Since a few centuries, parents are assisted by so-called experts who provide them with guidelines about how to bring up their children. Clergymen, medical doctors, pedagogues, and, increasingly, psychologists have voiced strong opinions about mundane matters such as bedtime tantrums and toilet training. It was repeatedly suggested that bringing up a child is too difficult a task for ordinary parents. Meanwhile, the experts themselves differed in opinion and their counsel did not always rest upon solid scientific research. Much allegedly scientific advice was based upon no more than contemporary culture-bound opinion. (Van der Veer, 2011)

Can a similar conclusion be made concerning care for babies and infants, as provided in maternities and in health centres, or is advice in this regard based to a larger extent on scientific results in medical research? Throughout the twentieth century, infant care becomes clearly more professionalized and medicalized. How can this be explained? And how medical interventions were legitimised? Were they indeed supported by scientific research and were medical practitioners aware of the limits of this research (cf. the long-lasting controversy about breast- or bottle-feeding)? How the widening of what is regarded as health care should be interpreted? The limited and purely medical treatment was gradually enlarged to an examination of the intellectual, emotional, affective, moral and social development of the child. Health became interpreted as general welfare. To what extent this advice was accepted and followed by the parents and, connected to this, to what extent these initiatives of normalisation can be regarded successful? Certainly in this respect, Brussels forms an interesting case-study because of the confrontation of deviating opinions and practices in different ideological, linguistic and social groups. For instance, when and how initiatives of the Oeuvre Nationale de l'Enfance (National Work of Child Welfare) reached parents and children of foreign origin?

In concrete terms, infant care took place primarily in maternities (besides, childbirth itself happened increasingly in the hospital and became gradually more medicalized as well) and in health centres for infants. In Belgium, from 1919, these were organised by the Oeuvre Nationale de l'Enfance. Whereas before the First World War, the largest part of this kind of institutions were set up by engaged physicians and charitable ladies, the government increasingly took over the initiative and became responsible for the general supervision. The charitable ladies were gradually replaced by a group of educated specialists, like midwives, nurses, general practitioners, gynaecologists and paediatricians.

With the establishment of the Oeuvre Nationale de l'Enfance, the Belgian government followed a general European trend. However, from the start the responsibilities of this organisation were exceptionally extensive in a European perspective. Moreover, in comparison with among other countries Great Britain, the degree of state intervention in infant and child care was much larger in Belgium. By placing the ideas and practices of infant care in Brussels in an international perspective, the aim is to get a better view on the special character of it.

Rima D. Apple, Mothers and Medicine: A Social History of Infant Feeding, 1890–1950 (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press 1987). Gilles Brougère and Michel Vandenbroeck (eds.), Repenser l’éducation des jeunes enfants (Bruxelles: Peter Lang 2007). Daniel Beekman, The mechanical baby: A popular history of the theory and practice of childraising (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill & Co. 1977). Marc Depaepe (ed.), "En toen zijn de artsen gekomen... Over de medicalisering van het opvoeden in België en Nederland in de negentiende en twintigste eeuw", special issue of Pedagogisch Tijdschrift 15 (1990): 61-124. Maurits de Vroede, "Consultatiecentra voor zuigelingen in de strijd tegen de kindersterfte in België voor 1914", Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 94 (1981), no. 3: 451-460. Jean Donnison, Midwives and medical men: A history of the struggle for the control of childbirth, 2nd ed. (New Barnet, Herts: Historical Publications 1988). Grietje Keller, Melk, macht en maatschappij: adviezen over zuigelingenvoeding in de afgelopen eeuw (Unpublished doctoral dissertation) (Amsterdam: UVA 2006). Tew Marjorie, Safer childbirth? A critical history of maternity care (London: Free Association Books 1998). Godelieve Masuy-Stroobant and Perrine C. Humblet (eds.), Mères et nourrissons. De la bienfaisance à la protection médico-sociale (1830-1945) (Bruxelles: Éditions Labor 2004). Emma Shirran, "Birth of a technocratic delivery: spatial reorganization and ritual characteristics of obstetric care in early twentieth-century Sweden", in: Anders Houltz, Hjalmar Fors and Enrico Baraldi, Taking place. The spatial contexts of science, technology and business (New York: Science History Publications/USA 2006): 35-58. Michel Vandenbroeck, In verzekerde bewaring. Honderdvijftig jaar kinderen, ouders en kinderopvang, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: SWP 2009). René van der Veer, Opvoeden door beginners. De zin en onzin van opvoedingsadvies (Amsterdam: Balans 2011). Henri Velge, L’activité de l’œuvre Nationale de l’enfance (1915-1941) (Bruxelles: L'Oeuvre Nationale de l'Enfance 1940).