Nazi Theory of Childrearing - Side Effects

[lpetrich]

Harsh Nazi Parenting Guidelines May Still Affect German Children of Today - Scientific American

The Nazi regime urged German mothers to ignore their toddlers’ emotional needs—the better to raise hardened soldiers and followers. Attachment researchers say that the harmful effects of that teaching may be affecting later generations.

In 1934 physician Johanna Haarer published The German Mother and Her First Child. Her advice guided child-rearing in the Third Reich. It ultimately sold some 1.2 million copies, almost half of them after the end of the war.

In that book, Haarer recommended that children be raised with as few attachments as possible. If a child cried, that was not the mother's problem. Excessive tenderness was to be avoided at all cost.

Psychotherapists fear that this kind of upbringing led many children in Germany to develop attachment difficulties and that those problems might have been passed on to subsequent generations.

Then the case of a woman in her 60's who complained that she cannot get herself to love her children no matter how much she wants to.

Flens’s story, told to me by her therapist, illustrates an issue troubling a number of mental health experts in Germany: Haarer’s ideas may still be harming the emotional health of its citizens. One aspect was particularly pernicious: she urged mothers to ignore their babies’ emotional needs. Infants are hardwired to build an attachment with a primary care giver. The Nazis wanted children who were tough, unemotional and unempathetic and who had weak attachments to others, and they understood that withholding affection would support that goal. If an entire generation is brought up to avoid creating bonds with others, the experts ask, how can members of that generation avoid replicating that tendency in their own children and grandchildren?

“This has long been a question among analysts and attachment researchers but ignored by the general public,” says Klaus Grossmann, a leading researcher in mother-child attachment, now retired from the University of Regensburg.

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In the laboratory, Grossman, who retired in 2003, continually observed scenes such as this: A baby cries. The mother rushes over toward him but stops in her tracks before reaching him. Although she is only a few feet from her child, she makes no effort to pick him up or console him. “When we asked the mothers why they did this, they invariably stated that they didn’t want to spoil their babies.”

...
Haarer’s recommendations were viewed as modern in the Nazi era and promulgated as if scientifically sound. Studies have since demonstrated that Haarer’s advice is indeed traumatizing.

Then some experiments on Romanian orphans.

For example, in a 2014 experiment with 89 of the orphans, a stranger came to the door and, without giving a reason, told a child to follow him. Only 3.5 percent of the children in the control group obeyed, whereas 24.1 percent of the children in foster care followed the stranger, and 44.9 percent of the children living in the orphanage did.

Why did many German mothers follow Haarer's instructions? There were two who were very willing, dedicated Nazis and those who themselves came from emotionally damaged families.

Of course, strict child-rearing practices had been commonplace in Prussia well before the Nazis came on the scene. In Grossmann’s opinion, only a culture that already had a tendency for hardness would have been ready to institute such practices on a grand scale.

It is still more evident in northern Germany than southern Germany. As to how Prussia got that way, it started out as roughly the later East Prussia around Königsberg, recently Kaliningrad -- and it was surrounded on all sides by Poland and Lithuania. So they had to fight fiercely to avoid being conquered.

Parents can grapple with their own attachment experiences and try to raise their own children differently. “But,” Grossman says, “in stressful moments, we often fall back on learned, unconscious patterns.” This tendency may be one reason that Haarer’s youngest daughter, Gertrud, decided never to have children herself. In 2012 she publicly confronted her mother’s legacy, writing a book about Johanna Haarer’s life and ideas. Speaking about her own childhood in an interview on Bavarian television, Gertrud Haarer declared, “Apparently it so traumatized me that I thought I could never raise children.”

 

[lpetrich]

Michael and Debi Pearl have gone even further in their book To Train Up a Child (Child 'training' book triggers backlash - BBC News).

A child-raising book that advocates whipping with branches and belts has sold hundreds of thousands of copies to evangelical Christians. But the deaths of three children whose parents appear to have been influenced by the authors' teachings have provoked a growing backlash.

...
"Training is the conditioning of the child's mind before the crisis arises; it is preparation for future, instant, unquestioning obedience," reads a passage from the book's first chapter.

Although the Pearls deny that they advocate violence, their critics disagree.

To Train Up a Child Archives - Love, Joy, Feminism has Libby Anne's blog entries on that book. LikeSome Michael Pearl Quotes on Child Training | Libby Anne

The Pearls recommend whipping infants only a few months old on their bare skin. They describe whipping their own 4 month old daughter (p.9). They recommend whipping the bare skin of “every child” (p.2) for “Christians and non-Christians” (p.5) and for “every transgression” (p.1). Parents who don’t whip their babies into complete submission are portrayed as indifferent, lazy, careless and neglectful (p.19) and are “creating a Nazi” (p.45).

A Nazi? Seems to me that they would have Sieg-Heiled over Johanna Haarer's childrearing prescriptions.

Blanket Training is About Adults, Not Children | Homeschoolers Anonymous

Blanket training is a child training method advocated by Gary and Anne Marie Ezzo and popularized by the Duggar family through their TLC show. It has its own Wikipedia page and has its own featured page on the Duggar Family Blog. Parents have adopted this child training method specifically because of the Duggars.

In its simplest form, blanket training consists of 3 actions: (1) place a young child (usually an infant or toddler) on a small blanket, (2) tell that child not to move off the blanket, and (3) strike that child if they move off the blanket. Rinse, repeat.

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Blanket training is essentially a specific manifestation of “first-time obedience” training, also popularized by the Ezzos as well as Michael and Debi Pearl. The Pearls use this same technique but instead of a blanket they use an object the infant or toddler will find attractive:

Place an appealing object where they can reach it …. when they spy it and make a dive for it, in a calm voice say, ‘No, don’t touch that.’ Since they are already familiar with the word ‘No,’ they will likely pause, look at you in wonder, and then turn around grab it. Switch their hand once and simultaneously say, No.

Five Worst Parenting Books | Evolutionary Parenting | Where History And Science Meet Parenting mentions the Ezzos' book Babywise as #2.

In this version there were strict guidelines on feeding times and touch times – in short, huge promotion of scheduled care. We know scheduled care with newborns is bad, but this one was so bad, the American Academy of Pediatrics had to make a public statement against this book because the methods were clearly associated with dehydration and ‘failure to thrive’ in numerous infants. In short, following the advice was putting babies at severe physical risk of harm. With that, you may be asking, what book could possibly be worse?

#1 was Michael and Debi Pearl's To Train Up a Child:

This book endorses inflicting physical pain on babies and children under the assumption that they are evil little bastards out to get you and that you must break their will to be a successful parent. Some of the suggestions include pulling your baby’s hair if s/he bites when nursing, teasing your child with something they want then hit them when they reach for it, using switches on babies, and spanking a child for up to 45 minutes at a time if the child doesn’t want to sit in your lap or clean up or simply tries to defend himself against any beating. Did I mention that there have been multiple deaths of children due to the practices in this book?

Train Up Your Child - Awful Library Books

8 ) The Pearls recommend pulling a nursing infant’s hair (p.7), and describe tripping their non-swimming toddler so she falls into deep water (p.67). They recommend ignoring an infant’s bumped head when he falls to the floor, and ignoring skinned knees (p.86). They also say “if your child is roughed-up by peers, rejoice.” (p.81) And on p.103 the Pearls say if children lose their shoes, “let them go without until they (the children) can make the money to buy more.”

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The Pearls’ methods have resulted in parents being investigated by Child Protective Services, children being taken away from parents, a restraining order against a father, and even a babysitter going to jail on felony charges!

One of the commenters stated

I have never heard of the Pearls, but they have a ministry and a website. I pulled this off the site about corporal punishment for children: “The anti-spanking campaign is a front for an anti-family agenda, a progressive socialist movement to reengineer society with government the only mentor of children.” They are totally scary people masquerading as “Christians”.

 

[rousseau]

The pseudo-science of the early twentieth century never ceases to amaze me.

It was like we wanted to be scientific but were really bad at it.

 

[Angry Floof]

Sadism thrives in the welcoming environment of religion.

 

[steve_bank]

Culturally Germany had always been a bit more regimented than France or England were they not? All Europeans were militaristic. Strong patriarchal system. Father is the absolute ruler of a family.

 

[4321lynx]

Culturally Germany had always been a bit more regimented than France or England were they not? All Europeans were militaristic. Strong patriarchal system. Father is the absolute ruler of a family.

Bolded bit is perhaps the understatement of the year.

Teutonic tribes wiped out two Roman legions sent to subdue them 2000 years ago, and made Rome stop its European expansion at the Rhine. Eventually their descendants overran that Empire.
Germans have had a "Drang nach Osten" (Drive to the East) along the shore of the Baltic Sea and in areas south of it
as far as Vienna for more than 1000 years. The best known were the Teutonic Knights who morphed into the Prussians when they secularized.
The "Nazi Theory of Childrearing" is but a slight modernization of the Prussian/German one.
The bloody Nazis are now blamed for much that is typically German, even the World War II was reputedly fought against the Nazis according to the media in the USA. Sure the Nazis were in power, but they were elected into that power, and anyone can see by the hysterically ecstatic welcomes of Hitler 's victories that those Germans who were not detained in concentration camps strongly supported the Nazis until the war was lost.
And be that as it may, the result was arguably the best damn regular soldiers the world has ever seen. They lost the war at Kursk in Russia in the summer of 1943 and fought on a fighting retreat for two more years on god knows how many fronts.

And don't forget that Germans modernized and trained the Japanese army in the 19th Century.

I am not claiming that these are huge achievements of culture or civilization, just trying to point out some facts.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

"Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes;
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases."CHORUS
(in which the cook and the baby joined): -- -- "Wow! wow! wow!"While the Duchess sang the second verse of
the song, she kept tossing the baby violently up
and down, and the poor little thing howled so,
that Alice could hardly hear the words: -- --
"I speak severely to my boy,
I beat him when he sneezes;
For he can thoroughly enjoy
The pepper when he pleases!" CHORUS"Wow! wow! wow!"

- Lewis Carroll

 

[steve_bank]

A topic for history.

The German army was not superior when against equals. They swept through Europe because for example the French were still practicing cavalry warfare.

I belive it was the Norwegians who put up a good fight but were overwhelmed.

The German regimentation was a serious drawback for the Germans. In Russia Guderian pleaded with Hitler to have the latitude to pursue targets of opportunity outside of the command structure and was sacked once or twice.

Personal initiative was not in the cultural DNA. The Brits also had a military class structure but not as inhibiting as the Germans.

Another generation of indoctrination of the youth and Hitler would have had a complete culture.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Then there was the Adolph Hitler schools. Young boys from the Nazi party members were shipped off to these schools to be molded into Nazi party members of the future who would be the bureaucrats that ran the 1000 year Reich.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_Schools