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Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting QUOTES

Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting QUOTES

1 " Interestingly, the Llewelyn Davies boys were first cousins of gothic novelist Daphne du Maurier, whose own rather gothic childhood is a story in itself, and the reason du Maurier would not permit the publication of her childhood diaries until fifty years after her death. "

― Jennifer Traig , Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

2 " Then there’s Russell and Lillian Hoban’s Frances series, which is almost unbearably wistful, and no wonder: written just before the Hobans’ marriage ended, the books seem to document a happy family that was dissolving as they wrote. "

― Jennifer Traig , Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

3 " Teenagers who experience moderate conflict with their parents tend to be the best adjusted, more even-keeled than those who have little conflict with their parents, or, obviously, a lot. "

― Jennifer Traig , Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

4 " With or without the books, most children eventually learn, and remember, to control their volume, but not everyone does; it can be an especially difficult skill for autistic children to master. "

― Jennifer Traig , Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

5 " putting beginning walkers in a “falling cap” or “pudding.” So named for its resemblance to black pudding, this was a sausage-shaped padded roll that went around the head and was kept in place with a chin strap. Having seen the pictures, I have to wonder if parents used them because they kept children safe or because they looked hysterical. They eventually disappeared, but left a linguistic remnant in the term of endearment puddinhead. "

― Jennifer Traig , Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

6 " It remains culturally relevant in Germany, home of the Struwwelpeter Museum as well as the industrial metal band Rammstein, which made the book the subject of a song. "

― Jennifer Traig , Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

7 " that about two-thirds of parents do. In one small but astounding survey, 80 percent of mothers acknowledged favoring one child over the others. This was no secret to their children, 80 percent of whom agreed. Interestingly, however, when they were asked which child their mother loved most, they almost always got it wrong. Similar results are borne out in larger studies—two-thirds of children accurately perceive their parents’ favoritism, but less than half get the favorite right. "

― Jennifer Traig , Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

8 " other children’s stories were certainly unabashedly racist, too. Among the worst were the popular if unfortunately named series of Dumpy Books for Children, whose titles include the notorious Story of Little Black Sambo "

― Jennifer Traig , Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

9 " Gesell’s group was even weirder than WEIRD. Instead of being fairly representative of most Western babies, they were representative of only a very specific subset of them. Gesell did a lot of his research on the sixty children attending Yale’s on-campus preschool.* "

― Jennifer Traig , Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

10 " By sixteen months, they know what bothers their siblings and will annoy them on purpose. "

― Jennifer Traig , Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

11 " In the United States teen rebellion is considered standard, putting the American adolescent in the awkward position of having to rebel in order to conform to societal expectations. For an obedient rule-following teen like I was, this is utterly flummoxing. "

― Jennifer Traig , Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

12 " Historian C. John Sommerville calls the Puritans “the first modern parents”; anthropologist David Lancy, a little more pointedly, describes them as “the first anxious parents.” Either way, their legacy is clear. The Puritans simultaneously established two American traditions: (1) making child-rearing an all-consuming DIY activity, and (2) ruining things for everyone. Before, benign neglect was the norm. Now you had to either obsess over your children or feel guilty for failing to. "

― Jennifer Traig , Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

13 " In practice, most teens spent a few years transitioning to adulthood living away from home as apprentices. In the Middle Ages, some spent those years training to be a knight, as did, I will note, my D&D-playing nerd friends seven hundred years later. But the difference was that my friends and I weren’t spending all our time with adults. Until the twentieth century, teens lived very much in the adult world as they trained and worked. They didn’t have the opportunity to develop their own unique identity and culture. By the twentieth century, they did. Adolescence was born, and D&D quickly followed. "

― Jennifer Traig , Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

14 " For now, after a couple of centuries of believing that children were born either bad or blank, children were presumed to be born good. It was the mother’s job to protect them from any corrupting forces, to preserve them in a suffocating innocence for as long as possible. "

― Jennifer Traig , Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

15 " If the mother can’t afford to hire a nurse, she should pretend she is one herself: “she must look upon herself while performing the functions of a nurse as a professional woman and not as a sentimentalist masquerading under the name of ‘Mother. "

― Jennifer Traig , Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

16 " She slept with her parrot, which she forced to lie on its back, using slaps to overrule the animal’s every natural impulse to not sleep on its back in a bed. Eventually, she’d kill it by washing it in soap and water and setting it to dry before the fire. When she washed her lamb—in the ocean—she dried it by burying it up to its nose in the sand. She did other odd things, like trying to force a blindfolded donkey to swim; and of course, writing a dozen utterly terrifying books for children. "

― Jennifer Traig , Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

17 " Not for nothing did H. L. Mencken define Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. "

― Jennifer Traig , Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

18 " They ushered in what became known as the golden age of children’s literature, and remain classics today. As a child myself I felt like I should like them, because they were classics and I was pretentious, but something about them put me off. "

― Jennifer Traig , Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

19 " Bruno Bettelheim, who might have had more influence if he weren’t, as Dr. Spock himself noted, a “[v]ery frightening” figure who “scared the hell out of people.” A Holocaust survivor with a heavy accent, a stern manner, and some outlandish ideas, Bettelheim gave people the creeps, and after his suicide in 1990, we’d learn there was good reason: his credentials were faked, "

― Jennifer Traig , Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

20 " The Cat in the Hat became a massive bestseller, allowing Geisel to quit his day job and start building the Seuss empire. This included not just books but words: a master neologian, he invented the terms oobleck, grinch, and nerd. "

― Jennifer Traig , Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting