Child-rearing theories long held that affects transmit through milk and lullabies

Evidence

Dutch authorities never agreed how on to cultivate European sensibilities in their young, and just how early in a child’s development they imagined they needed to do so. But as a broader history of child rearing would show, these were not idiosyncratic colonial concerns. Seventeenth-century philosophers, eighteenth-century medical experts, and nineteenth-century purveyors of domestic science harped on the same set of questions: whether affective dispositions were filtered through a wet nurse’s milk, the tone of a lullaby, or in the moral makeup of a pregnant mother. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 598

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the ‘Grafting & Growth’ and moral-panics argument strands: debates over nurture and influence recur across centuries rather than progressing. — connects to: Mothers transmit concentrated industrial toxins to infants through breast milk — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 119