nd direct question-and-answer format, the book addresses subjects ranging from what and when a child should be fed to how a bottle should be prepared to how a child should be kissed. Holt clearly writes from the standpoint of a doctor, rather than from the standpoint of an emotionally-invested caregiver. He consistently emphasizes the prevention of illness, injury, and disease, and pays little û if any û attention to emotional issues. Where emotions are addressed in his instructions, it is solely in relation to health concerns. For example, Holt stresses the importance of the mental health of the nursing mother not because he perceives it as intrinsically beneficial, but because any emotional stress "may cause the milk to disagree with an infant or even make it acutely ill" (Holt, 1894, p. 39). Similarly, he discourages the kissing of infants because "tuberculosis, diphtheria, and many other grave diseases may be communicated in this way" (p. 131). And his discussions of "bad habits" such as nail-biting or dirt-eating focus on the need for control of the habit, and not on understanding why the child may have begun doing the bad habit in the first place. Understood through Holt's eyes, then, the child seems to be little more than an affliction waiting to happen. This perception of the child as more of a problem than a blessing is carried through û albeit in a more subtle way û into the work of John Watson, which emerged thirty years later.
After years of working with laboratory animals like rats and frogs, John B. Watson's fascination with the psychology of learning brought him to the study of children. When he published Psychological Care of Infant and Child in 1925, it became a best-seller within a few months (Cohen, 1979, p. 217). Parents Magazine declared that it should be "on every intelligent mother's shelf"; Atlantic Monthly called it "a godsend to parents" (Cohen, p. 218). In a time when the possibilities of sc...