From technology to retreats into the home, some fascinating strides are being made in modern child-rearing.

Parenting isn’t what you’d call a new gig — large people have been raising small people since before we came up with the concept of time. But much about the job has changed in recent years, from shifts in home-schooling trends to the diminishing role of religion in families to the exploding role of tech in virtually every aspect of parenting (so long, Mary Poppins; hello, Alexa). Parenting may still be the hardest job you’ll ever love, but to keep up with how it’s changing — the good, the bad and even the ugly — OZY took a hard look for a new series: Parenting, Disrupted.

We’ve come a long way since What to Expect When You’re Expecting, or Dr. Spock advising parents on how to raise healthy children. Now we’re told about helicopter parents, tiger moms, lawn mower mothers — terms that replaced the “good enough” parent of 70 years ago — and are meant to capture a particular (and not particularly healthy) approach to raising kids. But our series addresses what’s really new on the parenting front — apart from the billion-dollar industry preying on parental anxiety by pumping out advice on what to do, what to buy, what to read and how to think about shaping young minds.

The new My NICU Baby app guides new moms and dads through an emotional cyclone.

A 1930s psychologist enrolled a pair of unwitting subjects — his own infant and an adopted baby chimp — to test whether nurture triumphs over nature.

Dr. Winthrop Niles Kellogg set his son, Donald, and his adopted daughter, Gua, in front of a movie camera. The psychologist wanted to capture a memory of the two babies, Donald in a white onesie and leather shoes, Gua in a diaper and similar shoes. The vignette in sunny Florida might have been cute, except that Donald was a human and Gua was a chimpanzee, and they were both subjects in Kellogg’s experiment.

Kellogg and his wife, Luella, had adopted Gua from Cuba at 7-and-a-half months to see if a chimp would act like a human if raised with their 10-month-old son and surrounded by other people — a bizarre thesis in any era but especially in 1931, when chimps were rarely used for behavioral research. For nine months, Kellogg, his wife and other researchers meticulously observed the two babies, an experiment that today would alarm scientists, animal rights activists and child protective services.