Opium for Infants, and Other Parenting Tips from the Nineteenth Century

During my short experience of parenthood thus far, one of the questions I've often found myself mulling over while my children are vainly trying to get my attention is how parents, mothers in particular, managed to raise their children safely to adulthood while running a household without modern technologies.  I'm not talking about the television or the iPad, though I'm ashamed to admit how prominently they feature in my own parenting toolkit, but more basic technologies, like electricity and running water.  The mere thought of cooking over an open fire, much less having one with two or three kids under the age of five running around it, makes me want to take to the sofa with a copy of Real Simple.  


Yet these women apparently didn't do so.  While the child mortality rate was horrifyingly high (something like 25% of children did not live to adulthood, and many died before age 5), it's amazing to modern mother me (i.e., of the helicopter parent generation) that really any children made it to adulthood with relatively little facial scarring and all their digits intact.  Also, that their mothers appeared, at least based on the literature they wrote and read, not to find their lives unbearably trying.


So, one of the fun projects I've been working on during my sabbatical has involved reading nineteenth-century domestic advice books.  I do have enough common sense to know that when people talk about parenting "back in the day," they're probably wrong--that is, it wasn't all buttery backlit picnics and lacy hoop skirts; nor was life all wholesome, clean, and simple.  But still, I sometimes wonder at my own incompetence and my reliance on things like the bouncy seat, the Ergo baby carrier, and the glow worm that plays lullabies in a dark crib.  So, it was, oddly, reassuring to read that nineteenth-century women faced similar challenges to my own.  The following are their solutions:

1) For the problem sleeper: a little opium every now and then
2) For the high-maintenance newborn: ropes, to tie him to a chair so you can get some work done
3) For the "high-spirited" child: regular whippings

The books I'm reading advocate against these practices, so it's not like they were the standard of care.  But somehow I find it kind of comforting, especially in the face of a lot of public criticism of my generation of mothers.  I mean, I don't know a single mother who has ever given her baby opium.