Thousands of American mothers are in the odd position of having raised their first child under rigid schedules, and their second under conditions of absolute freedom. If they are brave enough to have a third, they will find themselves obliged once again to figure out the practical implications of the latest scientific research. Looming large among recent contributors to the study of child-rearing is Dr. Arnold Gesell, who offers a picture of the normal child at various stages of his development, and coolly invites parents to make the best of it. Since, however, the I of the mother is never quite the eye of the scientist, some interesting complications are inevitable.

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A genial anarchist, S. G., whom I came to know suddenly and intimately during 1950, has reached the age of one year, and can be dimly recognized in Dr. Arnold Gesell’s profile (in his Infant and Child in the Culture of Today):

The year-old baby is already capable of finer coordination in his eating and play activities. He picks small morsels of food from his tray with deft forceps prehension, and masticates and swallows with much less spilling from his mouth . . . may seize a spoon by the handle and brush it over his tray. He can also dip it into a cup and release it; all of which shows that he is advancing in his mastery of tools and of the solid and hollow geometry of space.

But can S. G., or any other lively individual baby, be fairly described in this laboratory language? No mother could think so, though a baby, more empirical in outlook, a spontaneous admirer of tidy procedures, might. The contemporary baby will in any case have to come to terms with many a more pedantic image of himself. For his relation with his parents has lost its 19th-century privacy and become the public obsession of an imposing didactic literature.

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By “Gesell” (a name handed from mother to mother as a respectable token of their common experience, just as certain dress and perfume labels are the shorthand proof that one has been in Paris) is usually meant his Infant and Child in the Culture of Today (1943) which, along with The Child From Five to Ten (1946), summarizes the results of observing children at the Yale New Haven Clinic for thirty-two years. This article considers only the first volume, covering the period during which the character of the mother qua mother becomes undisguisably apparent to everyone but herself. Dr. Gesell has called his work a cultural anthropology and, although it is popularly thought of as a guide and can ultimately be used as that, its real distinction lies in a mass of descriptive material organized into laws about the structure, environment, and behavior of the modern child.

The body of the book, the part that makes or breaks a mother’s faith in its author, consists in a factual statement of the child’s growth characteristics during the first five years of life. To demonstrate what a continuing, knitting kind of process growth is, and to point up its constant sloughings off, projections, displacements, and transmutations of the past, Dr. Gesell makes all his evaluations comparative. He selects definite moments of maturity—four, sixteen, twenty-eight weeks, and so on—and delineates at each the progress in posture, perception, prehension, language adaptation, sociability: in short, the total but unfinished baby, on one rung of his confident climb toward self-containment. He is able to predict with uncanny accuracy that a sixteen-weeks-old baby will open his fist and bring his fingers together across his chest, that twenty-eight weeks is the heyday of the manipulation of objects, that a forty-week-old learns “pat-a-cake,” “bye-bye,” and the difference between one and two; that a two-year-old is a solitary, a threeyear-old docile and delightful, and a four-yearold bossy and boastful.

That these generalizing profiles are acknowledged as the most reliable contribution to the science of child study, has not diminished the resistance of mothers to such profiles or to science. When a mother asks, “What do you think of Gesell?” she usually means: “Do you really enjoy knowing what your child will or ought to do at a certain age?” Dr. Gesell explains in the introduction to his book that the age norms are not set up as standards; the prevalence of individual variations is recognized at every turn, and it is by the norms that we become conscious of such variations. But in spite of his caution, Dr. Gesell is doomed to responsibility not only for his dispassionate formulations, but also for our own passionate vanities. And in fact we may be able partly to blame Dr. Gesell when some modern mother can say with competitive smugness, “Yes, my child is an extremely early talker”; when sophisticated women weep because their children learn to sit or walk behind schedule; when sensible parents feel defrauded of their child’s eccentric charm on reading that her cocking of her head at six months is only the routine initiation of feminine coyness.

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The implication intended by Dr. Gesell is really patience—he means to say that all the necessary aptitudes will be developed in good time (“everything in season” ends many of the profiles). The deviations are usually only temporary imbalances or rough transitions, and what parents fearfully regard as abnormal or retarded will be straightened out when their child is neurologically and physiologically a little older. Still it does seem that Dr. Gesell’s profiles, taken at face value and out of context (and is not anxious motherhood the taker-outof-context par excellence?), place a great emphasis on the normal. He does not trouble much to account for abnormalities, or to say exactly at what point they could become ominous. His book could do with a few optimistic profiles of eccentrics. It is because of his indifference to the unusual and unexpected that Dr. Gesell often starts as a god and ends as a devil in the opinions of the worrying mother.

Benjamin Spock, on the other hand, takes every possible occasion in his by now classic Pocket Book of Baby and Child Care (1946) to mention the variety of pace and style of babies’ development, and this is only one of his levelheaded ways of ministering to the necessary confidence of the parent. In the end, Dr. Spock is always viewed more tenderly by parents than Dr. Gesell, who has made the more original if not more compassionate contribution to our knowledge of children. Of course, it is always easier to like the dependable family doctor than the impersonal laboratory researcher; and it must also be considered that Gesell is usually read in perspective by a skeptical parent trying to keep up culturally with the Joneses, while Spock is the recourse of a desperate father overwhelmed by a blotchy rash and a storm of howls at 3 A.M.

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Still, if one can put aside the threatening concept of a “norm,” one can take a great deal of pleasure in the brisk exactness and persistent energetic investigation that has gone into the profiles of Dr. Gesell’s Infant and Child in the Culture of Today. He likes to make fine distinctions, to reveal the interplay of the concrete and the abstract, and to perpetuate the baby’s and the reader’s sense of discovery; and all this turns his science into a wise and vital prosaicism, if not into pure poetry. Thus the businesslike profile quoted above continues more warmly: “The year-old child likes an audience. This is one reason why he is so often the center of the household group. As such he shows a Thespian tendency to repeat performances laughed at. He enjoys applause. This must help him to sense his own self-identity, just as he learned better to sense a clothespin when he brought it banging down against his tray. He is defining a difficult psychological distinction—the difference between himself and others. . . .

“He may be a prodigious imitator. Demonstrate the ringing of a bell and he will wave it furiously by way of social reciprocity. But suddenly in the very midst of this waving he stops to poke the clapper with his inquisitive index! This poking was not part of the demonstration, but it is part of the child.”

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Those generalizations that seem most vulnerable to attack turn up in the “behavior days” which accompany the profiles and rather dogmatically set down a baby’s activity from 6 A.M. to 6 P.M. (no insomniac infant shows his dissipated eyelids in a Gesell-directed living room after sundown), allocating the proper time for naps, baths, and sociability. The greatest limitation of these reports is the obvious middle-class milieu they assume, with a neat, comfortably equipped household. Their regularity and serenity give no hint of the frantic and disorderly mess that a household of any class can sometimes become under the tyranny of a baby and the distraction of a mother; and can only appear ludicrous to a reader who is poor, has many children, or was brought up in Kentucky instead of Connecticut. But it should be mentioned that Dr. Gesell deliberately followed the procedure of choosing the babies to be observed from homes in the middle socio-economic range. Their fathers were policemen, ticket-sellers, machinists, foremen, printers, and American-born, while their grandparents were European. Dr. Gesell felt this was the closest he could come to an ordinary or average American home. It may be argued that he did not take the most fruitful or imaginative approach to child personality, but he can at least be depended on to see and state his own limitations.

We see the same ability to define his scope exactly in his answer to readers disappointed in his apparent lack of concern with the individual psychology of infants. He explains in The Psychology of Early Growth (1938) that since personality make-up involves something more complicated than the quantitative method he uses, his purely psychological insights are largely accidental. A general law of biology can account for a specific attitude toward the world (Dr. Gesell says that a two-and-a-half-year-old is hard to discipline because the nerve-cell organization that presides over inhibitions is poorly developed), and to the extent that neurology and behavior can represent individual personality, Dr. Gesell has formulated an infant psychology. But, of course, it is only a partial one, and the common maternal complaint is that it eschews childish feelings and the deeper sources of childish temperament. Dr. Gesell never considers the possibility that a baby may have some very personal reason for its tears, some pressing anxiety that might be discovered and dispelled. The attachments a baby forms, the jealousies and slights it suffers, are not recorded in the behavior profiles, and it might be said that Dr. Gesell has in fact overlooked the whole realm of childish sorrow.

In his defense, one can only point out that a scientist does not resent being in the realm of the inscrutable, while a parent does. A parent is determined to find in his baby a small but exact copy of himself, and cannot imagine that before anatomy and physiology have had some time to interact, there can be no such thing as an autonomy of the mind. Eventually the quantity of nervous organization will produce a new quality, sensibility—but a parent is always rushing the transformation. This is only one more instance of that persistent adult anthropomorphism which interprets a baby’s uneasy wriggles as marks of disapproval, haphazard jerks as dancing, glances of stoical indecision as “She thinks I’m crazy,” and a burst of grunts as “I don’t care for your cooking” or “What in the world is keeping you?”

If a parent could put aside his xenophobia, he might take a special interest in the fact that his baby is located simultaneously in the apartment of its parents and in a very distinct universe of its own. For a time, its life is vegetative and it lives only as an organism in a world of things. Before it can become, in Dr. Gesell’s phrase, “a person in a world of persons,” it must absorb all the difficult concepts of time, space, number, form, texture, color, and causality. Dr. Gesell’s writing is full of passionate veneration for the gradual yet wonderfully efficient process of growing, and the contagiousness of this writing provides some of the pleasure of reading Infant and Child in the Culture of Today. But the more important pleasure is in our glimpse of science at its most modest and benevolent: not the new, gothic science that unleashes mysterious forces, but the old-fashioned variety that honors and faithfully describes the observable facts.

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This book is unusual, moreover, as an account of laboratory experiment in that its writer is as interested in ideas as in statistics, and takes pains to draw from the facts a general way of comprehending and accepting those organic processes that we ordinarily notice only when they annoy us. Although Dr. Gesell spent a good deal of his time at Yale with the techniques and equipment of observation, he likes to involve his descriptions with some aspect of scientific philosophy. A relativist, he points out that no phase of a baby’s growth can be understood separately, out of context with the whole career of its growth. Thus an infant’s automatic casting of toys on the floor is the rudiment of its eventual ability to throw and count. A year-old infant is biologically a fifteen-month child in the making. Feeding, toilet-training, sleeping are all cyclical patterns in which rhythms and mastery are constantly changing as the baby develops. Watching babies has made Dr. Gesell very conscious of Heraclitus’ notion that “nothing is, everything is becoming.”

The theoretical part of this book is not entirely free from the kind of jargon that seems to characterize most formulations in the nonphysical sciences. It is full of managerial terms like developmental, mechanism, manipulation, consolidation. But this jargon, while not subtle, does not prevent the plain expression of Dr. Gesell’s morality toward children. He describes his view as a developmental philosophy, which argues that the parents’ expectations must take their cue from the natural abilities of the child. It rules out absolutism and fanaticism, stresses the ingenuity and inevitability of growth, and assures us that we need not be “so grimly determined and soberly solicitous.” Dr. Gesell speaks of a baby’s nervous structure as being an ordering force against chaos and diversity. He is always discovering in nature a system of checks and balances. He believes, for example, that a baby’s familial and racial heredity—the force that makes him a distinct individual—keeps him from becoming the pawn of his culture: “. . . he is durable as well as docile.” And in general Dr. Gesell posits a firmly anti-Hobbesian view of nature as benign, prodigious, and wise.

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But the middle-class parents who are interested in Dr. Gesell have not usually read him in terms of his philosophy. Despite the fact that he is a scientist, not a counselor, his books have been seized upon as guides to the perplexed, and their danger lies in the aura of enlightened, authoritative sanctity with which they have surrounded the problems of childrearing. To this extent, at least, Dr. Gesell is responsible for the complacent and solemn tone of the popular psychiatric handbooks and for the self-effacement of the mother.

For the modern mother, especially if she lives in a city, can no longer regard her baby with equanimity unless she has some professionally created image to bolster her judgment. She has no heart for hit-and-miss procedures, and just as she will not understand her own behavior without the psychology course identified in the college bulletin, will not pick up a paint brush or join a game without the mimeographed instructions, so she will not pick up her child in comfort without a literature of guidance. She comes to this literature not so much with a hearty respect for knowledge as with an insistent devaluation of her own perceptions. David Riesman has described in The Lonely Crowd those parents who, whatever scheme of child-rearing they adopt, cannot help showing their children how little they—the adults—depend on themselves and how much on the authority of others. “Whatever they seem to be teaching the child in terms of content, they are passing on to him their own contagious, highly diffuse anxiety.”

To the pediatricians and psychologists who have more recently been drafted as cicerones, the weak cry of the parent reverberates more poignantly than the lusty howl of the baby. From the Federal Security Agency’s antiseptic recommendations for cleanliness and affection, through the intermediate writers for the women’s clubs and parent-teacher associations, to Benjamin Spock’s warm, humorous, de-sentimentalized version of Dr. Christian, the tone of the guidance literature is palliative. Parents are protected against confusing advice, accusations of authoritarianism, total responsibility for their children, and sometimes even against insight—as in the bright, flippant book In Defense of Mothers (1950), in which Dr. Leo Kanner feels obliged to burlesque Freudian theory lest it frighten suggestible readers. (There are, incidentally, no popular American books in this literature that express a strictly Freudian view of child development. Many of the widely read authors, like Spock and Sidonie Gruenberg, take for granted the kinds of childhood experience Freud drew attention to, such as rages, fears, and “erotic” curiosities. But they seem also to recognize that the instincts and the passions are not a province in which the middle-class American parent feels comfortable. The moderate tone of these writers was made easier by the earlier successes of John Dewey’s child-centered philosophy of education. In England, however, where a conservative educational philosophy dominated popular practice, no important transitional school existed, and the rebellious Freudian note sounded more distinctively in the writings of Susan Isaacs, Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, and Winifred de Kok.)

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In America, from whatever publication on child-rearing you happen to look into—including the homey magazines distributed gratis by the diaper companies—you cannot fail to amass useful information on bassinets, irritable crying, mosquito netting, thumb-sucking, and the thousand other natural shocks and problems to which, as mother, you are presumable heir. It is hard to see how knowing any of these things could do any harm, and yet in many cases such literature dulls the actual experience of raising a child, and diminishes the stature of the mother.

To the literate modern, a child shapes himself from the beginning as an objective aggregate of functions, patterns, and stages of development. But in the previous generation, more primitive and stern, which might allow him to cry all night, he was accepted as a bundle of chaotic energy that demanded to be confronted as a whole. An entirely formed person, he was at once designated as a scholar, a fighter, the image of an uncle—in any case, a baby of character rather than characteristics. Today we emphasize his limitations, his helplessness; they emphasized his potential powers: then he was already fated for a role, for responsibility. The modern mother, with the baby’s biology more exactly before her, loses the vision of his possible greatness. For the previous generation, the difference of sex was at birth already tremendously important; there was an actual difference in imagined destiny, in the hopes for the future focused on this event. It was very much the spirit in which Santayana introduces his hero in The Last Puritan:

“His little organism, long before birth, had put aside the soft and drowsy temptation to be a female. It would have been so simple for the last pair of chromosomes to have doubled up like the rest and turned out every cell in the future body complete, well-balanced, serene, and feminine. Instead, one intrepid particle decided to live alone, unmated, unsatisfied, restless, and masculine; and it imposed this unstable romantic equilibrium on every item of the man-child’s flesh, and of the man-child’s sinews. . . .”

Now we democratically pretend to feel that it makes no difference what sex we beget, possibly because there is a greater social equality between male and female, but more probably because the general obligations of child-rearing seem larger and more serious to us than any particular infant. Though the change has made us more considerate—the old point of view often led to sickness, brutality, and blindness as to what children were up to—it has also made us more self-conscious. We have rather proudly forfeited our natural impulses in favor of professionally approved responses.

There is no longer conceivable a scene like the one in Joyce Cary’s To Be a Pilgrim, in which a Victorian son, whipped by his father, and a few minutes later requested to bring his father’s hat, eagerly runs for it, having affectionately accepted both punishment and forgiveness. As parents, we are still in the early and therefore boastful stages of the Enlightenment, and cannot imagine how a spark of the irrational, the “outrageous,” might minister to the well-being of our children. To prove to ourselves how very sensible we are, we turn the simplest and most pleasing acts into dull lesson plans, and spring examinations upon ourselves in affection and libertarianism. We are under a constant and grueling pressure to allow our children freedom. An old-fashioned mother who was not especially fussy with her child might nevertheless rush him into the bathroom for a fast scrub before a guest arrived. But the compulsive modern mother, even if she has been worrying about her offspring all day, will proudly present him to company with dirty knees. She lets him play with dirt, feed the dog, and investigate his excrement; but her only reward is mounting tension. Hers is an era of tactful toilet-training, precocious beefconsumption, democratic nurseries, and nervous motherhood.

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Tantalized, but not yet liberated, by the dribbles of leisure and education that are available to her, the insecure, progressively oriented woman tries desperately to understand her child. She keeps a sharp eye on the neighbor who is retarding her baby by withholding affection; she goes out Saturday afternoons to assure herself that she is still an individual as well as a mother; she affects a marvelous nonchalance about her child’s clothing; and rather than indulge herself in an irritable outburst or a slap, will go about endlessly pinched in the face by polite repressions. The worst of her plight is that her child will be the first to sense and dislike her deception, like the boy of four whose mother asked if he wanted some delicious cheese, juicy applesauce, or lovely spinach, only to have him look critically at her artificially arranged features and peevishly order something she hadn’t mentioned. A unique and disheartening situation, when these green little nursery tenants can already condescend to their parents.

The real trouble of the book-guided mother is that she cannot and will not go backward to intuitive and improvised “parent-child relationships,” and can only go timidly forward toward sociology and medicine. She has lost the dangerous simplicity of the instincts and has not yet gained the patience or reasonableness of scientific discipline. She still hovers in that middle position which is the most arduous to sustain, whether in politics or child-rearing. As often happens, the extremists—in this case, the old-fashioned grandmother and the scientists like Dr. Gesell—really feel the power of their own opinions and glow with satisfaction in their point of view; and also, incidentally, they seem to monopolize the resources of verbal expression. Those caught in between are at best borrowers, suspicious of themselves and competitive with others.

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The instinctive, primitive, uneducated parents had their own rough grace; the scientists have their touch of godliness. But the midway “progressive” parents tend to be tense in their casualness, cloddish in their glibness. A whole jargon of solicitous abstractions has sprung up that expresses their uneasy position. Having a child is an “experience” that helps you to “mature.” Children are endangered by “over-protection,” over-tiredqess, or rejection. A mother can believe she has given psychology its due when she says to her noisy boy: “Why, I know what’s the matter with you, dear, you’re feeling neglected, aren’t you?” And a colorful, personable baby can be referred to by his own mother in these “other-directed” terms: “J. is a very good child. Sometimes he has temper tantrums, which are of course upsetting. But in general he is a perfectly normal, healthy, happy, sociable boy.”

Since it is difficult for the modern mother to escape her in-between position, she must exploit it and borrow shrewdly from both extremes. The wisdom of grannies is legendary and needs no elaboration, but scientists are commonly thought to be cold and mechanical. In fact, however, scientists like Dr. Gesell have often proved themselves (at least on the conscious, articulate level) the true appreciators of children. They are forced to think and speak precisely, and in this sense they become poets, sensitive to distinctions, exact, dispassionate, and yet full of the wonder of childish growth and childish eccentricity.

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One can find in Infant and Child in the Culture of Today, if one needs them, a number of practical recommendations, such as indexes of play materials and books suitable to various ages. But a parent ought not to read Dr. Gesell mainly for these or, in fact, ,for any sort of literal instruction. As Dr. Abraham Meyerson says in speaking of changes of style in childrearing: “The ancient Jewish scholars had a name for it; they called it ‘tatnar verkehrt’ which means that turning things upside down may bring as satisfactory results in the seeking of truth as logic itself.” Dr. Gesell should be read either for his sensible and encouraging philosophy, which is full of reason for pleasure rather than anxiety, or out of pure curiosity for facts that are sufficiently entertaining in themselves.

The most damaging accusation against Dr. Gesell is that he has created the image of an anonymous, factory-produced baby, an identical twin to every one of its own age group. But the accusers forget that, although it is immensely satisfying to identify and differentiate the personality of your own baby, its singularity can be revealed only in the interstices of scrubs and mouthfuls, in sudden glances, dazzling ducks of the head, guttural laughs, weak joyful giggles, and puzzled worshipful eyes. If I had to say what makes S. G. different from all other babies, I would submit her passion for all things sour—pot cheese, grapefruit rind, and entire lemons; her contempt for formal toys; her instantaneous appreciation of belts; her reverence for the dark abysses of bathing caps and oatmeal boxes; her expression of critical condescension; and her persistent intimate peering at preoccupied adults. But these are not the province of the scientist; they are the shocks of recognition of mothers. After all, there is a limit to the amount of poetry a pedant can discover in a nursery.

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