“That’s one of the interesting things about the better babies contest is that there is a coexistence of both a focus on heredity and a focus on nurture,” says Alexandra Minna Stern, professor of history at the University of Michigan and author of Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America. Accoding to Stern, that balance, “legitimized their work and the well-child care the reformers and physicians are interested in. They want to support the idea that these are better babies, but they can also become better, and they can become better through having access to more nutritious food, to better mothering strategies, to a good interactive environment and things like that.”

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