20 Parenting Rules From Before 1950 That Aged Surprisingly Well

Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori opened her first preschool, the Casa dei Bambini, or “Children’s House,” in a poor area of Rome in 1907. She had tables, chairs, and low shelves made to fit kids’ dimensions so they could access learning materials without adults’ assistance. The classroom still followed Montessori’s careful method, but children were free to choose their own activities within it. Today, studies have shown that the type of hands-on learning Montessori pioneered promotes better planning and impulse control in the brain.

In Emmi Pikler’s 1940 book What Can Your Baby Already Do?, the Hungarian pediatrician advised parents not to help babies into sitting, standing or walking positions that they hadn’t reached themselves. But she didn’t want them to be neglectful; she simply believed that during times of floor play it was better to let them do what they could, while still paying attention during things like feeding and dressing. Recent research has shown the same benefits for babies’ core strength and balance.

In the 1920s, there was a push by Nordic public health officials for parents to dress their babies in layers and put them out in prams (baby carriages) for daytime naps. This was in part because of the prevalence of tuberculosis, which thrived in crowded, poorly ventilated rooms. In a 2008 Finnish study, babies slept longer outside. The benefit wasn’t due to the cold killing germs, but to the fresh air babies breathed.

In a 1933 lecture, the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky claimed that games with strict rules, such as “red light, green light,” compel children to exercise self-restraint in order to succeed, and that this act of inhibiting oneself serves as a training ground for self-control. Research in modern cognitive science confirms that play structured around rules enhances self-regulation more than unstructured play.

The Austrian-American psychiatrist Rudolf Dreikurs, in The Challenge of Parenthood, published in 1948, warned against praise focused on fixed traits, such as calling a child smart. He advocated for “encouragement” instead, praising effort, persistence and strategy. Half a century later, psychologist Carol Dweck’s research into the growth mindset, the idea that abilities can develop through effort and learning, reached a similar conclusion: praise effort to build resilience; praise character, and kids become afraid to fail. Dreikurs made the same distinction decades before Dweck, without the marketing.

In the 1920s, pediatric recommendations for infant and toddler bedtime focused on the importance of setting up a quiet, dark environment in the evening hours. Today, sleep science links consistent, low-light wind-down routines to circadian regulation, the body’s internal biological clock, which helps children produce melatonin, a sleep-inducing hormone.

In 1919, Polish-Jewish pediatrician and educator Janusz Korczak published How to Love a Child in Warsaw. He believed that children should be treated as real people deserving of dignity and respect now, rather than being treated as merely the future adults they might become. He established an orphanage based on these concepts, and his writings were influential in drafting the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989.

Early kindergarten teachers used nursery rhymes as a staple of their daily curriculum. In 1990, a study published in the journal Nature found that children who excelled at identifying rhyming words also did well in tasks that required them to identify and play with the sounds within words. This ability, known as phonological awareness, predicts how well kids will learn to read.

American pediatrician Benjamin Spock began his 1946 book The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care with these words: “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” Rather than feed babies on strict, four-hour schedules that were popular in his day, Spock encouraged parents to feed them when they wanted food. Millions of copies were sold. Cue-based feeding, or feeding in response to a baby’s hunger signals, encourages healthy attachment, according to today’s advice.

In the 1930s, American public libraries launched public relations campaigns around events such as Children’s Book Week, asking parents to read aloud to young children every single day to build vocabulary and their ability to follow a narrative. This message is alive and well today; the American Academy of Pediatrics and other organizations recommend that parents read aloud to babies and toddlers.

In Rudolf Steiner’s 1907/1909 book The Education of the Child, one of the founding texts of Waldorf education, the Austrian philosopher wrote that simple wooden and cloth toys should be chosen instead of complex mechanical toys. In a 2016 study published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, researchers observed toddlers playing with either simple or electronic toys and found that parents talked and engaged more creatively with their children when playing with the simple toys.

In 1933, parent-education writer Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg and her husband, educator Benjamin C. Gruenberg, wrote the book Parents, Children, and Money. They suggested that children be given a small allowance without any obligations. There were to be no chore-based allowances or bribes for good behavior. The allowance was meant to give children the opportunity to learn about budgeting and delayed gratification on their own. This remains the standard advice today when it comes to teaching kids financial literacy.

In early 20th-century diet guides, popularized by physicians like pediatrician L. Emmett Holt, you’ll find good old-fashioned advice such as feeding babies unprocessed whole foods and limiting sugar intake. This aligns with what we advise today. But these old texts also encouraged the feeding of raw egg yolks to infants and solid foods to two-week-old infants. Nobody’s recommending either today. So we’re talking about a mixed bag.

Many households relied on grandparents, aunts, and neighbors to help with child care on a regular basis between the 1920s and 1940s. That kind of communal caregiving practice, which researchers now call “alloparenting” or shared care, has been associated with lower rates of caregiver stress and increased resilience in kids in recent studies.

From 1919 to 1922, physicians Kurt Huldschinsky and Alfred Hess discovered that daily exposure to sunlight would prevent and cure rickets, a childhood bone-softening disease, because sunlight helped the body produce vitamin D. This led to widespread efforts to encourage children to play in the sun. At the time, doctors didn’t know unlimited sun exposure carried long-term skin-cancer risk, a caveat modern medicine now adds to the same advice.

In 1886, British educator Charlotte Mason’s book Home Education advised parents to provide young kids with daily doses of unstructured outdoor time for observing nature rather than early academic instruction. But she was not suggesting children have complete liberty. Mason coupled her advice on outdoor time with intensive habit training inside the home.

Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s major contribution to child development was published in 1934 as Thought and Language. He argued that dialogue between an adult and a child helps children internalize their thinking processes. This “serve and return” pattern, a contemporary term rather than Vygotsky’s own phrasing, is at the foundation of modern pediatric advice about language-rich parenting, including that issued by the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University.

In Maria Montessori’s classroom, the children were doing actual work, such as pouring water, sweeping the floor, and dressing themselves, rather than playing with toys that simulate adult work. In a 25-year study conducted at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Marty Rossmann found a connection between doing chores as a child and levels of self-efficacy, achievement orientation, and work ethic in adulthood. The Harvard Grant Study has also highlighted this finding. It’s important to understand, though, that these findings, based on long-term data, are correlations, not causal evidence.

In The Challenge of Parenthood, published in 1948, the Austrian-American psychiatrist Rudolf Dreikurs spoke out against physical discipline. Rather than spank a kid for refusing to put on boots, let him go outside with cold feet and learn from that experience. Dreikurs would intervene if the situation posed a real threat (for instance, when running into traffic), but for everything else, discipline meant teaching, not punishment. This technique, known as Adlerian parenting, takes its name from Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler, whose psychological approach heavily influenced Dreikurs.

Pediatrician and educator Janusz Korczak’s 1919 writings and pediatrician Benjamin Spock’s 1946 manual both told parents the same thing: admit your mistakes and apologize to your child instead of insisting on unquestioned authority. Modern attachment theory’s research on “rupture and repair,” which involves re-establishing security with your child after conflict, demonstrates that acknowledging these faults can go a long way toward restoring trust.

This content was created with the help of AI.