoxy books are doing it by making it harder - enticing parents to go against their natural instincts, taking risks with their babies' health, spending hours and dollars sourcing the right food or cleaning nappies the environmentally friendly way, setting up fortifications against the slings and arrows of hormones and pop culture, and so on. To me, it seems that this works by a sort of instinctive irrational economics - you pay more for something, or it's harder to achieve, then it's obviously a better thing to have. They're no different from the magazines marketing the $80 organic cotton bassinette sheets* in that respect.
To finish up, I thought I'd post a link to this wee gem which was written recently, not a century ago, much to my surprise. Little mortifications indeed.
*which will get spewed upon relentlessly for three months then put away.