Mothers on the naughty step
Mothers on the naughty step: the growth of the parenting advice industry Finger wagging Seventy years ago, a middle-aged man walked into a BBC radio studio in London to record the first of a series of talks that would radically change the way mothers thought about parenting. The 50 or so broadcasts made by paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott between 1943 and 1962 on a wide range of subjects – from feeding and weaning to jealousy and stealing – popularised his psychoanalytic thinking on the relationship between babies and their mothers to such an extent that some of his catchphrases, such as the good enough mother and the transitional object, have entered everyday speech. Winnicott abhorred the idea of giving advice. He believed that when mothers tried to do things by the book – or by the wireless: "They lose touch with their own ability to act without knowing exactly what is right and what is wrong." Yet today there are far more parenting a...