The Dangers of Reading Too Much (Part 2)

The Dark History of Parenting Books

“Now, there has been a misconception by developmental psychology that all infants are resilient. This is not the case.  The more precise term is malleable. This misconception has been challenged. It’s now clear that just about every significant psychiatric disorder reflects a disruption of developmental processes.”

— Allan Schore

As I discussed in Part 1, the printing press was critical to the Protestant Reformation, the turning point, according to Iain McGilchrist, when left hemisphere-thinking began to dominate the West.

Martin Luther was one of the first best-selling authors, including publishing a German translation of the New Testament in 1522 and of the full Bible in 1534 (and, later, after the Jewish people rejected his “purified” Christianity, a popular anti-Semitic text entitled The Jews and Their Lies). People were encouraged to read and interpret the Bible for themselves, and religion became a more individualistic pursuit. The left hemisphere is more literal than the right, which is responsible for understanding metaphor. Unsurprisingly, then, it is now common for people to interpret Biblical stories literally, instead of metaphorically or allegorically, as they were likely originally intended to be. Furthermore, as Jacques Barzun says in From Dawn to Decadence (2000, page 19), “[o]nce literal biblicism had taken hold, all imaginable acts of cruelty, moral, social, and political, found their warrant somewhere in scripture.”

Another influential book that widely circulated shortly after the invention of the printing press was Germania by Roman historian Publius Tacitus (56-120), which was rediscovered in the 15th century and translated into German. According to Barzun, Tacitus described the German tribes as “nobly moral and free” (page 9) and as leading lives in which “candor, truthfulness, and loyalty are as normal as falsehood, deceit, treachery, and a cowardly fear of death are in civilization” (page 107). Germania inspired many Germanic elites to “find cause for national pride” (page 9), and according to The Harvard Gazette (2008) would later help “fuel Nazi propaganda” and was, unsurprisingly, “not an accurate depiction of reality.”

For good or ill, no one can dispute the power of books to change a culture, in particular books that target the minds of the young—or their parents.

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Around the 1600s, the rise in mobility and colonialism resulted in generations of mothers who were raising children away from their extended families and traditions. Self-proclaimed “experts” began publishing books on child-rearing, targeted toward affluent, literate, and isolated mothers, and to those who aspired to raise children who would climb the social ladder.

Alice Miller (1923-2010), a Jewish psychologist, penned multiple books about the “poisonous pedagogies” spread in these manuals, which advocated practices such as not hugging your children, lying to them, beating them, psychological manipulation, and early forms of sleep-training/cry-it-out.

Miller believed that the “poisonous pedagogies”, which primarily arose out of Germany and the former Holy Roman Empire—but were also popular throughout Western and Northern Europe and the colonies—resulted in psychologically distressed and alienated children with a vulnerability to narcissism and totalitarianism. This, she argues, in part gave rise to the conditions that led to Nazi Germany.

Her claims are supported by research on hunter-gatherer tribes; tribes which were highly physically affectionate toward babies and toddlers had lower rates of violence than tribes which were less physically affectionate (and tended to inflict more pain on their children). In other words, a lack of physical affection—i.e. neglect—in early childhood predicted violence in adulthood.

In The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting (2006, page 28), Miller writes:

“I call the violent kind of “upbringing” abuse, not only because children are thus refused the right to dignity and respect as human beings but also because such an approach to parenting establishes a kind of totalitarian regime in which it is impossible for children to perceive the humiliations, indignities, and disrespect they have been subjected to, let alone to defend themselves against them. These patterns of childhood will inevitably then be adopted by their victims and used on their partners and their own children, at work, in politics, wherever the fear and anxiety of the profoundly insecure child can be fended off with the aid of external power.”

Traits Alice Miller observed as common among adult children who were raised under “poisonous pedagogies” and/or by cold, abusive, and/or narcissistic parents include:

• Hyperactivity

• Rejection of the inner child, negative self-talk about the self as a child

• Overachievement and “giftedness”

• Intellectualization and obsession with language and bureaucracy

• Perfectionism

• Validation-seeking

• Hypersensitivity and what we would now call “rejection sensitive dysphoria”

• Conformity of thought and reliance on groupthink (largely due to a fear of rejection and losing love)

• Gullibility

• Inability or limited ability to love and authentically connect to other people

• Codependency and people-pleasing

• Obsession with power

• Impaired theory of mind

• Poor boundaries

• Alexithymia (inability to identify and describe emotions)

• Masking and the creation of a “false self”

• Anger issues and outbursts / “meltdowns”

• A tendency toward exploitative relationships

Miller’s thesis is further supported by the fact that many of the authors of these “poisonous” parenting manuals—mostly white men, though white women, such as Nazi pulmonologist Johanna Haarer (1900-1988), would later join the fray—were either not parents themselves, or were bad parents. Haarer, for example, wrote:

“The best is the child in a separate room, where it then remains alone. Do not start taking the child out of bed, carrying it, weighing it, driving it or keeping it on your lap, even nursing it. Child understands incredibly quickly that it only needs to scream to summon a compassionate soul and become the subject of such care, and after a short while, it demands this occupation with him as a right, gives no rest until it is carried again, rocked or driven will – and the small but relentless pet bully is ready!”

Her daughter, Gertrud Haarer, later challenged her mother’s advice, and once stated in an interview that she “was apparently so traumatized that [she] believed [she] would never have children of [her] own.”

Decades earlier, Dr. Moritz Schreber (1808-1861), author of multiple best-selling parenting books in the 1800s, had three children who were later diagnosed with mental illnesses, including Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911), author of Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, and another child who committed suicide. Schreber is credited with being largely responsible for multiple generations of German children growing up “without direct, loving contact with their parents” and other family members. His son, Daniel, became a famous case study for schizophrenia, and also for what we now call gender dysphoria, as he wrote about feeling like he was becoming a woman for the purposes of “sexual misuse.”

Christopher Badcock quotes Daniel Schreber in The Imprinted Brain (page 177):

“I could see beyond doubt that the Order of the World imperiously demanded my unmanning, whether I personally liked it or not, and that therefore it was common sense that nothing was left to me but to reconcile myself to the thought of being transformed into a woman.”

According to one blogger, “[i]n Germany and Austria in particular, childcare advice was so neglectful that it was common for children to remain in their own soiled diapers and clothing for hours. Children were dirty, and so they were despised, and because they were despised, they were not cleaned and cared for.”

Poisonous pedagogies are not exclusively a historical phenomenon; on pages 161-163 of The Myth of Normal (2022), Maté provides Jordan Peterson and Emily Oster as recent examples of authors who advocate harmful parenting practices in their bestselling books. Oster “devalues, among other things, such ancient practices as breastfeeding and cosleeping with one’s newborn” (page 161), and, famously, tells parents that drinking alcohol during pregnancy is fine, advice that has been called “profoundly dangerous”. Gina Ford’s parenting books once had around 25% of the childcare market in the UK (according to her), and advocated “golden rules” like “put your baby to sleep in its own room from day one” and “avoid making eye contact with your baby after 10pm”, and other “dangerous” advice.

As well, a lot of the poisonous pedagogies from previous generations are still in use or still have an impact via intergenerational trauma. I think the caregiver instinct is largely developed in early childhood from being cared for, mirror neurons working the way they do and all that—if you were inadequately cared for as a child, it makes sense that it would be a lot harder for you to be a good parent. (Of course, many people break the cycle, and I’m always rooting for healing). 

According to the article on Johanna Haarer in Big Think, the Nazis’ “inhumane parenting guidelines may still be affecting German children” today. Other pedagogues who still have an outsized influence on parenting practices today include Dr. Luther Emmett Holt, who introduced the “cry it out” method in 1894 (still recommended in a majority of parenting books), and John Watson, the “father of behaviorism”, who instructed parents not to excessively hug, kiss, or coddle their children. 

Watson’s granddaughter, actress and comedian Mariette Hartley, would later write a book called Breaking the Silence (1990) about the harm caused by her grandfather’s parenting beliefs. She writes:

“In Big John’s ideal world, children were to be taken from their mothers during their third or fourth week: If not, attachments were bound to develop. He claimed that the reason mothers indulged in baby-loving was sexual … Children should never be kissed, hugged or allowed to sit on their laps.

My mother’s upbringing was purely intellectual. The only time my mother was ‘kissed on the forehead’ was when she was about 12 and Big John went to war. Although she was reading the newspaper by the time she was 2, there was never any touching, not any at all. Grandfather’s theories infected my mother’s life, my life and the lives of millions.

How do you break a legacy? How do you keep from passing a debilitating inheritance down, generation to generation, like a genetic flaw?”

(Quoted from Attached at the Heart: Eight Proven Parenting Principles for Raising Connected and Compassionate Children (2013) by Barbara Nicholson and Lysa Parker, pages 11-12).

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The word “trauma” is tossed around a lot these days, with many people complaining that the definition has become so broad, almost everyone can identify as traumatized. But what if, as Gabor Maté suggests in The Myth of Normal, Western culture and our “WEIRD” child-rearing practices are inherently traumatic? Alice Miller was able to trace examples of “poisonous pedagogies” back to at least the 1700s in her 1980 book For Your Own Good. This means that some Western families may have been affected by toxic parenting ideas—as well as poisonous pedagogies affecting maternity care, postnatal care, and education—for around a dozen generations, and probably more.

According to Darcia F. Narvaez, PhD, author of the Psychology Today column “Moral Landscapes”:

“In our culture, we have pretty much unnested our children. We are missing most of the components of what helps a baby grow into their full potential, their systems to develop properly. That’s the unnestedness.” (quoted from The Myth of Normal (2022) by Gabor and Daniel Maté, page 167)

Narvaez characterizes Western parenting as being long “off the rails.” Her work frequently compares Western (and “colonial”) parenting practices over the past few centuries with Indigenous practices of childrearing, noting that Indigenous peoples in the Americas were “shocked” at the harsh parenting practices of the colonizers. Narvaez advocates for the “decolonization” of child-rearing, a call which is conspicuously absent from most of the mainstream “woke” rhetoric on the subject (leftist calls for government-subsidized universal daycare would be an example of further “colonizing” child-rearing, ironically).

This is my primary qualm with Badcock’s, McGilchrist’s, and Henrich’s works: they point to the printing press as a turning point where the Western mind became more individualistic, mechanistic, left-brained, and autistic. I laid out their arguments in Part 1, and I do think they are correct. But they fail to consider the impact of the content in the books themselves.

While it is impossible to tease out the exact effects of the various cultural shifts that occurred in the lead-up to and during the Industrial Revolution, I suspect the impact of “poisonous pedagogies” spread in parenting books had just as great, if not a greater, impact on the left-hemisphere and mechanistic shift toward “WEIRD”-ness than literacy itself.

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Alice Miller, who died in 2010, wrote her books before much of the neuroscience research supporting her theories was conducted. But now a scientific explanation for her observations is available from research on brain development and the right hemisphere.

McGilchrist characterizes autism—and multiple other conditions known to be highly co-morbid with autism or to share traits with it, such as anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and borderline personality disorder—as being a disorder of right hemisphere dysfunction and left hemisphere dominance.

In The Matter With Things (page 322) he notes:

“It is relevant that the important areas for mother-infant attachment, recognition of the mother’s face and voice, and of self-other distinction are all in the right hemisphere, which is normally dominant in early childhood.”

Erica Komisar, a clinical social worker and psychoanalyst, focuses largely on the importance of nurturing the right hemisphere in babies and toddlers in her book, Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters (2017). She writes (page 26):

“The first three years of your child’s life are a critical window in which to develop your baby’s right brain and nurture her emotional health and social development through attachment, play, and nonverbal communication. The development of right-brain attributes, like the ability to read social cues, relate to others, and develop lasting emotional connections, lays the foundation for later cognitive development; without that foundation a child may not be able to tolerate the frustration and mistakes for effective learning or the resilience to recover from making a mistake.”

Recall from Part 1:

The right hemisphere is the dominant processor of our relationships to our embodied selves, to nature, to food, to spirituality, and to other people and all living things. The right hemisphere is also dominant in processing music, and in the nonverbal aspects of communication. The left hemisphere, on the other hand, contains the language centres of the brain, and is dominant when we interact with non-living things, such as machines. The left hemisphere is abstract, reductionist, uses bottom-up processing, emphasizes logic, order, rationality, and bureaucracy, and understands things in black-and-white. The right hemisphere is holistic, uses top-down processing, emphasizes change, empathy, and openness, and is the hemisphere of the brain responsible for meaning-making. The left sees things, including our own bodies, as an assemblage of parts, whereas the right sees the complex and systemic whole. The left is narcissistic, while the right is relational. The left hemisphere apprehends, while the right comprehends. The left explains, while the right understands. 

It logically follows that generations of neglecting the right hemisphere of our babies and toddlers under the misguided belief that “children forget everything that happened to them in early childhood” would lead to epigenetic changes that predispose babies to be more left-hemisphere dominant.

Over the past forty or so years, older beliefs about “schizophrenogenic mother” and “refrigerator mother” being the cause of their children’s schizophrenia and autism (i.e. right hemisphere dysfunction) have “fallen out of favour” and are described as “debunked” in multiple sources (notably, never with a link to an actual study).

I don’t agree with these terms, or the implied belief that all cases of schizophrenia, autism, and other developmental disorders and mental illnesses are caused solely by cold, abusive, or dysfunctional parenting—and where these are factors, fathers are also important. As I explained in Part 1, autism is not a unitary condition, but an umbrella diagnosis for a cluster of symptoms originating from a variety of causes. This appears to also be true of many diagnoses currently available in the DSM.

However, as Erica Komisar writes (Being There, page 41):

“As we struggle to explain the increase in the numbers of children diagnosed with conditions on the autism spectrum, ADHD, and other social and developmental disorders, we have to consider that this rise may be directly related to increased maternal stress and the lack of consistent, intimate engagement of mothers (and other caregivers) with children.”

It is fairly obvious, for example, that lack of face-to-face time in infancy and toddlerhood could be a cause of prosopagnosia, or facial blindness, which is seen in around a third of autistic adults without intellectual disability, or of the difficulty many autistic children have with eye contact. It is fundamental to neuroscience that cells that fire together, wire together. Babies learn faces from interacting with faces, not from “screen time” or playing with toys or smiling into Mom’s cell phone camera.

Nowadays, this lack of engagement often has little to do with how loving or attentive parents are with their children, but is instead a function of insufficient parental leave and mothers (and fathers) who are unable to quit their jobs to become full-time parents for financial reasons and instead have to rely on understaffed daycares. Year Zero, a substack by Wesley Yang, recently ran an incredible piece on the adverse effects of daycare on babies and toddlers.

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In 2005, McGill professor Michael Meaney published research on rat pups and maternal care, building off work by Sigi Levine and Victor Denenberg from 1967.

Meaney’s research team observed mother rats with their pups, and divided them into “high-licking” and “low-licking” groups. They found that the pups in the “low-licking” group had a methyl mark on genes known to inhibit the stress response, silencing the genes in question. Low-licking mothers were more fearful on average, and “beget more stress-reactive offspring.” Furthermore, licking behaviour was passed down to the next generation.

Meaney and his colleagues then cross-fostered the pups, giving pups from low-licking mothers to high-licking mothers and vice versa. The pups were more likely to repeat the same maternal care they received, instead of the care style of their biological mothers. Pups of low-licking mothers raised by high-licking mothers showed less fear of novel situations than the pups of high-licking mothers raised by low-licking mothers. At an epigenetic level, early maternal care and affection was critical for the development of a healthy stress response. Meaney writes:

“These findings demonstrate that the structural modifications of the DNA can be established through environmental programming and that, in spite of the inherent stability of this epigenomic marker, it is dynamic and potentially reversible.

This is a theme that reverberates through Miller’s and Maté’s works; healing is possible, and quickly, within a generation or two.

However, according to Miller, we cannot heal until we understand why we’re in pain, and without awareness, we are likely to repeat the same parenting behaviours that contributed to our psychological distress.

On the opening pages of The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979), Miller writes:

“The damage done to us during our childhood cannot be undone, since we cannot change anything in our past. We can, however, change ourselves. We can repair ourselves and gain our lost integrity by choosing to look more closely at the knowledge that is stored inside our bodies and bringing this knowledge closer to our awareness. This path, although certainly not easy, is the only route by which we can at last leave behind the cruel, invisible prison of our childhood. We become free by transforming ourselves from unaware victims of the past into responsible individuals in the present, who are aware of our past and are thus able to live with it.”

As Roger Hodgson of Supertramp sings in “Hide In Your Shell” (a song I’m convinced is about narcissism, or at the very least, masking, and which I hear as a son pleading to his mother), “the cure for pain is love.”

I experienced this firsthand in 2020 when I met my husband, and again in 2021 when we met our daughter. I see it every time my daughter hurts herself and asks me to kiss away the pain. It’s cheesy, but there’s scientific evidence for this poetic claim.

And as Erica Komisar points out in her second book, there is a second window of right hemisphere development, a second window in which healthy attachments and connections can be fostered—adolescence, or roughly ages nine to twenty-five.

After the mid-twenties, it is admittedly much more difficult, but I don’t think it’s impossible. Legacies can be broken, and epigenetic trajectories sent on new paths toward healing.

Stray thoughts:

(1) While many poisonous pedagogical ideas are still in common use, there is also a tendency among some parents to over-correct (e.g. helicopter parenting, “gentle” parenting), which are also harmful. Some of the most insane examples come from, of course, Germany (which makes me wonder if Germans are aware that non-sexual forms of physical affection exist). Many modern poisonous pedagogies look very little like the poisonous pedagogies of yore, but in some cases the consequences for the children are far more permanent and destructive.

(2) Obviously bad ideas about parenting aren’t exclusively a Western thing. I am aware of The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and of some of the overly Type-A parenting practices in Korea (etc), but this is beyond the scope of my knowledge and this essay, so please forgive the omission.

(3) Not all children raised under the influence poisonous pedagogies suffer equally. Loving parents who, for example, follow “expert” advice and sleep-train their children, can and frequently do raise children who are resilient, healthy, and attached to their families. Some children are born more sensitive than others. Something that traumatizes one child might have little to no negative impact on another.

(4) I cannot stress this enough but I am not saying all cases of autism (or any other DSM condition) are related to neglect, cold parenting, and/or poor attachment. There are numerous other factors, such as maternal stress during pregnancy, genetic disorders, certain medications, diet, and toxin exposures (Tao Lin, an autistic author, has an excellent essay summarizing environmental factors and how he improved his own symptoms). However, it’s worth noting that loneliness and lack of oxytocin are associated with chronic inflammation and impaired immune functioning, which would increase the vulnerability of neglected children to environmental factors.

(5) It is well established in clinical literature that people high in narcissism make some of the worst parents, and are generally unwilling or incapable of admitting fault and typically respond with rage, DARVO tactics, and blaming others and external factors whenever information is presented to them that challenges their self-concept (i.e. a narcissistic injury). This makes discussing parenting factors in relation to developmental disorders and mental and physical illness very challenging.

(6) For those who are looking to tackle their childhood traumas, heal their connections to nature, to food, to other people, and to their own body, and improve their physical and mental health, I believe magic mushrooms are probably the most powerful and effective medicine out there. But proceed with caution, high doses are not for the faint of heart or for people unable to relinquish control.