Parents' Parent

An excited Manhattan mother recently dialed the editor of Parents' Magazine. "My child didn't eat his breakfast this morning," said the mother. "What shall I do?" Clara Savage Littledale soberly answered: "Try him on lunch."*

Such quick and sensible answers are always available from Editor Littledale of Parents' Magazine, a trim little 60-year-old woman who doesn't "like the idea of an inaccessible editor." This week, accessible Editor Littledale put out the 25th-anniversary issue (198 pages) of the monthly she had helped to found. In its quarter century, she had made prosperous Parents' the soundest, bestselling guide (circ. 1,250,000) to the care & feeding of U.S. small fry.

"Idiots Can Vote." Herself a mother (of two) and grandmother (of one), Mrs. Littledale earned her blue pencil by starting as a cub reporter. Fresh from Smith College, she went to work on Oswald Garrison Villard's old New York Evening Post, and became its woman's-suffrage editor: "It was wonderful, just what I wanted to do." It was so wonderful that she became the suffragettes' pressagent, once paraded down Fifth Avenue with a sign which said "Insane and Idiots Can Vote. Why Can't I?" Later she joined Good Housekeeping, became its World War I correspondent ("I felt silly up near the front when I had to say I was from Good Housekeeping").

When young Publisher George Hecht was ready to launch Children, the Magazine for Parents in 1926 (the title was shaved to the Parents' Magazine three years later), he offered her the editorship. She soon found out that "editing" meant rewriting into readable form the pedantic prose of the medical and child-guidance experts who were and still are Parents' important contributors. She crusaded for better pay for teachers, school lunches, better health examinations for children, more thorough care and training for mothers.

Little Adults. Later, she added regular articles on marriage problems and housing ("for they all affect children, too"), children's books (which are pretested on young readers), movies and records. Editor Littledale also keeps a supervisory finger on Parents' byproduct publications: Children's Digest, 21 (for young men), Compact (for girls), Your New Baby and Baby Care Manual (for new mothers).

As Parents' has changed, so have its readers, and each partly because of the other. Said Clara Littledale: "Twenty-five years ago we adhered to a very rigid schedule in feeding and raising children. John B. Watson's theory of behaviorism was the thing at the time. It called for a very detached attitude . . . Raising a child today calls for being warm and affectionate and expressing love for the child . . . We thought they were little adults who were just being naughty; now we know they are children."

*An even more realistic prescription for the listless appetite: "Have a large family, and not quite enough to go round."

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