Notable Mentions

• QI, S16E12 (4 May 2019)

There was an American paediatrician called Dr. Walter J Sackett Junior, and he basically suggested that you should ignore crying babies. He wrote a bestseller in 1962 called Bringing Up Babies: A Family Doctor's Practical Approach To Child Care, and he said if you didn't ignore crying babies, they would grow up to be socialists.

"If we teach our offspring to expect everything to be provided on demand, we must admit the possibility of sowing the seeds of socialism." [...] But he also prescribed early feeding. He recommended that you give babies cereals at two days, vegetables at ten days, meat at 14 and finally, at nine weeks, "Bacon and eggs, just like Dad." Can a baby digest all that? No, darling. No, it's a terrible idea. [...] Anyway, he disliked milk intensely. He said, "To my mind, the dairies of America constitute the number one health hazard." He recommended giving babies black coffee from six months.

• Slate. The Worst Advice Ever Given To Parents, Going Back To The 1700s (27 Nov 2012). Huff Post.

As late as 1962, well after Spock’s kinder, gentler approach had become a staple of nightstands across the country, a Miami pediatrician named Walter W. Sackett Jr. came out with a book called Bringing Up Babies, in which he implied that parents who failed to impose strict schedules on their babies were downright unpatriotic. Absolutely no night feedings, he wrote, no matter how young the baby, nor how much it cried. “If we teach our offspring to expect everything to be provided on demand, we must admit the possibility that we are sowing the seeds of socialism,” Sackett warned, likening overindulgent parents to Hitler and Stalin.