"Act Natural: A Cultural History of Misadventures in Parenting" by Jennifer Traig. TNS

Jennifer Traig’s curiosity about the history of child rearing, how kids grow up in other cultures and why modern Americans parents do what they do led her to write “Act Natural.”

Turns out that people have done some strange things that today seem unthinkable, but which might be fun to share at a cocktail party. In ancient Rome, for example, child abandonment was perfectly legal — and it happened to 20%-40% of all infants.

Marie Antoinette gave birth to her first child at Versailles in front of an audience so large it almost caused a stampede. In the 1920s and ‘30s, babies commonly slept in window-mounted cages that hung out of apartments like air conditioning units.

In the 1960s and ’70s, parenting books advised feeding babies coffee and Coke.

Deploying a lively, chatty tone, Traig weaves in personal anecdotes as she relays her research. When sharing the statistic that children argue, on average, 3.5 times per hour, Traig says she considers this behavior “the part of parenting I hate most, which is saying something, giving that parenting is a job that also requires cleaning diarrhea out of neck folds.”

Tribune News Service