24/06/2025
Somewhere in your family tree, there was a woman—maybe your great-grandmother, maybe your own mother—who was handed a parenting guide full of rules that today would make your jaw drop. These women were expected to raise healthy, polite, and obedient children while navigating advice that was often illogical, dangerous, or rooted in control rather than care.
Take, for instance, the idea that cuddling your baby too much would spoil them. For decades, mothers were warned against affection, told that picking up a crying infant would only make things worse. That instinct to soothe, to comfort, to protect—it was discouraged. And yet, what mother doesn’t ache to wrap her arms around her child in those first moments of fear or pain?
In the early 20th century, women were told to give their teething babies whiskey, or put sugar water and even coffee in baby bottles. There was no talk of brain development or long-term effects. You soothed the child, not with touch or patience, but with numbing agents. It was survival, not nurturing.
There was advice to bathe newborns in lard or butter. To put them in cages outside windows so they could “get fresh air.” To begin potty training at two months old. To rub sandpaper on your ni***es to prepare for breastfeeding. These were solutions born from fear and folklore, from a desperate desire to follow the rules—even if they made no sense—because society told women they weren’t naturally equipped to raise their own children.
Mothers were told not to make eye contact with their babies for too long. That a child should learn independence from the moment of birth. That crying was good for their lungs. That discipline should come quickly and harshly. Some were told to tie their child’s left hand down if they favored it, because being left-handed was seen as defective.
And so many of these rules had nothing to do with the well-being of the child and everything to do with control—of the child, of the mother, of the family image.
Today, we can look back and feel horror, or even guilt, depending on what era raised us. But we can also feel gratitude—for the knowledge we now have, for the freedom to question, and for the right to trust our own instincts. We know now that babies aren’t manipulative. That love doesn’t spoil. That eye contact, warmth, cuddles, and connection build strong, secure humans.
The women before us did their best. They were handed a script and followed it with trembling hands, hoping not to be judged, blamed, or shamed. Now, we get to write our own. We get to raise children with softness and strength, with information and intention.
