A detailed routine for caring for babies in the 1950s has gone viral for advising parents to follow advice such as putting the baby “out of doors to sleep”.
The “baby’s day” routine, which was taken from an old parenting book, was shared on the Facebook page Mum’s Grapevine, where it has since been liked more than 1,000 times.
The caption reads: “Apparently this is how it was done 70 years ago. Two baths a day, orange juice, outside for naps.”
In addition to waking at 6am to feed, change, and “hold out” the baby, parents were then informed that they should leave the baby back in its cot to sleep again.
At 9am, the baby should be allowed a “drink of water,” before being allowed to “kick on bed without clothes” followed by a “daily sunbath”, according to the itinerary.
Following a bath at 9.30am, the baby should be fed, held out again, and then put “out of doors to sleep”.
According to the routine, at 2pm, the mother should participate in an “outing and ‘mothering’” with the baby.
After putting the child in its cot to sleep with “lights out, windows open door shut and no dummy” at 6pm following a second bath and some orange juice, the routine advises feeding the child once more at 10 or 11pm – at which point the child will sleep until 6am.
On Facebook, the questionable schedule has amused parents, who have sarcastically wondered whether they have been “doing it all wrong”.
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“Clearly we are doing this wrong. Here’s the answer to all of our problems,” one parent wrote.
Another said: “So this is where I’ve gone wrong.”
Others questioned what it means to “hold out” the baby, which was expected four times a day.
“What does ‘hold out’ mean? Just hold them out the window?” one mum asked, while another said: “Hold out??? At arm’s length, on a selfie stick??”
According to other commenters, to “hold out” the baby meant putting the child over a potty in an effort to have the child use the toilet without the need for diapers.
However, someone else summed up the parenting guide by commenting: “Whoever wrote this ‘program’ hasn’t had any babies.”
