Act Natural Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Green Eggs and Ham. The book was not actually written to encourage fussy eaters to eat, but to make Seuss’s editor Bennett Cerf eat his words. (Cerf had bet Seuss he couldn’t write a book using fifty words or less.) Green Eggs and Ham hit it on the nail, and Geisel won fifty dollars, or would have, but Cerf never paid.”
― Jennifer Traig, Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

“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

“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

“We expect them to acquire a full mouth of teeth and learn where to deploy them (apples: yes; siblings: no).”
― Jennifer Traig, Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

“When Thomas Hobbes called life “nasty, brutish, and short,” he was describing life during war, but it applies equally well to life with small children (as well as to the children themselves). Like war, it manages to be both boring and exhausting. Day after day, there’s nothing to do and so much to get done.”
― Jennifer Traig, Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“The most famous of these books is probably De Secretis Mulierum (Women’s Secrets), a late medieval text compiled by anonymous monks. Even by the standards of the day, the authors’ conception of female anatomy is fanciful. The text declares that menses is not blood but excess food; asks if said menses comes out the anus; and suggests that urine comes from the vagina. Its grasp on male anatomy is shaky, too. Male readers are warned that if they consume sage on which a cat has ejaculated—which is a really weird hypothetical—they will become pregnant with kittens. The esophagus would have to serve as the birth canal, and the father would need to vomit them out.”
― Jennifer Traig, Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

“Which is not to say that you’re not ruining their lives, the minor missteps snowballing into lifelong grievances and injuries. My husband and I play this game all the time, wondering what mistakes we’re making now will surface in group therapy when our kids are in college. Then, of course, there are all the things we’re doing that are unwittingly killing them that we won’t even realize are dangerous for another twenty years, just as our parents blithely drove us around unbuckled in smoke-filled cars. My own mother, a nurse married to a chest surgeon, smoked so often while nursing me that my father termed the tableau “Madonna and Cigarette.” Maybe our equivalent will be the phthalates in their bottles or the carcinogenic flame retardants so omnipresent they show up in cord blood. Maybe, by some great irony, it will be the naturally produced aflatoxins lurking in the organic produce we all thought was best.”
― Jennifer Traig, Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

“It is—let’s be clear—very, very hard. Freud called child-rearing one of the three “impossible professions” (the other two: governing nations and psychoanalysis). To do even a half-assed job is a Sisyphean task. Children get away with things no adult would.”
― Jennifer Traig, Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

“As is true in many houses with small children, questions are asked all the time in ours, but these are seldom about big-picture matters. Why is there yogurt on the TV? Why are my car keys in the trash? Where’s the front doorknob? Who let a squirrel in the house?”
― Jennifer Traig, Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

“Writing in 1957, Dr. Spock endorsed the process: “This is the way Nature expects human beings to learn child care—from their own childhood.”
― Jennifer Traig, Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

“Newbery’s other major innovation was product placement. Characters in Newbery publications read and tout other Newbery publications shamelessly.”
― Jennifer Traig, Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting

“THINGS LOOSENED UP a bit by the time John Newbery came along in the mid-1700s. Now known mostly for the shiny-stickered award that bears his name, Newbery wrought a sea change in children’s publishing. If the Puritans established the genre, Newbery established the industry, becoming wildly successful in the process. Newbery introduced a number of huge innovations, inventing the model that would inform children’s publishing for the rest of history, not to mention the Happy Meal. His big idea was fairly simple: include a bonus gift with your purchase.”
― Jennifer Traig, Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting