As a parent, there is no shortage of advice on how to raise a child.
When is bedtime? Is breastfeeding or bottle-feeding best? Should crying children be encouraged to self-soothe, or should parents respond straight away?
At one point in time, when kids were indeed “raised by a village,” these questions were easily dealt with.
But according to Rebekah Delahoy, a former research assistant at the Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre, the once-simple choices have given way amid a broader tension between the “industrialisation” of parenting against traditional community ties that have bound generations.
The mother-of-four says that since the Industrial Revolution and rapid urbanisation in the 19th century, the traditional family unit has been eroded as people moved to big cities—a trend still happening today—away from relatives and community networks.
“Everyone knew what to do because if you hadn’t done it yourself yet, you probably helped raise younger siblings,” Delahoy told The Epoch Times.
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Mother of four and Substack author Rebekah Delahoy. Courtesy of Rebekah Delahoy
As more people across the West shifted to urban cores, family networks became weaker, and outside advice played a bigger role.
“If you look at journal articles, [parenting] wasn’t researched until the last 50 years,” she said.
“It’s only been in the last 100 or 200 years that we started to write down parenting advice and give it, and started thinking that we needed an expert to tell us what to do.”
In fact, psychiatrist Tanveer Ahmed has observed that the expansion of government and the welfare state in recent years did not occur in a vacuum, instead, as Western societies became more “atomised” compared to Asia, community links broke down leaving the state to step in.
Pedestrians move past the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) headquarters in Sydney, Australia, on May 4, 2026. Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images
“Everyone lives in cities, we don’t live in extended families or tribes—a biological need actually …”
“We kept trying to improve [parenting],” Delahoy said. “But at the same time, it’s made it harder.”
This in turn, motivated the former researcher to find out why parenting had changed so much.
The Industrial Revolution, Marxism, and the Eroding Family
The 19th century was marked not only by the end of the Industrial Revolution, but also the rise and spread of Marxism.
In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto, which would underpin a vision for society. Among its many ideas was one of class struggle between the rich and poor, parents and children, teacher and students, as well as communist regimes against free societies.
Marxist scholars also advocated for the destruction of the traditional family unit, as they saw it as the foundational building block of free democratic societies.
“Der Stolz der Familie” (“The Pride of the Family”) image from an 1879 German journal. Public Domain
While there is no obvious link between communism or behavioural scientists, it was barely 50 years after the release of The Communist Manifesto when American paediatrician Luther Emmett Holt, released his, “The Care and Feeding of Children,” in 1894.
The book was published over several decades and advocates for strict regimens for children, including fixed feeding times, withholding affection, or advising parents to let babies “cry it out.”
There were some successes with the work though, as some of the ideas helped deal with genuine health risks of the time.
Photograph of Dr Luther Emmett Holt, who published “The Care and Feeding of Children” book in 1894. Dr. L. Emmett Holt, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Later, American psychologist John Broadus Watson, a leading figure in behaviourism, built on Holt’s work and cautioned against excessive affection or frequent hugging or kissing—in 1924, he wrote:
“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select–doctor, lawyer, artist–regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors.”
Three of Watson’s four children attempted suicide later in life with one succeeding.
Photograph of John Broadus Watson at John Hopkins University (1908 to 1921), where he established behaviourism. John Broadus Watson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
What Should Parents Do Now?
Today, many of the practices linked to early behaviourist parenting have fallen out of favour, but strains still remain.
“A lot of the stuff that they were doing was based on very little actual evidence,” Delahoy said. “They didn’t actually do much hands-on raising of children.”
She also said some of the child-rearing ideas drew heavily from animal behavioural experiments involving pigeons, dogs, and seals—questioning why kids need to be so obedient in the first place.
“Even if we can train our children and make them more obedient, is that really the goal that we want anyway?” she asked.
Fans are pictured during the Macca’s Footy Festival at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in Melbourne, Australia, on Sept. 25, 2025. Jonathan DiMaggio/AFL Photos/via Getty Images
“I want my children to learn to think for themselves and not just do what anyone says.”
Her suggestion is that while advice is welcome, parents don’t need “all of the advice.”
“Find just one or two trusted voices and tune out everything else. You need to figure out what family you are going to have.”
