The mothercraft manual

by Mary L. Read

Mothercraft is the skilful, practical doing of all that is involved in the nourishing and training of children, in a sympathetic, happy, religious spirit. It is not merely the care of the little baby; that is a very small, though significant, part. Its practice is not dependent upon physical parenthood, but is part of the responsibility of every woman who has to do with children as teacher, nurse, friend, or household associate. It is no more an instinct than is gardening or building. It is not merely being with children. Its requisite is vital working knowledge of the fundamental principles of biology, hygiene, economics, psychology, education, arts. It is mothering—that oldest, steadiest, most satisfactory vocation to women always and everywhere—made intelligent and efficient and joyous.

Mothercraft cannot be learned simply from books any more than can music, agriculture, carpentry, dentistry. The most important factor in the learning of mothercraft is the daily intelligent association with the children in their natural environment of home. A hospital with sick children is a place to learn its pathological phases.

No one of intelligence will dispute the theory that the most important period in the child’s life is the first seven years. It is in these years that the foundation of his physical life is settled (or unsettled); that the lifelong habits are formed; that the prejudices and the bases of his spiritual and social life are laid. The “gates of gifts”—his potentialities—are closed at birth, possibly when his parents are chosen. Whether one is an advocate of heredity or of environment as the most influential factor in the life of the individual, none will now gainsay that both the heredity and the environment of every individual can be controlled, and that each of these factors may be made vastly more efficient through the high ideals, the intelligence, and the foresight of parents present and potential.

In these days of radical change in the activities and education of women, mothercraft has not kept pace with the other vocations open to women. In a society where marriage is no longer an economic, domestic, or conventional necessity, there has developed a tacit assumption that youth would not marry, and therefore special preparation for home-making (and especially for child care) would be presumptuous and a waste of time. The school has left this part of a girl’s training for the home to give, and in a large proportion of homes there has not been the time or the intelligence or the foresight to give it. Girls have gone from elementary school directly into industry, or to high school and college, or to finishing school and society. Educators and vocational guides have frequently overlooked it in educational and vocational conferences, exhibits, and guidebooks.

And yet to-day in America, the care and training of young children is chiefly in the hands of women. Seventy-five per cent. of women in America are married, and presumably most of them have the responsibility of children in their own homes.

There are ten million children under six years of age whose care and training is naturally in the entire control of their homes. There are fourteen million children between five and fifteen years of age who, on the average, spend thirty hours a week, for forty weeks a year, in school, while all the rest of their life—about seventy per cent. of their waking hours, as well as all their sleeping hours—is in the control of their mothers and fathers.

Nursing, within fifty years, has become a profession, and to-day it is almost impossible for a woman to find employment as a nurse unless she has had a special training for three years. Yet nursing has only to do with sick folk, usually in a hospital, which is still a far cry from the daily care, hygiene, and training of the normal child in a home. For an equal period, teachers of young children have been expected to take a special normal course of two to four years. Yet this training has had little to do, until recently in some quarters, with hygiene, biology, or the psychology of the child, but has concerned itself chiefly with subjects in the curriculum and with masses of children in an artificial grouping and environment, foreign to their native interests and inimical to their physical needs.

Only within the last twenty-five years has medicine developed pediatrics—the special study of children’s treatment. Child-hygiene is still later as an exact science. Child-study, as an exact science, dates back to Froebel and the early nineteenth century, and is still a new field.

The mother in her home, herself with slight special preparation, busy with her children, could scarcely have been expected to keep pace with these developments and to teach them to her daughters, even had she the foresight. The higher institutions of learning, naturally among the most conservative forces of society, have not yet begun to perceive the significance of such a subject as mothercraft in the curriculum, although the beginnings of some phases are being made. The secondary and elementary schools, bound by the fetish of college requirements, are only beginning to show here and there indications of efforts to prepare for living instead of simply for college.

And the young woman—still immature, inexperienced, and therefore not appreciative of life’s values and impending responsibilities—has had neither the guidance of school and home, nor the educational opportunity, nor the personal foresight to prepare adequately for this vocation.