For example, 21st-century experts do tend to acknowledge that fathers exist — revised editions of The Baby Book, the 1992 “attachment-parenting bible” written by William Sears, include sections on “attachment fathering.” But mothers still do a disproportionate amount of child care in American families; mothers were the ones most affected by the daunting new parenting challenges of the pandemic; most of the people listening to Becky Kennedy and poring over parenting books at night are moms. “Fathers are being addressed in child-rearing advice” today, Fass says. “But it’s still mothers who are being made crazy.”
Mainstream parenting texts have also become somewhat more inclusive of queer families over time — the 2004 edition of Spock’s Baby and Child Care included advice for gay parents. But images and anecdotes of cisgender, heterosexual couples still dominate American parenting discourse. In the 2021 memoir The Natural Mother of the Child, Krys Malcolm Belc writes about the legal and social hoops he’s forced to jump through as a transmasculine parent who has given birth — when one of his kids “asks when we can meet other families like ours,” he writes, “I say, honestly, that I do not know.”
Indeed, despite some gestures toward gender, racial, and class equity, today’s culture of parenting advice is not so different from the 19th-century tips about keeping a clean house. Then, as now, child-rearing philosophy centered on the idea that “we can fix the problems that ail children and families through maternal education,” Vandenberg-Daves said. If we just tell women the right things to do, they’ll raise healthy, well-adjusted children — no outside support required. “We have a very privatized model of parenting and the family,” Vandenberg-Daves said, “and an assumption that mothers will take so much upon themselves.”
This kind of thinking can result in advice that’s at best unhelpful, and at worst stigmatizing. Recommendations to limit kids’ access to screens, for example, assume that parents have the time and resources to entertain their families in screen-free ways. “It’s all very well and good to say, when you’re in the car together, listen to stories or talk to each other,” Johnson said. “But if you don’t have access to your own car, you have to take three buses to get your kids to day care so you can go to work, there might be a reason that you’re making different choices about your parenting.”
