Photo: Lesley Photograph (Shutterstock)
The prevailing societal trend in parenting in the 1960s was based on the open, understanding style of baby guru Dr. Benjamin Spock, but there was a popular counter-stream too, as exemplified in the authoritarian parenting advocated by pediatrician Walter W. Sackett, Jr.
In his 1962 book Bringing Up Baby, Sackett advises parents to not feed hungry, crying babies, and to not let babies believe they are “entitled to all the love at the expense of the deeper love that existed between his parents before he was born.”
There’s also this sentence which I love:
If we teach our offspring to expect everything to be provided on demand, we must admit the possibility that we are sowing the seeds of socialism.
But the weirdest thing is the food. Sackett encourages parents to get their kids off breastmilk fast by feeding them cereal two days after birth, then moving up to bacon and eggs by three months of age. By the time your child is six months old, he advised, they should be drinking coffee every morning. (I did not make that up.) But feeding a baby solid food too soon can be very bad for them.
