Baby and child care, 1894

[mmcirvin]

Tara Smith links to an 1894 child-care manual (PDF). Remember, playing with babies younger than 6 months just makes them nervous, and always keep your baby's abdomen supported by an elastic band to prevent rupture!

I do wonder how many current dicta will be seen as equally ridiculous a hundred years from now. A lot of advice has flip-flopped just in the past ten, and the breastfeeding advice in this manual now seems more modern than some things that were promulgated in the meantime.

Comments

[cheryln.livejournal.com]

I'm a volunteer at a late seventeeth-century historic site--so, two hundred years before that--and we've done programs about childrearing and infant care. That manual is positively spoiling the infant in comparison.

I think one of the big differences from a hundred or two hundred or three hundred years ago is that, while I'm sure a lot broke down by class, everyone's version of how to care for an infant was informed by essentially the same principles. That's not the case now.

[sultmhoor.livejournal.com]

And not to mention Masturbation.

Masturbation is the most injurious of all these [bad] habits, and should be broken up just as early as possible. Children should especially be watched at the time of going to sleep and on first waking. Punishments are of little avail and usually make matters worse. Medical advice should at once be sought.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

I suspect about the same proportion of today's advice will be laughable in 2106. And not just what's in childraising books.

And even where it's the same: Victorian books on writing contain the advice to omit useless words which is still found in today's writing books. But by today's standards, that advice is quite wordy.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

As I said in the comments to Tara's post, I'd initially been baffled by all that abdominal-band stuff, but it seems to have just been the consequence of misconceptions about the nature and treatment of umbilical hernias (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000987.htm).