Bad Parenting Through Millennia
Posted By Charles on December 14, 2010
The history of bad parenting advice is nothing new. How to be a good parent has been a problem for adults since Adam and Eve. The truth is that there is no way to be a perfect parent, but there are hundreds of ways to be a good parent. Problem is, what works for one child is wrong with the next, even a sibling. There is no magic formula.
Socrates the Ancient Greek philosopher complained that parents were more concerned with careers and status than caring for their children saying, “Fellow citizens, why do you burn and scrape every stone to gather wealth, and take so little care of your children to who you must one day relinquish all?” How little things have changed after all those millennia. Our technology is vastly advanced, but greed and our baser instincts are unchanged.
One thing I noticed looking back at the history of parenting advice was that these great words of wisdom are about younger children, there is far less advice specifically aimed at parenting teenagers. I wonder why?
Although it is sometimes suggested jokingly to employ a teenager while they still know everything, there is some grain of truth in this. Looking back through the history of parenting advice, it seems that adults lose their common sense when parenting children. They listen to the daftest advice from arrogant experts who should have been jailed for child abuse.
Albert Einstein put a date to the age when our common sense stops developing, when he said, “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”
If common sense were so common, then why is there so little of it? We tend to bow to experts and follow their advice even when it is nutty. Why don’t we have the self confidence to accept that we are more sensible than some arrogant nitwit? Where is that common sense when parents need it most, as when dealing with teenagers? By following bad advice we damage and abuse our children, and stop ourselves from hearing good advice.
So now we know why parenting experts throughout history got it so wrong, they lost their common sense.
If you are a parent and struggling with your child’s difficult behavior there is some common sense practical advice, with empathy and respect that really works for difficult young children and problem teenagers.
Really Bad Expert Parenting Advice
The philosopher John Locke in his treatise on education, published in 1693, “Some Thoughts Concerning Education” wrote, that it was good and healthy for children’s feet to be washed every day in cold water, and to have shoes so thin, that they might leak and let in water.
This man, one of the greats of philosophy believed a child’s cold wet feet were character building, and so it seems did a few generations of education experts who looked up to him. This is a great tactic for guaranteed hyperactivity, keeping the child constantly moving to get warm.
These words of wisdom from a great philosopher were in the most influential book on education in the eighteenth century. It was translated into the major European languages during this time, and nearly every European expert on education, including the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, accepted this wisdom.
Later as understanding of education and child care advanced, the idea of keeping children’s feet wet and cold was quietly put aside as new ideas developed. Some of these more modern experts gave advice that was sure to create dysfunctional sociopathic individuals.
Emmett Holt, in “The Care and Feeding of Children” published in 1894, wrote, “ Babies under six months old should never be played with; and the less of it at any time the better for the infant.”
This is a sure way of raising children who will suffer from Attachment Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder and a number of other emotional disorders.
John B. Watson in “Psychological Care of Infant and Child” published in 1928, wrote, “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. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinary good job of a difficult task.”
To be a good parent, just do exactly the opposite of this expert advice and you will do well.
A quote from Groucho Marx puts this parenting advice in perspective, “A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.”
