Parenting pages and childcare advice columns are now the norm in almost every British newspaper. This is, in a significant way, due to my mother, Lydia James, who in January 1960, launched 'Within the Family' in The Observer. Written under the name Bridget Colgan, her columns dealt with a wide range of issues, from childhood fears to the role of the father, and represented the first attempt to move these subjects out of the nursery and into the public arena.
She began writing the columns as a result of meeting David Astor, the then editor of The Observer, and his wife, Bridget, who lived around the corner from us in St John's Wood, London.
Both David and my father, Martin James, had been psychoanalysed by Anna Freud. I can remember endless discussions in our house about how changing parents' behaviour could change society. Our family was a serious talking shop. My mother, who had trained as a psychiatric social worker and a psychoanalyst, set up a nursery school which the Astors' children started to attend. I believe the advice column was David Astor's idea, and he very much encouraged my mother to take it on.
Childhood had been very difficult for my mother because her father committed suicide while she was at Roedean and so did her brother. Her mother also suffered mental illness in later life, so she was brought up by a nanny.
She became interested in mental health after having psychoanalysis herself and was influenced by Kate Friedlander, who had set up the Child Guidance Movement after the war to help parents look at their own behaviour, rather than just psychoanalysing a problem child.
There was never any idea that she should be authoritarian in her columns. She just tried to give readers the wisdom to solve common problems, without being prescriptive. She got a lot of readers' letters, which I still have, and she tried to base her articles on those. When she died after a brief illness last week, I unearthed her old columns and was astonished at how contemporary many of them feel. This, for example, was her advice to new mothers lacking in confidence:
Lack of confidence in the capacity for mothering springs, of course, from the nature of our modern society. Women are educated to play many parts; they have often had nothing to do with small children and often do not see themselves primarily as mothers.
Girls leave school equipped and trained to take on quite other 'identities' as Secretary, Air Hostess, Civil Servant, and so on. Those who develop in any of these directions may, on marriage, leave a job where they are in control of events, often in an intellectual way, to face a task that has nothing to do with being clever and a lot to do with devotion and patience.
When faced with a first baby, it is not surprising that many women feel at a loss, turn to books and find themselves at the mercy of people who they think 'know how to do it properly'. 24 January 1960
If all that was true then, how much truer now? Women's jobs may have changed, but motherhood still comes as a shock for many women. Unusually for that era, my mother didn't have children until she was well into her thirties. At the point when my youngest sister was born, she suddenly had four children under five and she looked after us all by herself, so it got pretty hairy at times. Standard thinking now is that you have to be fairly strict with a large family, in order for chaos not to reign. But neither of my parents was strict.
She was not at all interested in the cognitive tradition of training your child to behave in certain ways. Her advice was much more about connecting. This meant that there was a lot of chaos at home. Looking ahead to the birth of my first child in the New Year, I imagine I will have the same difficulties that she had as a parent. In some ways, these things are cyclical, however much psychoanalysis you have. My mother didn't work at all while we were very young, but the issues surrounding women and work, such as whether it was all right to leave small children with full-time carers, were becoming current. She tackled the subject in her columns:
Whether a small child can be left if parents want a holiday or have to go away is partly a question of security - giving factors like the presence of brothers and sisters and remaining in familiar rooms. However, first and last, success depends upon whether someone can be found whom the baby knows intimately and who can take over before the mother's departure.
This means that if the substitute mother is a stranger to the baby she will need to stay in the house for a time before the mother goes away. Perhaps the title of my last article should have been 'There's no one quite like whoever does the mothering'. What is required is that the mother substitute can 'mother'. February 1960
This advice seems ahead of its time since only 12 per cent of young women worked in 1960. It is so pertinent now with the Government giving the impression that it wants to get all lone mothers away from their babies and out into the workplace because it will cost less.
The psychologist John Bowlby had strong ideas about the 'mothering instinct' and the evils of working mothers, but although she admired him in some ways my mother is saying the opposite here. She was practical and hated theory. The point for her was that her nanny had loved her and she had loved her nanny; her parents had not played much of a role.
Her views on the role of the father in the family were also enlightened for the 1960s, as the following column shows:
Husbands are asked by their wives for a kind of support which their fathers were not required to give and, moreover, they are asked to devote more time and energy at home just when they themselves are being exposed to increased demands for their job, both during work and after.
Moreover, there is a new ethic creeping up: that only measurable virtues such as wealth or position are estimable. Both they and their wives are liable to use this standard even against their better judgment. In this situation, something has to give way, and with all the psychological talk nowadays, it can't be the children. 3 April 1960
This article was surely something of an exercise in consciousness-raising, as many of her columns were. I suspect that was David Astor's intention.
In her old age, my mother very much railed against working mothers. So I was astonished often to read her in more sympathetic mood, such as here:
Other mothers feel obliged to go to work. Sometimes they really have to earn money, but many, I think, work because they could not feel satisfied without. As one highly qualified young woman put it: 'I just couldn't sit around with a baby.' A real nanny if she can be afforded (and found) is an effective solution and she even solves the otherwise difficult problem of holidays. 12 June 1960
I have to say I agree with her. People still don't seem to realise that babies can't be left with just anybody.
Both my parents were a tribute to good psychoanalysis. They did not recreate their own cycle. There were problems, but they did provide us with love. She and my father, who died in the early 1990s, were both interested in setting up the kind of family they had not had. The proof of their success was that, at 85, my mother was the closest confidante of all four of her children.
My sisters and I all chose her career and my father's as our own. I think I went into the field mainly because I found it so fascinating to listen to my parents. They were always trying to work out why other children were the way they were.
My mother was nice about my work, but she was my sternest critic, too. She pointed out to me what was superfluous and indulgent. Her great skill was to identify with the reader, not the writer.
Oliver James was talking to Vanessa Thorpe
