ABSTRACT
The degree to which parents were nurturing and protective of their offspring in Western societies over the last twenty-five hundred years is controversial, and there are arguments among historians as to whether an attachment between parents and infants, which most people assume to be "normal" today, was common prior to the twentieth century in Western societies. One view is that the history of the interaction between parents and children in Western societies is a nightmare from which we have only begun to awaken in the twentieth century (Johansson, 1987). In contemporary Western societies there is a general presumption that most parents want to provide the foundation for a better life, with greater opportunities for success, for all of their children. Lister (1986, p. 1403) has proposed that "a society such as ours, which encourages the birth of new members, has in fact committed itself to their well-being". This optimistic view of parent-infant interaction is supported by evidence that there has been a recent increase in nurturing of infants by fathers over the last few decades in Europe and the United States (Hewlett, 1992a). However, the general assumption that in Western societies today the typical parent is protective, caring, and nurturing of all offspring contrasts sharply with estimates that millions of children are being abandoned, neglected or physically and sexually abused by their parents (Gelles and Cornell, 1983; Lynch, 1985; Gelles, 1987; Creighton, 1988; Green, 1988). Some experts believe that reported child abuse is "just the tip of the iceberg", with the actual incidence of abuse being much higher. For example, Green (1988) estimates that there may be 1,500,000 cases of child abuse in the United States annually. Child abuse and neglect are used here to describe situations in which a child suffers identifiable harm that can be attributed to a caregiver (Gelles, 1987; Korbin, 1987).
