Part of the problem with over generalization, as well as ignoring
correlation is not causation ... Is that it fails to source out real and necessary reasons why some practices were best
at the time.
- Scheduled feedings (instead of feeding on demand) & early introduction to solid foods (6mo instead of 12-24mo) is a direct byproduct or the World Wars. Women needed to work. Period. In factories that would have proved lethal for infants and small children, women were not stupid enough to bring their smallest children to be killed. As such, they could not be nursed/breastfed. As such, they needed formula. Formulas of various kinds have been around for thousands of years... Parents have always loved their kids. And not all mothers can nurse, have access to wet nurses, or are even alive. The formulas designed during the first & second world wars were some of the better ones used historically... But they had a very real danger: intestinal torsion. Aka twisted gut. Aka death, if fed too often or if the baby was allowed to move about too much immediately following feeding (stomach needs to rest). These formulas, in addition to being dangerous, were also difficult to digest, and nowhere near as nutritious as table food (the inverse is true today, modern formula is exponentially more nutritious than table food, although still not as ideal as breast milk, since ntrients don't fluctuate according to biological cues, as they do with breast milk in a
healthy nursing mother whose body is performing ideally). So babies were taken off of formula and fed table food as early as possible. Even though babies develop at different rates (bell curve) and only the smallest percentage are ready at 6 months... The accompany problems were deemed (rightly) better than the constant risk of dying of a twisted gut. Just as the risk of dying of a twisted gut was deemed far more acceptable than dying of starvation / failure to thrive.
- Having as little physical contact with babies, firstly never applied to primary caregivers, and secondly stems from the very real epidemics & pandemics (and budding understanding of germs / disease transmission), as well as the complete lack of vaccinations & efficient medications to treat infections. The 1918 Influenza Pandemic killed between 20,000,000 & 40,000,000.
https://virus.stanford.edu/uda/ But it was hardly the only lethal illness out there. Measles epidemics occurred every few years, killing millions (
Link Removed ), and things we don't even blink at today in the first world will curl your hair if you go look up mortality and morbidity stats. The single
best way to protect your baby pre-vax & readily available antibiotics & anti-fever meds was to
limit exposure. This meant not allowing people to handle or breathe on your infant (2years and younger) and to handle them yourself as little as possible whenever you were exposing yourself to large crowded environments. Not an issue for most families outside of slums in cities (which had horrifying infant mortality stats) until WWI & WWII, as mother generally stayed home. Once mother was out working? And tracking home every available infection from the factories? If you loved your baby? And understood the science behind germs? You exposed them to as few lethal infections as possible.
- The overwhelming support of circumcision, is another byproduct of WWI & WWII, and of adult male circumcision. Whole units were lined up and cut in military fashion... For "hygiene reasons". Otherwise known as trench foot, or jungle rot, gangrene, and other infections... On epidemic levels on troops in the trenches and the jungles. Fathers, having lost friends due to those infections (instead of being killed by the enemy), or even having returned from the war impotent (due to those infections)... All but universally jumped on the bandwagon for circumcision their infant sons after WWII... So that in this way, at least, their sons didn't have to suffer as they were made to suffer. The war to end all wars, was not in fact the last war. Instead it was seen, by WWII, as the sign of life to come. Men get a little protective of their penis's. Trench-foot, and jungle-rot, and army-circumcisions? Or a snip in the hospital that their Jewish friends didn't even remember? No contest. Dads came home from the war on circ'ing their boys like white on rice. It's not as necessary now, for a huge number of reasons (not the least of which being combat tours, instead of in it to win it / for the duration). But the trend was never seized upon out of some slavish adherence to fashion, or desire to mutilate their children, or take choices away. It was seized upon because nearly every male between the ages of 15-40 (not 4F) was at war for several years, and came home with strong opinions as to at least one thing they could do. They didn't want their boys to suffer as they had.
These and others weren't crackpot theories by pop-psychologists on childrearing &/or experimentation on the masses by some entrenched hegemony. These were real people, doing the best they could, in the situations they found themselves in... With very real threats & dangers. And, by and large, taking extremely reasonable precautions in order to protect their children as best they could.
