Parenting Trends Throughout History

Jennifer Traig:

The very earliest piece of it that I know of is actually in an ancient Greek medical book by Soranus. It’s not terrible, I have to say. A lot of it holds up, perhaps because he got a lot of his information from practicing midwives. Some of it’s a little weird. He really warns mothers away from the colostrum — he’s very insistent that you hand the baby off to someone else right after the baby is born because the colostrum is much too rich and cheesy for newborns — and was also very insistent, as most were in the ancient world, about salting your baby, which was a widespread practice that we no longer do.

Emily:

Could you please tell me how to salt my baby?

Jennifer:

I believe it’s really just, before you swaddle them, you pat them down with fine salt.

Emily:

What on earth would lead someone to think that you should salt your baby?

Jennifer:

Well, salting and swaddling were part of an idea that held sway for quite a while, that a baby would not acquire human form unless it was imposed on that baby, and the swaddling and the salting were part of that process — that if you didn’t do that, you might end up with a throw pillow or a pudding, but not a human baby, and so this was widely done. And the salt piece, I’m not exactly sure why that and not some other compound, but widely used.

Jennifer:

The 20th century was called The Century of the Child, which was the name of a book by Ellen Key, and the idea was that we’ve undergone this huge sea change in how much we know about how the world actually works, scientific principles are being applied to everything, and they start getting applied to childbearing with more and less success.

Emily:

So what is your sense of what science this guy is using? Is this I’m an expert and I think this is what worked for me, or is it I studied people? Where is the science in this?

Jennifer:

Well, it’s not like they spent a lot of time with their own children, so it’s definitely from the lab and not from the home. Given that, even sometimes the science is pretty bad.

Jennifer:

So, Dr. Spock really changes things. It’s for three reasons. One, he starts out by being enormously reassuring, which is something parents really needed to hear. He starts out by telling them, “You know more than you think you do.” He lets people know it is pretty hard to do this wrong. He says, “You can follow your instincts.” He says, “You can hug and you can kiss your children.” He also says it’s okay to follow their lead on some things, to feed them when they’re hungry, to put them to sleep when they’re tired. And one really, really, really simple thing that completely changed things, and it was his innovation: there was an index for the first time in his book, so that when you were having a crisis in the middle of the night, you could very quickly flip to the page that would address the middle-of-the-night crisis. He wrote it himself, and this is something no one had thought to do before.

Emily:

I find Dr. Spock … it’s quite sensible, is the word I would use for it. It’s not that it’s not scientific, but it’s also that a lot of it just feels like: oh, that’s sensible, up-the-middle-of-the-road advice. It’s not real judgy.

Jennifer:

It has aged very well, as few parenting books do.

Emily:

Like the Greek guy at the beginning, the old Greek guy — it’s like, that guy and Dr. Spock, that’s who we should have. Little salty, salty babies that are eating on no schedule at all.

Charlotte (Sex and the City):

There are a million questions to answer before the baby ever gets here. Do you have a birthing plan? Do you know what kind of a mother you want to be?

Miranda (Sex and the City):

Yes, I plan to be a …good mother.

Charlotte (Sex and the City):

But a marsupial mom or a stroller mom? Will you be breastfeeding or bottle feeding? And what about baby proofing? Because with all the sharp edges around here, I mean this place is a death trap.

Emily:

I’m Emily Oster. This is ParentData and today…

1950s Parenting Film:

Multiply this scene by thousands and you have a daily picture of young Mr. and Mrs. America on their way home after mother’s exciting days at the hospital. The one thought of this typical pair is what do we do next?

Emily:

If I had to summarize the modern Instagram and TikTok inflected parenting feel, it would be with the question, “Am I doing it wrong?” And then the answer, “Yes, definitely, because it’s not the way that I’m doing it.”

TikTok Influencer 1:

Get ready with me while I tell you how exclusively pumping is not breastfeeding.

TikTok Influencer 2:

The key to sleep training without crying out is to teach your baby how to put themselves to sleep. So I’m going to show you my 10 steps to crib-side comfort.

TikTok Influencer 3:

Three reasons to continue co-sleeping or bed sharing.

TikTok Influencer 4:

I’m a speech pathologist, feeding therapist, mom of two. And I know how overwhelming it can be starting solids with baby, especially when choosing should you do baby-led weaning or purees.

Emily:

Parenting is hard. And we all parent slightly differently and it is very easy in the current moment to get absorbed in the idea that there is exactly one correct way to do it. And if you mess up, if you get the wrong toy or you use the wrong swaddle, or you sleep in the wrong way, or you give your kid the wrong food, you start with pears instead of peas. That somehow that’s the end and you’ve messed up and you might as well just go back to the drawing board and try with a different baby because you completely ruined this one.

1950s Parenting Film:

Much of your baby’s health depends on his getting enough of the right kind of food. That means a formula.

1990s Doctor:

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends breastfeeding for all moms and babies. Every parent should be educated to know that breast milk is so much different than formula and it’s so much better.

1950s Parenting Film:

The formula is more than just milk.

Emily:

We need a little bit of perspective. And that is why I have Jennifer Traig here on the podcast to talk about her book, Act Natural, which is a history of all of the ways people have parented in the past. What’s so valuable for me about looking to the past is that it helps us to take a wider lens on the question of parenting trends and how they fall in and out of fashion. Colostrum, which now the internet will tell you, you must collect in a Haakaa cup because otherwise, if you don’t give your child every drop of it, they will never, ever get into college. People used to throw that away because it was too thick for babies and should be completely discarded.

1950s Parenting Film:

You’ll begin to realize how much you are going to enjoy your baby. He’s all yours, every inch, every ounce of him.

Emily:

After the break, Jennifer Traig.

Emily:

Jennifer, I am absolutely delighted to get to talk to you. Thank you for being here on ParentData.

Jennifer:

Likewise, thrilled to be here.

Emily:

So I’d love to start by having you introduce yourself.

Jennifer:

As you said, I’m Jennifer Traig. I am a writer, a teacher, an editor, and turns out none of those skills are particularly transferable to parenting.

Emily:

But you do have a book about parenting and the book is called Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting. And this is an incredibly entertaining book about all of the insane ways we have parented over time. It has many other features, but that was part of how it came across to me. And the reason I’m excited to talk about this is because there is so much emphasis in this moment on the idea of doing it right. And I spend so much of my time explaining to people, Hey, there are many different ways that parenting happens. And it’s difficult sometimes I think from our narrow parenting space to have a conception of even the ways people are parenting or the things that they believe like three houses down or two towns over. And your book is about what was the parenting advice the Romans had, and what we learn is it was pretty different. So that’s why I would like to talk.

Jennifer:

I started working on this book just because, as the parent of small children, I really felt at sea and I could not believe that humanity had survived as a species given how hard it was. And so I started looking into what did people actually do? And I found out that we’re making it so much harder than it has to be, that it’s actually really hard to mess up your children, and that despite millennia of really bad advice, we’re still here and we’re still doing fine.

Emily:

There’s something about reading some of the ways in which people are parenting in these historical contexts and then thinking about the… Okay, I’m going to tell you, there was a fight that somebody had on my Instagram feed, which you will really appreciate, last week. I posted something totally milk toast that was like, “You know your own right way to parent,” or something in that uplifting space. And then I asked people to share, “Are there things you did that you think worked for you that maybe didn’t work for other people?” Or something like that. And somebody was like, “I used purees instead of baby led weaning.” So the first food she gave her kids were purees rather than giving them pieces of apple or whatever.

Jennifer:

There’s a long tradition of this. I think it’s important to remember that the original meaning of advice was judgment. And that’s exactly what the early parenting manuals are. They pretty much always say, “Well, here in Greece we’re doing fine, but in Rome they’re all incredibly xenophobic,” and usually frame their advice by pointing out what other cultures or other people are doing wrong. We very much still do that today, especially in internet comments. And I think there’s a few reasons why. I think, one, it can make us feel a little better, and, two, the people that are in the trenches are pretty exhausted, pretty miserable, have invested so much time into doing these incredibly difficult things. And if somebody comes along and says, “Actually, I did it this way, and it was much easier,” you have to attack them to not feel like you’ve wasted the last two years of your life.

Emily:

Another way to say it is the things I do that are hard, I think they’re right, and I want them to be so right that they must be right for everybody because otherwise why did I spend all this time giving my kid chicken legs if I could have just been giving them a bowl of pureed peaches and it would’ve been fine? That’s just like that’s hard to accept. It’s hard to accept. So let’s go all the way back. Tell me about the first piece of parenting advice in the world.

Jennifer:

The first that we know of. And I have to say, there’s not a lot, and I wasted several weeks trying to find early parenting materials only to realize that parenting is not the word at all, that parenting doesn’t come into usage until the 1970s, it’s very recent, because the idea before then really was not that parents did much or any of it, a lot of it was outsourced. Child-rearing tended to be the term. And the very earliest piece of it that I know of is it’s actually an ancient Greek medical book by Soranus, it’s not terrible, I have to say, a lot of it holds up, perhaps because he got a lot of his information from practicing midwives. Some of it’s a little weird. He really warns mothers away from the colostrum, is very insistent that you hand the baby off to someone else right after the baby is born because the colostrum is much too rich and cheesy for newborns, and was also very insistent, as most were in the ancient world, about salting your baby, which was a widespread practice that we no longer do.

Emily:

Could you please tell me how to salt my baby?

Jennifer:

I believe it’s really just before you swaddle them, you pat them down with fine salt. It’s even mentioned in the Bible as an example of bad parenting.

Emily:

The Bible does not support salting your baby.

Jennifer:

No, no, no, the Bible does.

Emily:

Oh, the Bible does. Okay.

Jennifer:

Yes.

Emily:

Oh, not salting your baby would be a problem.

Jennifer:

Compare someone to an unsalted baby as an example of, well, this child was raised by wolves.

Emily:

That is how I feel about a chicken, if you don’t salt it before you cook it’s very difficult to get the salt in later. But this is a question which is what on earth would lead someone to think that you should salt your baby?

Jennifer:

Well, salting and swaddling were part of an idea that held sway for quite a while, that a baby would not acquire human form unless it was imposed on that baby, and the swaddling and the salting were part of that process that if you didn’t do that, you might end up with a throw pillow or a pudding, but not a human baby, and so this was widely done. And the salt piece, I’m not exactly sure why that and not some other compound, but widely used.

Emily:

It is interesting when I think about what’s the feedback that you would get that would suggest something works or not. So much of what happens in parenting, and partly because a lot of different things work is most of the time when you salt your baby, it’s okay, it’s not really a problem. And so then you’re like, “Well, I guess this must be a good idea,” because the mortality rates were very high, but probably not higher for salting than not salting.

Jennifer:

Right. And also in the swaddling piece of it, actually, there was a payoff in an era with high mortality rates, those infants might live longer just because they could not move. So at a time when there was not a whole lot of supervision of small children and parents had to work and were busy doing other things, a swaddled child could and sometimes was hung from the wall, there were hooks to hang your baby. It could not get out of its cradle, it could not run around, it could not move at all. The one problem was that it could not escape if it were eaten by livestock, which did happen. Animals tended to roam in and out of medieval homes much more than they do now, and children were sometimes eaten and also sometimes nosed by family animals a little too close to the heart and would sometimes be killed that way.

Emily:

So swaddling is something which we still do, although albeit in a somewhat different way than we did back then and does have some scientific basis. So there’s pieces of this where there are things you get out of the swaddle, not just that you can store it on the wall, but, kids, there’s something there about they sleep better, so presumably some of the initial impetus for that was good feedback around how kids would react, and then it got codified into something else and had these other benefits, and then it continues, but, of course, there are presumably other pieces of this that we let go. I’m curious if you have a sense of how things would fall out of fashion.

Jennifer:

Yeah, that’s a good question. Oftentimes when poor people start doing something, that’s when fashions change and that will switch. We see that a lot with breastfeeding. There’s that saying when rich people eat brown bread, they breastfeed their own babies, and when rich people eat white bread, other people do, and this switches back and forth, and we’re back in the brown bread breastfeeding stage now. And high mortality rates. I think when it becomes clear that something is actually dangerous, and we have the science to figure out why that is, a lot of times we don’t. For instance, teething was considered one of the deadliest stages of babyhood for a long, long, long time, and there are a lot of deaths in medieval and slightly later British records death due to teething. It was not due to teething, but other things that tended to happen around that age kicked in and people made that connection.

Emily:

We’re always seeking causality.

Jennifer:

Yeah, exactly.

Emily:

I want to talk about feeding your kid and about breastfeeding and breast milk, because this is a thing which has changed in some ways so frequently over time how we feed our kids. Can you please tell me about the goats? Can we just start with the goats?

Jennifer:

So I really struggled with breastfeeding, and there’s an enormous guilt that is placed on your shoulders if you do not breastfeed your own children. As it turns out, I could not, my children would’ve died. But at no point in history was that true. There were always mothers who could not or chose not to breastfeed their children and their children lived, because early on we came up with a lot of other ways to keep that child fed and alive. The most obvious, wet nursing, which dates back to earliest humanity. And then bottles came along much, much, much, much later. The early bottles were made of clay and tended it to be pretty breakable and also not very sanitary, they were not great to… Sticking a terracotta tube in a toothless baby’s mouth was not the best thing. But one thing that people did tune to when wet nurses weren’t available, or even when they were but tended to carry syphilis, was goats.

Emily:

It’s the most moral animal, even though it eats garbage. This is always what I wonder about what is it about the behavior of the goat that makes one think it’s moral?

Jennifer:

I don’t know. I think they’re decent parents. I’m not sure.

Emily:

You’re looking at the own animal’s own parenting and choosing. I also think mean some of the other milk producing animals would not fit well in the crib, like a cow. It’s very large.

Jennifer:

And pigs maybe, but pigs, really bad reputation. So yeah, the goat.

Emily:

So over time, we have the wet nurse, we have the goats, eventually we have better formula, non-human milk alternatives. I feel like the moment we are in around breastfeeding, the moral obligation feels much greater than at any of these… All of these other things seem like we’re looking for a good solution in the face of a complicated environment, there’s no milk, somebody has syphilis, we need a goat, things that are just about let’s try to get this done. And it is now taken on this moral obligation in parenting, which feels new, although maybe that’s not new.

Jennifer:

Moral and really also at a time when it’s harder to get into college than certainly when I applied, and I defer to you on the data here, but there were some widely quoted studies that showed you got a bonus of a few IQ points if you were breastfed.

Emily:

Those studies are not good data, but yeah, okay. Just to get it in there for people

Jennifer:

I will point out that in my marriage, only one of us was breastfed, that would be me, and it’s not the one who went to Harvard. So I don’t put a lot of stock into that.

Emily:

Yeah, I do think there’s a moment of wanting to do everything to get every possible advantage for our kids, which is perhaps a bit different than a time period in which half of them would die. And I realized that there’s a big gap between where we are now and where we are then, but there’s something in there about the investment in your kids. Okay. I want to talk about the science, parenting science, because there was some point, maybe early in the 20th century, when you start talking in the book about people coming at parenting and the choice of childbearing, parenting, whatever we’re calling it, with the idea that we are going to use science to win this or do it right, when is the beginning of that idea?

Jennifer:

So around the turn of the 20th century, it was named The Century of the Child, which was the name of a book by Ellen Key, and the idea was that we’ve undergone this huge sea change in how much we know about how the world actually works, scientific principles are being applied to everything, and they start getting applied to childbearing with more and less success. So some of the early proponents of this were Luther Emmett Holt, who wrote a very popular childbearing book, but it was extremely, extremely, extremely rigid with these very, very, very strict timetables. Even his daughter-in-law couldn’t follow them. They were pretty unforgiving. And also, not all the science was great. He had an absolute horror of bananas, I don’t know why, but really pushed them as a very dangerous food for children and pretty much any uncooked fresh fruit or vegetable. The menus in his book are just something called beef juice, which I guess is maybe bouillon, but it’s just really the most bland, flavorless boiled to death foods. And it was hard for parents to carry out. It takes a long time to cook vegetables [inaudible 00:20:06]

Emily:

To cook a vegetable until it’s in a mashed beet puree.

Jennifer:

And to stick to these very, very strict schedules. And not too long later, he’s followed by the behaviorists.

Emily:

But wait, with this, just to touch on this for a minute, so what is your sense of what’s the science this guy is using? Is this I’m an expert and I think this is what worked for me, or is it I studied people? Where is the science in this?

Jennifer:

Well, it’s not like they spent a lot of time with their own children, so it’s definitely from the lab and not from the home. Given that, even sometimes the science is pretty bad. So when the behaviors come along a short time later and really urge parents to avoid giving their children affection, it’s John Broadus Watson who was this womanizing alcoholic, a real Don Draper figure. In fact, he had spent some time as an advertising executive and came up with the concept of the coffee break, which I will thank him for, but he became not just a prominent psychologist, but the president of the APA, one of the most prominent psychologists in America, and his science was very iffy, and he did conduct experiments in his own home that his children said were pretty damaging. A lot of depression and unhappiness and mental illness in the family that followed.

Emily:

And that one, unlike the banana guy, children like bananas, but if they don’t get bananas, it’s okay. Watson’s advice, it’s pretty bad. A lot of it is don’t hug your kid ever.

Jennifer:

Yeah, don’t hug your kids, don’t kiss your kids. His wife, who was, in fact, one of his grad students, I believe, pushed back on that somewhat, but died young.

Emily:

And do people listen to this?

Jennifer:

Well, he was wildly influential. He was the head of the APA. He was telling pretty desperate parents who are looking for advice. This is coming up on a time when we’re starting to see a little bit more movement in the country, so you might not be living near your own parents necessarily. When you have children, you’re away from your extended family, so you’re not getting that received wisdom and you are looking for outside advice, so he’s one of the voices. Fortunately, Spock comes along not long after with a very different message.

Emily:

After the break, more ParentData.

Merv Griffin:

As a father, I’ll tell you, this man’s book is only outsold in the history of books by one other. The top-selling book in the world is The Bible. The second bestseller belongs to Dr. Spock, his books on childcare. I have read your book, doctor, and I am floored and always have been by how you call your shots.

Dr. Spock:

Well, I give lots of leeway.

Emily:

So what is the Dr. Spock message?

Jennifer:

So Dr. Spock really changes things. It’s for three reasons. One, he starts out by being enormously reassuring, which is something parents really needed to hear. He starts out by telling them, “You know more than you think you do.” He lets people know it is pretty hard to do this wrong. He says, “You can follow your instincts.” He says, “You can hug and you can kiss your children.” He also says it’s okay to follow their lead on some things, to feed them when they’re hungry, to put them to sleep when they’re tired. And one really, really, really simple thing that completely changed things, and it was his innovation, there was an index for the first time in his book, so that when you were having a crisis in the middle of the night, you could very quickly flip to the page that would address the middle of the night crisis. He wrote it himself, and this is something no one had thought to do before.

Emily:

I find Dr. Spock, it’s quite sensible is the word I would use for that. It’s not that it’s not scientific, but it’s also a lot of it just feels like, oh, that’s sensible up the middle of the road advice. It’s not real judgy.

Jennifer:

It has aged very well, as few parenting books do.

Emily:

Like the Greek guy at the beginning, the old Greek guy, it’s like that guy and Dr. Spock, that’s who we should have. Little salty, salty babies that are eating on no schedule at all.

Jennifer:

Given my children’s diets when they were infants, they probably were covered in salt, but it came from tomatoes.

Emily:

So I want to talk about the shift to parents becoming more invested in raising their kids. So we talked about parenting and child-rearing, but there’s a long period in which parents themselves are not maybe the central people in their children’s lives, or at least for some, maybe that’s not true, but that’s my impression, there’s a point at which it becomes parents. So I’m curious about how that transition worked.

Jennifer:

So it’s a few things. At least according to my research, that’s pretty true, that it’s your job to have the children, but not necessarily your job to raise the children. That does start to change. There’s a few things that contribute to that. So the first are Locke and Rousseau who write a pair of books that encourage parents to raise their own children. So here I want to point out, Locke had no children, Rousseau had five, gave every one of them up to a foundling home, so maybe not a lot of hands-on experience from either one of them, but they both wrote these books urging parents to take more interest in their children, to invest more in their upbringing. Since Locke was a doctor who actually treated children, he did have some experience with them. Rousseau’s a philosopher, and he’s writing a philosophical treatise. That’s it.

Emily:

And then we arrive at the present where we’re taking on all of the things. So is there anything in the old parenting advice that you would say, “This is something people always thought was a good idea and has held up.”? Is there any constant?

Jennifer:

There’s a few. So stay out of your children’s fights. There’s a long, long, long history of any parent of more than one child know that they fight nonstop. They are hardwired to, this happens in most species, it’s happened throughout history. The Bible is basically just a collection of stories about siblings fighting each other sometimes to the death. And some of the earlier advice is don’t get involved. And once I started using that advice, my children started fighting a lot less. That one was good.

Emily:

That is a good piece of advice. Anything else?

Jennifer:

That it’s the lower bar of the pre-Locke, pre-Rousseau, the idea that it’s your job to keep them alive, but it’s actually hard to mess them up I have found really reassuring.

Emily:

I think seeing this full range gives you some sense of people have been doing a version of this for a long time with a variety of good and not good ideas, and most of the time it works out okay. Even when the changes in their behavior are enormous, let alone the very small deltas that we’re arguing about.

Jennifer:

Exactly, yeah. And we do tend to overestimate our sample size. Most of us are working with the sample size of two, and we draw a lot of conclusions from that that we then post on the internet.

Emily:

I feel like we draw a lot of conclusions from the first one. You do things that work with the first one, and you’re like, “I’m so great at parenting. Look at me.” And then you have a second one and you’re like, “I am not good at parenting. That did not work a second time.”

Jennifer:

It’s extraordinary, because pretty much everything else, you put the same ingredients together, you’re going to end up with the same product. And kids, no, so different.

Emily:

We were reflecting on a moment, my kids are four years apart and we’re now four years out from exactly the time the pandemic started, and so we were thinking back to when my daughter was my son’s age, and she was the older of the two at the beginning of the pandemic, and she was just taking care of him some fraction of the time during the day, basically she was eight and he was four, and now we’re just like, “I don’t think he would be good taking care of a four-year-old.” They weren’t home alone or anything, but we would have them playing outside. Anyway, they’re not the same kid, it’s for sure.

Jennifer:

My husband and I play this game all the time, how are we ruining our children in ways that will be obvious to them that we do not see now? And I would like to just point out here that my mother used to smoke while breastfeeding me, my father is a chest surgeon and my mother is a nurse, and they both swore they didn’t know it was bad for you. I think it’s the phones, I think it’s the unchecked screen use, and I’m not doing a great job of checking it.

Emily:

No, it’s hard. I don’t disagree with you, but I also think this is a societal problem even more than an individual problem.

Jennifer:

Right. Yeah. If I limited it entirely, it would cut them off socially.

Emily:

Totally different set of problems.

Jennifer:

Yeah.

Emily:

I’m curious if there are things in your parenting that you do differently as a result of this book?

Jennifer:

Yeah, it was very useful that I just don’t feel guilty anymore, I pretty much never feel guilty just because the bar has been lowered so much for me. And I’ve also realized that when we take something on, we not only make it our problem, we make it a problem that throughout history, picky eating being maybe the best example, that when parents, with Holt, started to get very uptight about what children ate, we suddenly see this epidemic of picky eating. And before that, what you see in the literature is complaints that children will eat anything and everything. So I try to ignore problems in the hope and in the faith that they will resolve themselves.

Emily:

Yeah, I like it. All right, I have a couple of rapid fire parenting questions for you. You ready? All right. What is one of the most horrifying parenting techniques you came across in your research?

Jennifer:

Let’s see. The worst parents of all time, I’m going to go with the John Broadus Watson, the completely hands-off thing. He at one point dreamed of having children raised through a rotating set of foster homes and never being with their real parents because parents are too soft on their own kids and will hug and kiss them. That one’s pretty bad. Parents who followed Rousseau’s advice to send them naked out in the snow to play with pistols, that one was pretty bad. Oh, this one I adore, but it ended up not being a great idea. So Winthrop Kellogg, who was an Indiana psychologist in the 30s, he raised his own infant side-by-side with a chimpanzee because they thought the chimpanzee would learn to act like the boy, and the opposite happened, the boy ended up copying the chimpanzee, and after a few years they had to discontinue the experiment. But there are very cute pictures of the baby and his chimp brother and their little onesies. It was a failed experiment, but it was a pretty cute one.

Emily:

And what is the most heartwarming parenting, the thing you read and you were like, “Oh.”?

Jennifer:

What I love is how indulgent parents have been throughout history. And American parents were known for really spoiling their kids. And you see some press about how kids run wild in America, that they’re overindulged, and one of the best examples is the Lincoln’s. The Lincoln’s really let their boys run wild in the White House, including giving them live ammunition. I believe there were a few explosions in the actual White House, and it was cute that they loved their kids, they wanted them to have fun. They gave them ammunition.

Emily:

Okay, my last question. What animal would you pick to nurse your baby?

Jennifer:

Gorilla.

Emily:

Gorilla. But how will you get it in the crib, Jennifer? How will you get it in the crib? Thank you so much. This was such a treat.

Jennifer:

Thank you very much for having me.