August 1979
March 1981
March 1982
The Sonics won the NBA championship, but Seattle parents felt like losers. Seattle’s Child explored guilt in a multi-part series.
The World Health Organization called for limits on the use of breastmilk substitutes. Dr. Dana Raphael called for a woman’s right to infant feeding choices.
Seattle dubbed itself the “Emerald City” and local stay-at-home mom Gretchen Shively rebranded herself a “Domestic Engineer.”
The guilt trap
Seattle’s Child through the years
The politics of breastfeeding
Occupation: Housewife
»Publisher’sNote
„ Find more local news for families on seattleschild.com
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From the desk of Ann Bergman
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Ann Bergman published the first issue of Seattle’s Child in April 1979. It was the first local parenting publication in the country.
A trailblazing mag turns 40 Much has changed about parenting and publishing since 1979, but SC remains a Seattle institution photo by J O S H U A H U S T O N
When the first issue of Seattle’s Child rolled off the presses 40 years ago this month (!), my first child was about to turn 1. The idea for the magazine was born out of my frustration over how difficult it was to find out what was going on around town of interest to families.
I also was hungry for writing about parenting that rang true. The few national parenting publications simplified the messiness of home life by telling neat and tidy myths: If you were a “good mother” you loved that part of your life wholeheartedly, and if your kid was not “well-behaved” it was because you were doing something wrong. Mothers’ battles with depression, boredom and insecurity were seen as personal failures and dads who got “involved” at home received big bonus points. Luckily for me, my mom told me
when I was pregnant that I “better do something besides stay home with the kids all day or else I’d go batty,” and I had a husband who fully supported my work, because despite the Women’s Lib movement, working moms in 1979 were often judged as selfish and neglectful of their kids and marriages. We didn’t know then that babies arrive with their hard-wiring preinstalled, so we thought our fundamental task was to shape our kid like a lump of clay rather than getting to know them and accepting them CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE >
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