“You may shake your young child’s hand, but that is all”

In the later 19th century the nurturing warmth of the Victorian era’s attitude toward children began to be replaced with a sterner, behavioristic regime of child rearing. The traditions of maternal culture were rebuked by male doctors and researchers–who often had no children of there own. They were displeased with the “spoiling” and “coddling” of children. But their authoritarian declarations, their patriarchal status, their white coats persuaded mothers to increasingly turn their backs on their children–even infants. According to researcher Kiersti Giron, this new phalanx of “… European and American experts told parents not to hold or touch their babies much, not to respond to their cries for fear of ‘ spoiling’ them, and to only interact with and feed their infants on a strict schedule, being governed by the clock rather than listening to their children and responding based on compassion and their own parental wisdom and intuition… This trend continued into the 1900s, as evidenced in John Watson’s 1928 Psychological Care of Infant and Child: There is a sensible way of treating children…Never hug and kiss them, never let them to sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when you say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning…”

One wonders how this played out in the early twentieth century. Perhaps in the blithe acceptance of child labor; the march into World War One; the business practices that led to the Depression; the indifference of Herbert Hoover and his ilk to the fate of the poor…