SOCIOL 2U06 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Toilet Training, Infant Mortality, Developmental Psychology
30 Mar 2016
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Document Summary
Childhood has a biological underpinning, but sociologists are interested in how childhood and childrearing are socially constructed. Ideas about children vary by time and by place. Childhood has become prolonged in our more recent history. Trying to protect children from the industrial workplace: child developmental psychology. Permeating the literature of how to raise children. These were very often geared toward mothers. Emphasis on trying to understand infant mortality and public health, hygiene issues to help with their exposure to germs (1900s), vaccines etc. Emphasis placed on early child training for babies, so women can focus on more household work, stick to specific feeding schedules, play on their own. Women needed to be free in order to be able to keep her house running: medical science. More recently: intensive mothering: communicates to mothers that women have to invest a lot of time, attention, emotional, financial needs to their children or else they won"t develop to their full potential.
