Indeed, adherence to the perspective of developmental determinism undermined the emphasis in the mental hygiene movement on parent education as a tool for the intervention and prevention of the “problems of child-training.” Parent education had become an important feature of the mental hygiene movement, since one of the implications of the increased interest among scientists in the process of child development was the belief that this process was too complex and fragile for the average mother to understand without the intervention of experts, as parent educators.¹¹

Frances Lily Johnson, who compiled bibliographies for Blatz and Bott, reviewed Parents and the Pre-School Child for Chatelaine magazine in January, 1929. She claimed the book would find audience among mothers, teachers, nurses, clinicians, and social workers alike and was essential reading for “avoiding the pitfalls that lie in the path of every normal child during the course of his life, by means of well-planned and consistent training in the early years” (Johnson, 1929, p. 32). With its focus on educating parents, one implication of the mental hygiene movement was the call for parents to reclaim involvement in their children’s learning, which the authors felt had been “too far delegated to teachers and other specialists” (p. 279). They singled out fathers in particular:

[Fathers] should take the time and trouble to maintain an active and appreciative participation with the child in the process of learning]. There was a time when this task was assumed by the parents, but with the modern speeding up and specialization of life this has been delegated to others — and not merely instruction but the whole process of managing the child. It sometimes strikes one with a shock to realize how far the average parent, particularly the father, is removed from the activities of his own child, not merely in the school, but in the home. (p. 279)

¹¹ This notion was taken to its idealistic extreme by B. F. Skinner in Walden Two, in his utopian fantasy in which children are raised without the annoying inconsistencies and inadequacies of their mothers and fathers.