This became the popular understanding of Kanner’s latest theory: If mother was cold, so too would baby be. Class, education, and race (all of the families were white) each played their role in determining the conditions for diagnosis. But those hallmarks of scientific motherhood—intelligence, book learning, and regimens relating to a child—were, he found, the most striking commonality and the foundation of his etiology.
Kanner was far from alone in identifying maternal traits and their impacts on child development at mid-century. Pediatricians, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts aimed to identify what constituted a Bad Mother and how she produced Bad Children as a result. From the late 1940s through the 1960s, class, race, and maternal function were linked in metaphors of media in dozens of pediatric psychological studies of “Bad Mothers.” In parallel, early media researchers began to think of media as serving as mother-proxies who also were understood to cause harm to children. I argue that rather than being offered distinctly, these two theories of pathology two co-emerge: this media theory of mothering intertwined parenting theory of media to become a definitional logic by which mothers were understood psychosocially in the United States. Newly codified diagnoses and pathological theories of motherhood were inseparable from midcentury conceptions of stimulation, mediation, domesticity, and race. Taken together, these two theories unite to form a slippage around media, mediation, and medium and the role of the mother and her labor both reproductively and productively. It is this slippage—and how it shapes our social understandings of technology, media, and mothering at midcentury—that this talk investigates.