Strange parenting trends down the years – and the latest fads
From using a rag dipped in sugar and brandy as a dummy to baby cages hanging outside buildings, parenting has gone through many fashions. Placenta eating and kid tracking are the latest popular crazes
How we raise our children has, over the generations, been subject to dozens of different fads and fashions. Some have stuck, like the dummy, which began life in 19th century America as sugar rags.
These were pieces of cloth tied tightly around sugar to create a ball sucked by babies to soothe them. Sometimes the fabric was moistened with brandy.
It’s difficult to imagine such a practice being adopted by parents in this day and age. Sugar and booze for babies?
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Over several generations, these sugar rags, or sugar teats, morphed into the dummies we know and use today.
In around 1900, a rubber teat with a shield and handle was patented in the United States as a “baby comforter”. In the US today, 51 per cent of newborns use dummies, research suggests. In China it’s less than half that, at 23 per cent.
The bases for some of the trends that have taken hold since the first dummy nearly 120 years ago, though, were so outlandish that nothing sensible was ever going to come from them.
If we teach our offspring to expect everything to be provided on demand, we must admit the possibility that we are sowing the seeds of socialism
Until the 1920s many doctors and teachers believed that left-handedness in children must be “trained away”. Experts considered that to be left-handed indicated a child was defiant, wilful, and must be reined in. So if you could switch the dominant hand, you could manipulate a child’s personality.