For instance, John and Elizabeth Newson's 'Patterns of Infant Care' (1963) reports results of interviews with 700 Nottingham mothers of one-year-old children. 'Whenever mothers reported receiving professional advice from doctors or nurses, it was in fact invariably in the direction of urging them not to 'give in' to the child' and to let them cry it out, though most mothers were not able to force themselves to follow the medical directions fully. E.g.: 'Doctor told me to leave him; and if he cried, let him; if I put him to bed and he wouldn't sleep, to let him cry- to leave him an hour and if he still cried to go and slap him and leave him another hour; but I couldn't - not to let him cry like that.'
Even Dr. Spock recommended being 'firm' with babies who cried at night. It was only in the 1970s - after research by Mary Ainsworth and colleagues suggested that when mothers are responsive to their babies' signals, the babies end up crying less, and show better later adjustment in certain respects -that some of the advice began to be modified.
Although I agree that rigid infant-rearing methods are not ideal, I tend to be suspicious of the doom-laden suggestions that there are modern 'epidemics' of all sorts of social problems that were never present in the past. Often these suggestions either look back through rose-coloured glasses and forget past problems, or they ignore the economic and broader social factors in influencing outcomes. If 'life outcomes for American youth' (and those of other countries too) 'are worsening', a lot of this may be the result of economic uncertainty, increased rate of poverty, and job insecurity.
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