Between Watson and Spock: Eleanor Roosevelt's Advice on Child‐Rearing from 1928 to 1962

Historians who have examined the popular literature on child-rearing advice for the late 1920s through 1940s have pointed to an important shift in parenting advice offered in such periodicals as Women's Home Companion, Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping and the mass distributed U.S. Child Bureau bulletins, Infant Care. In the period just prior to the Great Depression the "restrictive" and authoritarian advice epitomized by John B. Watson in the late 1920s peaked. Increasingly the reading public now was exposed to a more "permissive" message that was democratic in tone and emphasized self-regulation and self-expression. By the late 1940s virtually all popular periodicals promoted this new message as it became widespread and found a popular spokesperson in Benjamin Spock whose 1946 book, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, was to sell over 39 million copies.(1) The shift away from a restrictive emphasis in child-rearing advice occurred at a time when there existed a wide-spread perception that the social order was moving towards collapse under the weight of a worsening economic depression and the spread of fascism and threat of war throughout the world. Popular writers and social scientists worried over a lack of respect for law and order as they watched the growth in industrial violence and prohibition spawned crime. In addition, many believed that the growing failure of adolescents to conform to various social norms reflected the fact that the family and school were failing now in their efforts to prepare youths to assume the responsibilities of citizenship necessary for living in a democracy. As a consequence, many concerned individuals during the 1920s and 1930s looked to the behavioral sciences for new child-rearing advice in the hope that better parenting might make citizens of the future more dedicated to democratic and peaceful ends.(2) Although the contributions to the popular child-rearing advice literature during this period of such seminal figures as John B. Watson, Arnold Gesell, Sigmund Freud, and Benjamin Spock have been duly acknowledged, and the various social and cultural themes looming so importantly in the background examined,(3) no review as of yet has been made of the influential role played by Eleanor Roosevelt (hereafter, ER) to the popularization of this shift in child-rearing advice. Although neither a scientist nor acknowledged expert on child-rearing, ER spoke and wrote extensively during much of this period on the relationship between parenting, childhood, adolescence, and the troubling social issues of the time. As the most famous, and at times, most influential woman in the world during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, her message reached into the homes of millions and helped focus widespread public attention on the importance of good parenting. Called by Time Magazine "an oracle to millions of housewives," ER frequently offered advice in her books, speeches, and answers to queries from readers of her columns ("Oracle" 12). And, when This Is My Story (1937) and Your Teens and Mine (1961) were published, ER explicitly held herself up as a role model for American women and young girls. Revealing her own heartaches as a child, and foibles as a parent, millions of readers became acquainted with the sorrows of her childhood as she talked about her father's alcoholism, her mother's critical remarks about her lack of beauty, and the austere and rigid life growing up in her grandmother's household.(4) In concert with the many "experts" on child-rearing who argued that our hopes for a better world depended on our ability to train our children to be more rational and competent, ER emphasized the significance of the early formative years and the critical importance of the role of the mother. Noting in 1932 that so many things in the world seem to be changing, including "the way we feed our babies, ...how we should clothe them and...how we should train them" ("A Foreword" 5-6), she emphasized that "'no mother has a right to be unfamiliar with the discoveries made about the health of babies" ("Babies Rights Upheld" 12) or the importance of "the mental and emotional life of a little child" (It's Up to Women 91). …