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Science and Parenthood

Abstract

IN “The Retreat from Parenthood”, the author makes a vehement plea for the application of science to life in all the small details of home comfort, child-rearing, and marital relations—a plea for the emancipation of these provinces from the domination of age-old formulæ and customs. It is suggested that the traditional machinery of home life is particularly ill-adapted to the rearing of healthy and happy children, and that those more intelligent sections of the community typified by the professional classes will tend increasingly to curtail their reproductive activities unless biological ideals are applied to modern life. It is an acknowledged and deplored fact that during the last twenty or thirty years the birth-rate among the professional classes has fallen to an alarming extent. The author examines the causes of this curtailment of fertility and her analysis makes depressing reading indeed, if her diagnosis is correct, the vast majority of men and women of intelligence must be living most unhappy lives, dominated by the tyrannical inefficiency of modern life.

The Retreat from Parenthood.

Jean Ayling. Pp. xvi + 293. (London: Kegan Paul and Co., Ltd., 1930.) 10s. 6d. net.

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A., M. Science and Parenthood. Nature 127, 732–733 (1931). https://doi.org/10.1038/127732a0

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