The Practice Babies

Practice babies were live human babies, cared for by college seniors who were temporarily living in home ec practice houses. The babies mostly came from orphanages or child welfare agencies, and were usually adopted after their time in the program.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Before we
start today's episode proper, we have kind of a I

(00:21):
think special thing coming up. It's unlikely at this point
that we are going to do any touring this year.
That we had some things on the calendar that had
been scheduled that we're you know, one off appearances in
places those have been canceled. I think the only one
that we actually announced on the show was we were

(00:42):
planning in July five show at the Adams National Historical
Park in Quincy, Massachusetts, UM that has been canceled. One
of our favorite things about these appearances is getting to
talk to people who listen to the show and answer
questions about the show. So we were thinking, since we're
not getting to do any kind of touring this year UM,

(01:03):
that we would have a Q and A episode with
with questions submitted by listeners. So we are going to
be taking questions specifically for a Q and A episode
up until June twelve, UM, and then we will record
an episode based on those questions shortly after that. And
put it out as an episode of the show. So
if you have questions for us about episodes that you've heard,

(01:25):
or about how we do the show, or just random
things that you're curious about, send them along. We're at
History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. Um. We
of course we'll still be having questions for listener mail
parts of the episodes and stuff like that. This week
a special thing that will put out as an episode
of the show. Uh So I kind of excited about that.

(01:46):
And now on to to today's actual episode. I learned
about these practice babies when researching the episode that we
just had about home economics, and my response was, like,
what practice babies? When I was in school, home at
classes had parenting lessons that I'm putting in quotation marks
that were about looking after a decorated egg or a

(02:07):
sack of flour. At my school, this was not really
about parenting, though. It was more about trying to discourage
teen pregnancy by trying to simulate the stresses of having
an infant using an egg with a face drawn on it.
Um practice babies, though we're not eggs. They were living,
breathing babies cared for by college seniors who were temporarily

(02:28):
living in home ec practice houses, and in most cases
the babies came from orphanages or child welfare agencies, and
then after their time as a practice baby was over,
in most cases, they were usually adopted. This whole idea
tends to elicit pretty strong emotional reactions, especially from folks
who are part of the adoption triad or people who

(02:50):
have some experience with foster care or institutions for children,
and the reasons why most of these babies were in
institutions in the first place are definitely bubbling. But as
with the incubator side shows that we talked about on
the show late last year, this is a case where
something that seems just clearly unethical and bizarre by today's

(03:12):
standards at the time was actually probably doing more help
than harm, and something we should note before we get
started in talking about this. The history of adoption in
North America includes a long established pattern of placing Native
American First Nations and other indigenous children with white families
as a tool for assimilation and cultural eradication, and it

(03:36):
is possible that this happened in practice baby programs at
some point, but that is also not really documented. If
that was part of this story, at least not in
the material that we had access to. Another important thing
to note is that throughout the decades that we're talking
about today, children of color were removed from their families,
in place and institutions more often than white children were.

(03:58):
And there were definitely hull MAK and I mixed programs
that had practice houses at schools for black students, as
well as home programs that were racially integrated, But overwhelmingly
the documentation that's available to us is centered on programs
where the babies and their caregivers were or appeared to
be white. So since we're going to be talking about

(04:19):
some social issues related to adoption, we would be remiss
to not mention all this and kind of pretend that
it didn't exist. But based on the information that we
have issues that are specific to indigenous communities and to
transracial adoption seemed to be outside the scope of today's episode.
The trend of practice babies as part of a home

(04:39):
economics practicum ran alongside the development of home economics as
a field. It was something we just covered in our
earlier episode on the Bureau of Home Economics, but it
also ran alongside changes to orphanages and to adoption and
foster care. In the United States, most of the nation's
orphanages were built in the nineteenth century as immigration in

(05:00):
an urbanization, and other social and economic factors led to
a huge increase and how many children were experiencing homelessness.
Orphanages were attempts to move these children out of poor
houses and prisons and other facilities that were really designed
for adults. Many of these children did have at least
one living parent, but for a variety of reasons, the

(05:23):
family couldn't or didn't care for them at home. Poverty
was also seen as a valid reason to remove children
from their parents custody conditions. In nineteenth century orphanages often
were not much better than the prisons and workhouses that
they were replacing. At best, they tended to offer very
little in the way of care, education, entertainment, and stimulation.

(05:46):
By the early twentieth century, the United States was trying
to move away from orphanages and to focus more on
placing children with foster families. The nation also started to
move away from using poverty alone as a reason to
institutionalized children, but it wasn't until the nineteen forties that
the number of children living in orphanages really started to
drop in terms of changes to the foster care and

(06:09):
adoption systems. Really, for all of human history there have
been babies and children who were raised by somebody other
than their birth parents, So fostering and adoption have always
been part of the human experience, but in terms of
formal laws and processes, these didn't really start to develop
in the United States until the middle of the nineteenth century.

(06:31):
The first modern adoption law in the United States was
passed in Massachusetts in eighteen fifty one. Other states followed,
with the details of these laws really varying from state
to state. Research into outcomes for children who had been
fostered or adopted didn't really start until after the first
practice baby programs were established. The first major outcome study,

(06:53):
titled How Foster Children Turned Out, was published in nineteen
twenty four, and it wasn't really until the nineteen sixties
that people started doing major research into connections between adoption
and foster care and mental and emotional health. And by
the time that work was being done, the last practice
baby programs were already ending. There was some research into

(07:14):
how being a practice baby affected children's emotional and mental
health and development, and we'll talk about the specifics of
that research later on in the show, But especially in
the later years of these programs, those kinds of studies
became a lot harder to carry out, in part because
of an increasing focus on keeping adoption records completely sealed,

(07:35):
So a lot of practice baby programs didn't fall up
on children's later lives, not because they just didn't care
about the children's future well being, but because that information
about the families they had been placed with and where
they were now that was sealed. A lot of this
has to do with stigma, especially within the white middle class.
Becoming pregnant out of wedlock was increasingly stigmatized from the

(07:57):
nineteen thirties through the nineteen fifties and six teas. By
the middle of the twentieth century. If someone was pregnant
and unmarried, they were likely to spend their last months
of pregnancy somewhere out of sight, like in a maternity
home or living with a relative from out of town,
and then to be pressured, coerced, or outright forced into
an adoption. Infertility was also stigmatized, so sealed adoption records,

(08:22):
which were often inaccessible even to the children involved, allowed
everyone involved in the whole process to keep all of
this secret. Of course, this is not at all how
it's recommended to handle adoptions today, and this practice made
it incredibly hard for people who were adopted as babies
to get any information at all about their birth family

(08:42):
or their health history. So the babies who were part
of these home economics programs generally had some kind of
trauma in their backgrounds before becoming a practice baby. Maybe
their parents had died and they were placed in an orphanage,
or their parents were alive but just financially could not
care for them. Many were born to unmarried parents who
had little to no say in the adoption decision. In

(09:07):
article in the Journal of Home Economics, Catherine h Read,
head of the Department of Family Life in the School
of Home Economics at Oregon State College, stressed that babies
should be placed in practice houses only if these kinds
of circumstances suggested that it would be in their best interests.
College programs generally kept these babies identities confidential. Students generally

(09:28):
knew them by first names only, although they often gave
them temporary last names that varied from school to school.
So for example, babies at Cornell University were giving the
last name Domicon, which was short for Domestic Economy. Eastern
Illinois State Teachers College had two teaching houses, and babies
were given last names for which house they were living

(09:50):
in north or South. Since everything was confidential, students didn't
generally meet the babies families or follow up with them
later on in their life. And we're going to talk
more about these practice houses and the babies in them
after we first have a sponsor break. Broadly speaking, home

(10:14):
economics programs in the United States had two types of
houses that were part of their instruction and practice. At
the high school level, there were cottages where students could
learn and practice, but where they did not generally live
full time. These were everything from converted classroom spaces inside
the school building which had been made to look like

(10:35):
little homes, or a standalone cottage that the school either
owned or rented. Colleges, on the other hand, had houses
or apartments where upper level students actually lived for a time.
In the words of Dr Louise Stanley, chief of the
Bureau of Home Economics, quote, it is a house in
which groups of students organized as a family group live

(10:56):
for varying periods and apply their home economic training to
the solution of the different housekeeping and homemaking problems as
they arise. Stanley recommended that each state college have at
least two practice houses, one outfitted like a home in
a city or town and the other replicating a house
in a rural district. The first documented practice houses were

(11:18):
built in nineteen o four. One was at Stout Institute
in Wisconsin, and the other was at the Tuskegee Institute
in Alabama. By nine twenty, there were seventies seven practice
houses at colleges and universities around the United States, as
well as some number of apartments that served the same purpose.
Some schools bought or rented an existing property, and others

(11:40):
had a practice house custom built. For example, at the
Hampton Institute, the funding for the house came from a
gift for the school, and the structure itself was built
by the school's trade school students. The exact details of
a student's time in a practice house could vary, but
in general it tended to involve six to eight senior
who usually lived in the house for six to ten weeks.

(12:03):
Faculty or sometimes graduate students were on hand to instruct, supervise,
and evaluate the students who were expected to cook, clean,
serve meals, make budgets, and just generally manage the household.
And in the words of Alba Bates, head of the
School of Home Economics at North Dakota Agricultural College, quote,
the big thing which we expect of the students and

(12:23):
upon which we check them is their family relationships, such
as the spirit of cooperation, helpfulness, generosity, kindness, and tolerance
of the mistakes of others. At some schools, these family
relationships practiced in the house involved caring for a baby.
This infant care was usually described as mothercraft, and mothercraft

(12:44):
as a specialization was something that was introduced into American
home economics programs following the establishment of the first mothercraft
schools in England that happened in nineteen fourteen. As had
been the case with homemaking in general, the home economics
movement can that her child rearing to be a worthy
vocation that deserved study and refinement. Home economics approached homemaking

(13:06):
through science and mothercraft did the same with parenting. The
mothercraft approach was very precise and regulated, with parents trying
to establish set schedules for babies with regular times for meals,
bass play, and sleep, and a diet that was carefully
measured and managed. By the late nineteen teens, it was
generally agreed that practical study of mothercraft was critical to

(13:29):
a home economics degree. Raising children was a huge part
of a typical homemaker's work, so home economics programs that
had no hands on experience with childcare were just incomplete.
This wasn't just about completeness for its own sake, though.
A ninety article in the Journal of Home Economics noted
that under the Smith Hughes Act, vocational contact was required

(13:53):
for people who were going to teach home economics, So
if you were going to teach mothercraft, you had to
have some vocational contact in childcare in your own education
in order to be able to do so. Schools approached
this hands on component in several ways. Some had daycare
centers and preschools on or near campus, which were staffed

(14:14):
partly or entirely by home economics students. Others brought infants
and older children from the community to campus for supervised
play and workshops, or they arranged for groups of students
to observe and interact with babies and children in their
own homes out in the community, and some, as we've said,
brought babies to live full time in their practice houses.

(14:36):
The same nineteen twenty article outlined the first documented practice
baby program in the United States, which took place at
the University of Minnesota in nineteen eighteen and nineteen nineteen.
The university's to home management houses each had one child
in residence in the spring and summer quarters, and although
it became common to place children in practice houses as

(14:58):
young as possible, and this pilot program the babies were
Russell aged thirteen months and Earl aged twenty one months,
both of whom had been living in baby homes since
they were born. In this program, each student in the
practice houses acted as a so called baby manager. For
one week. She was on duty with the baby's care
between six and eight each morning and four thirty to

(15:21):
six each night. The baby manager was generally in charge
and was responsible for the baby's laundry and for keeping
up with documentation, including recording all of the day's tasks
and monitoring the baby's progress. The other three or four
students rotated through the rest of the day's childcare tasks,
depending on how their own class schedules and commitments worked out.

(15:42):
There was one brief window each weekday when all of
the students were in the same class, at which point
a faculty member or a home X student who wasn't
living in the house would come and fill in. Both
Russell and Earl arrived at the university with some health
issues that were associated with their time in the baby home.
Both of them were described as listless and underweight, with

(16:03):
anemia and ricketts. Russell also had exema, but at the
end of their two quarters in the practice houses, they
had gained weight, they were showing fewer signs of nervousness
and distress. Students reported that the babies became more active
and more engaged. Their rickets had been resolved, and Russell's
exema was also under control. The A doctor who examined

(16:25):
both babies at the end of their time at the
university noted quote, the improvement in the condition of these
children speaks highly for your cooperative motherhood. Other programs followed
from there pretty quickly. Survey found that of the seventy
seven practice houses operating in the US, sixteen had a
child in residence. By the time these programs were phased

(16:47):
out about fifty colleges had brought babies into their practice houses.
Although this episode and our earlier one on the Department
of Home Economics has focused on the United States, there
were practice houses with practice babies elsewhere as well. For example,
the University of Manitoba had thirty three practice babies in
its home economics houses between the years nineteen thirty and

(17:08):
nineteen fifty. The details of exactly how these programs worked
varied from school to school. For example, by the mid
nineteen fifties, Iowa State College had six practice houses for
home economics students. Babies stayed in one of the houses
for a quarter, and each group of eight students lived
in the practice house for half of a quarter. Each

(17:31):
student had primary care of the baby for about four
to five consecutive days, so by the end of each quarter,
each baby had been cared for by sixteen women in sequence.
From the beginning, there was some debate within the home
economics field about whether this was an effective way to
teach mothercraft and whether having so many caregivers could harm

(17:52):
the babies in some way, But in the nineteen fifties,
public opinions started to shift as well. In nineteen fifty four,
Estern Illinois State Teachers College became the focus of a
huge national controversy surrounding a practice baby known as David North,
who was only the second baby brought to the school.
Dr Ruth Schmallhausen had been hired at the college's Home

(18:14):
Economics department in nineteen fifty and the school's first practice
houses came into use in nineteen fifty two. They had
actually been authorized before World War Two, but because of
the war, they were delayed. When the schools started looking
for practice babies, Smallhousen went to Dr Roman Haremsky of
the Illinois State Child Welfare Division for help. However, Harensky

(18:37):
had some concerns about this program's potential impact on the children,
and he refused to be involved in this, so Schmallhausen
worked directly with families in the community. Eastern Illinois State
Teachers Colleges first practice baby was Margaret Anne North, whose
mother had been referred to the school by the Salvation
Army Home in Chicago. Margaret Anne's time as a p

(19:00):
actus baby seemed to have passed without raising any eyebrows,
but in nineteen the college brought in David North, who
had been born pre term and whose mother was unmarried.
She had arranged for the school to take care of
him temporarily so that she could return to work, also
arranging for visitation rights and regular updates about his progress. However,

(19:21):
after an article about the program ran in a local newspaper,
Haramsky was livid, both because of his concerns about it
and because the school had done all this without his involvement.
He was also concerned that there was no father figure
involved in baby David's life. He ordered Child Welfare Services
to investigate. During all this, David's pediatrician, Dr William Kahite commented, quote,

(19:47):
the infant boy is in excellent physical condition. He has
received physical care which is far superior to that given
in the best Foundling homes and in most American homes. Furthermore,
he has loved, which is the basic fact in the
healthy developmental environment. This child has benefited tremendously from the
good start he is receiving and will show it for

(20:07):
years to come. On January twelfth, ninety four, this became
a national news story, with most of the coverage about
it being pretty negative. Reporting focused on the evolving fields
of psychiatry and mental health. And on concerns that women
were abandoning their so called natural role as wives and
mothers in order to join the workforce. Time magazine ran

(20:31):
an article about this with a photo of two students
feeding David, together with the caption quote David North and
mother's heaven knows how many neuroses. Ultimately, Child Welfare Services
found that since this had been arranged privately between David's
mother and the school and there was no adoption involved,
it wasn't within their jurisdiction to intervene. Eventually, the furor

(20:55):
died down and David finished his time as a practice baby,
and then a new practice ba be Amy Norse, arrived
in the fall of n with no public outcry. The
furor over David North was tied to an evolving understanding
of how an infant's early life affected their later mental
and emotional health and development, which is one part of

(21:16):
why this practice ended. You will get more into that
research after a sponsor break. As we noted earlier, opinions
were divided about how best to teach practical mothercraft in
American home economics schools. I mean that that debate went

(21:38):
all the way back to when this subject was first introduced.
People questioned whether bringing babies into practice houses was the
most practical or effective way to teach, and they questioned
whether it was harmful or exploitive. Along with things like
budgets and logistics and other practical issues. These concerns were
some of the reasons why not every home economics program

(22:00):
sought out babies for its practice homes. Articles and primary
source documents from these programs are full of anecdotes about
the experience from the students and teachers points of view,
and not all of them are positive. Some students talked
about feeling overwhelmed or even terrified when they were expected
to care for a baby. In articles about her novel

(22:22):
The Irresistible Henry House, author Lisa Grinwald mentioned getting an
email from one home economics graduate who quit her program saying, quote,
you can't treat children this way. But other anecdotes are
more positive and documents from the time students described the
programs as beneficial to their education, everything from giving them

(22:43):
practical mothering experience to strengthening their connection to their own mothers,
to the baby's presence in the practice house transforming other
domestic work from a drudgery to a joy. A nine
article in Successful Farming quotes an instructor from the University
of Minnesota as observed ring that the program allowed students
to do kind of a trial run of the often

(23:04):
frazzled first few weeks of parenthood in a more controlled
setting with some experienced supervision. Anecdotally, the program could be
beneficial for the babies as well. Archival documents from programs
all over North America described babies brought into the programs
from institutions where they had been deprived, babies who were malnourished,

(23:25):
with conditions like anemia and ricketts as we mentioned earlier,
who just weren't very active or expressive, and who seemed
disconnected from the people around them, and then after their
time in the practice house, the babies were placed with
adoptive families, now apparently happy and healthy. There are numerous
reports of former practice babies being particularly sought after by

(23:46):
families who wanted to adopt because they were considered to
have been treated with the most up to date and
sophisticated care. In the nineteen fifties, though, the general concerns
that babies might be harmed by all this started to
be reflected in some psychological research. Most notably, psychologist Henry
Harlow did a series of experiments with baby reesless monkeys

(24:09):
in the late nineteen fifties. He separated the monkeys from
their mothers and then placed them in enclosures with sort
of surrogate mothers, one of them made out of wire
and the other covered in a soft terry cloth. He
made a lot of observations from this setup, like if
a monkey was in an enclosure with both types of
quote mothers and Harlow put a scary wind up toy

(24:31):
in there, the monkey would go to the soft mother
for comfort, not the wiry one. This was true even
if the wire mother dispensed milk and the soft mother didn't.
And the monkeys that had no soft mother in their
enclosure behaved differently than the ones who did. They would
scream or throw themselves on the floor if something scary happened,
while monkeys with a terry cloth mother seemed more resilient

(24:53):
and able to soothe themselves. Harlow's work folded into a
body of research that increasing He suggested that a person's
experience and infancy, including love, comfort, security, and stability, affected them.
Later on, some of this research involved children who had
been raised in institutional settings where they were truly deprived

(25:15):
of care and affection, and it quickly became accepted that
an infant whose early months were severely deprived would show
signs like listlessness, poor sleep, and failure to maintain weight,
even with a diet that seemed like it would be sufficient,
so just a general failure to thrive. And older children
issues included an inability to make close friendships or other

(25:36):
strong relationships, lack of concentration, and a range of mood
and behavioral disorders that came to be called attachment disorder. Naturally,
people started to wonder whether these conclusions could also apply
to practice baby programs. In general, practice babies got plenty
of care, but that was from multiple people rather than

(25:58):
one primary caregiver with whom the baby could develop a
strong attachment. The first formal studies into this question actually
started before Harlowe's research with monkeys, and December of nineteen
thirty three, a paper was published in the Journal of
Experimental Education, the Tailing the Welfare of Practice Babies at
the Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts Hall

(26:21):
Management Houses. Critics had questioned whether the children there could
quote develop the necessary feeling of security under such circumstances,
and the American Vocational Association had appointed a committee to investigate.
This committee carried out an eight month study of the
three children who had been practiced babies at the college

(26:42):
between nineteen and nineteen nine, and then the four children
who were there in nine nineteen thirty. They compared them
to other children who were within two weeks of the
same age and the same sex, and had been living
in a boarding home or an orphanage. They also compared
all of these children into control groups. These were children

(27:02):
of the same age and sex who had been raised
with their birth families in professional and non professional households.
The assessors conducted a range of physical, mental, and psychological
assessments and had parents and caregivers fill out questionnaires. They
concluded that the practice babies as a group excelled in intelligence,

(27:22):
motor development, language development, adaptive behavior, and personal social behavior.
They performed slightly better than both control groups in their
motor development and slightly better than the children from non
professional homes in their personal social behavior. They were slightly
behind the control groups and language development and adaptive behavior,

(27:43):
but they quote compared favorably in physical health and emotional stability.
The researchers only had seven children to evaluate, and some
of the measurements involved were really pretty subjective, but overall quote,
an analysis of the investigator's notes gave no evidence that
the home management house children suffered emotionally because of their

(28:04):
apparently complex social situation. They compared very favorably with the
control groups and emotional stability, they were less timid in
the presence of strangers, They cried less during the medical examinations.
There was less thumbsucking and nail biting among them. The
home management house children were noticeably superior in physical health.

(28:25):
No ailments of any kind were registered against them. While
the investigations were in progress, more research was conducted starting
in the nineteen fifties. Fully possible there was other research
in the interim, but the nineteen fifties research was what
I found doing this. In nineteen fifty five, Iowa State
College and the Iowa Children's Home Society got a grant

(28:47):
from the Elizabeth McCormick Memorial Fund to conduct a longitudinal
study into how quote, non continuous mothering and home management
houses affected babies personalities. They studied about forty baybies who
had lived in the Whole Economics houses, following up with
babies who had already been through the program, and also
doing baseline assessments of new babies as they came in.

(29:09):
The practice babies were Group A and had lived in
the home management house for about twelve weeks during their
first six months of life. Group B were infants of
the same agent sex who had spent a comparable amount
of time in foster care before being adopted. Groups were
also the same agent sex and had lived with their
birth families since being born. Because they wanted to study

(29:30):
only the effects of non continuous mothering and they didn't
want it to be influenced by other possible contributing factors,
this team excluded children who had congenital disabilities or who
had been born prematurely, and then they did a battery
of tests when the babies were six months, nine months,
twelve months, eighteen months, and twenty four months old. In

(29:51):
nineteen sixty one, the team published non Continuous Mothering in
Infancy and Development in Later Childhood in the journal Child Development.
Lead author D. Bruce Gardner referenced the ongoing longitudinal study
as well as efforts to track down older children who
had been previously living in these management homes. Of sixty
two children between the ages of nine and seventeen who

(30:13):
had been through the program, twenty nine were still living
in Iowa. That was Group A. They compared those twenty
nine children to children living in the same communities who
were of the same age and sex but had been
raised in their birth family Group B. They also factored
in things like socioeconomic status, parents, education, and the children's

(30:34):
intelligence when making these comparisons. Then, the researchers administered a
number of tests, including the California Test of Personality and
the Iowa Every Pupil Test of Basic Skills, to these
two groups of children, and they found little to no
difference between the two groups. The difference between their quote
personal adjustment scores was close enough to the threshold of

(30:56):
significant that it was noted as something that should not
be were looked, but it also was something that they
couldn't really say was conclusive. They also had a separate
psychologist conduct a study to evaluate whether the children's responses
to frustrations were healthy or mature. In the twenty nine
older children, the response from the child in Group A

(31:16):
was considered healthier twelve times, and in group B seventeen times.
So there was a slight difference in favor of the
children who had been raised in their birth families, but
again not one that met the threshold of significance the
overall conclusion quote In none of these variables could differences
be attributed to the factor of discontinuity of mothering in

(31:38):
early childhood. Tracking down the final results of that longitudinal
study proved to be a little trickier. I spent a
lot of time going through old journals um looking for
like a final comprehensive result. In nineteen sixty four, Physical
Status and Non Continuous Mothering was published in the Journal
of Home Economics, and that discussed only of the children's

(32:00):
physical measurements. That particular paper found no differences between the
two groups that could be attributed to their their time
in a in a Practice baby program, but other papers
summarizing the work characterized it as showing no meaningful differences
that would suggest that the non continuous mothering was harmful
to the babies. So again, these are small studies looking

(32:24):
only at children who lived at Iowa State College, usually
for twelve weeks, usually in their first six months of life.
So you can't necessarily apply these findings to other programs,
which may have kept children for longer or shorter periods,
or earlier or later in their life. At the same time,
all this research and the general concerns about whether these

(32:45):
babies would have been better off in a home with
just one mother were informed by perceptions of how families
and motherhood should work and specifically what women should be.
The idea that children should live in a small family
unit with one parent being their primary caregiver, and that
parents specifically being their mother was seen as the normal

(33:06):
standard that families should aspire to, but that is definitely
not universal. For example, research into societies that are more
communal or more likely to have large, extended families with
many family members all contributing to a baby's care, that
research doesn't suggest that those other types of families cause
attachment disorders. As this research was happening the same societal

(33:31):
changes that were shifting the field of home economics, we're
also leading to the end of practice houses and practice babies.
In addition to changing expectations related to gender and work,
ideas around parenting were also changing. There was a move
away from the strictly measured, scheduled, very scientific idea of
mothercraft to a more relaxed and intuitive model illustrated by

(33:54):
Benjamin's Box. The Common Sense Book of Baby and Childcare,
which was first published in eight It's first chapter, which
is called Trust Yourself, starts off quote you know more
than you think you do. So we know very little
about the adult lives of people who spent part of
their infancy in a practice house. Because of confidentiality rules

(34:16):
and sealed adoption records and attitudes about adoption in previous decades.
It's possible that there are people living today who were
in these practice baby programs and don't actually know about it. However,
in the nineteen nineties, the stories of two different former
practice babies made headlines. One was Donald Aldinger, whose reunion

(34:36):
with at least four home X students at Cedarcrest College
in Allentown, Pennsylvania was covered in The Morning Call in
nineteen three. Aldinger had been declared abandoned shortly after his
nineteen forty six births because his mother was incarcerated for
vagrancy at the time. He was known as Donnie. At
the cedar Crest practice house, Aldinger was placed with a

(34:58):
foster family at the age of thirteen months and raised
on a dairy farm with many many other foster children
who came and win Aldinger was there until the age
of seventeen. After meeting some of his practice mothers, he
was quoted as saying, for the first time in my life,
I feel like everybody else who had a family. Articles
about his experience, framens is like having reconnected with somebody

(35:21):
in a generally positive experience. Shirley Kirkman's story, published in
Oregon in is almost the opposite. Kirkman had been a
practice baby in the nineteen thirties at Oregon State College
before being adopted. She described this home as a lonely
one with her mother quote chili and her father addicted

(35:42):
to alcohol. In terms of her time in the practice house,
she was quoted as saying, quote, I'm sure I got
excellent care. That's not the hurtful part. It's that I
was used. Kirkman had thirty four students involved in her care,
and she described her experiences as an infant as leaving
her una to love and quote dead inside. In addition

(36:03):
to the book The Irresistible Henry House, which we mentioned earlier,
there's another work of fiction about this that's related, which
is Carol Shields The Republic of Love. And if you're
still interested in more, there is also a play which
is called Borrowed Babies, and that was written by Jennifer Blackmer.
In a weird twist of googling, UM, I learned about

(36:25):
this play by trying to figure out whether my grandmother's
home mech program had a practice house, which it did.
I don't know if it did while she was in
school there because the article that I found talking about
the practice out there was from the forties and she graduated.
UM and the uh that uh that college had put

(36:47):
on a performance of this show, and like that was
how I wound up finding it by about them by
coincidence doing a performance of this show. So that is
the practice Babies, I uh. I. A lot of articles,
like just popular articles, not necessarily academic articles that have
been written about it in the last ten years have

(37:09):
a just a horrified tone and describe it with words
like dystopian um. And there's a lot of reason to
be upset about conditions during a lot of this period,
like so many of these children were living in experiences
that that were truly deprived and that there's so many
stories of people being forced into adoption because they were

(37:32):
not married, um, and all of that to me is
a lot more troubling than the practice house component of it. Anyway,
I also have a listener mail. Fabulous listener mail is
from Jess. Jess says, Hi, Holly and Tracy, thank you
for doing an episode about bees and beekeeping. I'm headed

(37:52):
into my second season of beekeeping and I'm up to
four hives this year, all of which are the Langstroth type.
I'm working with a couple of low goal farmers to
place hives as the years go on to better help
their crops out. I'm anticipating getting upwards of a hundred
pounds of honey this year. Once we all have offices
to go to again, I'll have to send you some honey.
I did have one possible correction in relation to the

(38:15):
use of smokers and hives. While they may have been
intended to disburse the bees initially, it's not that effective
in doing so. Primarily, using smoking hives interrupts their ability
to communicate since they use pheromones to do that. Basically,
if one bee is anxious about a keeper being in
the hive, it prevents that from spreading through the hive,
keeping the bees calm and easy to work with and around.

(38:36):
I laughed about the privacy wall the bees made, but
it is possible that they may have done that. Bees
create a product called properis, which is basically be glue.
It is a sticky, water resistant residue that bees can
and do cote the inside of their hive with to
help prevent water from getting in. Thanks again for keeping
me entertained. I've attached some pictures and a video of

(38:57):
dropping a new hive this year after a split, which
is the manual version of a swarm. Thanks Jess, Thank
you so much for sending this note, Jess. UM. One
of the things that I did not get into detail
about in that episode was that while today most of
the things that are used in smokers are not considered

(39:18):
to be harmful to bees and it does have a
pacifying effect UM, earlier in history some of the things
that people have burned when dealing with bees UM have
been things that were a lot more harmful UM, and
in some cases we're were things that when burned, would
like really irritate or even kill the bees, which is
of course not done today. UM. And as I as

(39:41):
I was trying to UH to like narrow down the
immense history of beekeeping. That was one of the things
that I did not really get into you as much.
I could not specifically say whether when I was talking
about using smoke to drive the bees out, UM, whether
that was correct or not. Because I've rented that textbook

(40:01):
and it has gone back, it is no longer something
I can go back to to check the deals without
renting it again. UM. If physical libraries were open, I
could have gotten a physical copy from UH from a
fancy university library, but couldnt anyway. So UH, that is
a little tidbit about the smoking and the beeves. UM.

(40:25):
If you'd like to write to us, whether it's just
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in having a question in a in a Q and
a episode that we're planning in the relatively near future.
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(40:48):
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