Boundaries of Touch: Parenting and Adult-Child Intimacy

2. The Rise of the Expert, the Fall of the Mother

two The Rise of the Expert, the Fall of the Mother MostofusprobablyrememberDr.Spock,oneoftheearliest“scientific”experts offering popular child-rearing advice, who continues years after his death to instruct us. But he and all those others who glut today’s marketplace with their recommendations and warnings are relatively new phenomena. In part, this is because of Spock’s new at the time pro-touch leanings. Until the 1940s, most child-rearing experts were adamantly opposed to the intimate touching of children. Many advised against breastfeeding, and they were certainly against children sleeping in bed with their parents. Of central importance in this anti-touching period are the mind–body split and the dominant culture’s general fear of the body and, in particular, of touching the body. Yet, starting at the beginning of the twentieth century, child-rearing experts in general were a relatively new form of authority. Their influence took hold simultaneous to industrialization. With industrialization and modern science came new ideals about what it meant to be modern parents.1 Increasingly , and in particular for the Anglo-American middle class, being “modern” meant turning to science to learn how to live. Further, science and modernity were associated with the modern principles of masculinity; this encompassed being male, rational, controlled/ing, strong, and, as one might imagine, heterosexual , middle-class Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Finally, being masculine meant an avoidance of emotion, physicality, and physical contact.  • boundaries of touch These ideologies expose underlying dualistic patterns of thought. Because many dualisms are embedded in and born from the fundamental Western mind–body split, in this chapter I address several of these binary variants, including the science versus nature dichotomy, the bad mother–good mother split, and the masculinist versus relational dualism. In Western history for centuries, the body has been associated with that which is “savage” and the mind with that which is “godly” and “rational.” The body also became associated with that which is not male, not middle class, and not white. Bordo argues that the “scheme is frequently gendered, with woman cast in the role of the body, ‘weighed down,’ in Beauvoir’s words, ‘by everything peculiar to it.’” In contrast, man casts himself as the “inevitable, like a pure idea, like the One, the All, the Absolute Spirit.”2 To touch the animalisticbody ,oneriskedawakeningitsostensiblyout-of-controlpassions.And thus, for a period of time in Anglo-American middle-class ideology, touching, including mothers touching their children, became taboo. In the first half of the century, scientific experts on child rearing came largely from the fields of mainstream medicine and psychology and, in particular , the new behaviorist school of thought. Thus, I briefly examine the thinking on adult–child touch of the following experts: medical doctor Luther Emmett Holt, behaviorist psychologist John B. Watson, pediatrician and psychoanalyst Benjamin Spock, biologist Alfred C. Kinsey, and psychologist Harry F. Harlow. I also succinctly consider the challenge offered the experts by early popular health/back-to-nature movements. Sociohistorical Contet Scientific Experts and Mothers Well into the nineteenth century, many if not most parents in the United States sought parenting advice from the Bible and religion and from the families and communities in which they lived. With the advent of the twentieth century and the effects of industrialization, urbanization, and the growing power of technology, the prestige of science increasingly competed with religion in offering guidance to people on how to live in the modern age. Eventually , science, as well as the scientific expert, became the new god and authority on almost everything, including the newly recognized “work” of child rearing. The middle class, especially, looked to the scientific expert to learn how to raise their children.3 And scientific experts in turn disseminated their special knowledge via the mass-mediated written word in books and magazines. The rise of the scientific expert parallels the decline of the large family. Whereas in the past, religion, supported by the economic imperatives of farm life, sanctioned large families, now children were an expense rather than an asset. Given this, smaller families were increasingly common. As Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd wrote in their 1920s study done in Muncie, Indiana, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, “families of six to fourteen children, upon which the grandparents of the present generation prided themselves, are considered as somehow not as ‘nice’ as families of two, three, or four children.” They continued, “in...