Babies

For thousands of years human infants in the first year of life have squirmed, kicked, rolled, crawled, gurgled, cried, laughed, panted, sucked, waked, slept and submitted with good humor or bad grace to endless ministrations. For thousands of years all of these doings were of supreme importance only to their mothers and, sometimes, their fathers. But for seven years such typical, normal baby actions have seemed to a kindly and learned man in New Haven to be of supreme importance to Science. Fruit of that belief appeared last week in the form of a monumental, 15 1/2-lb. compendium in two volumes, illustrated with 3,200 action photographs: An Atlas of Infant Behavior,* by Arnold Lucius Gesell, M. D., Ph.D., Sc.D., director of Yale University's Clinic of Child Development.

Dr. Gesell has subtitled his work: "A systematic delineation of the forms and early growth of human behavior patterns." A baby's mind grows like his body, and like his body, his psychological make-up is an organic structure. It is revealed at any stage in behavior forms. Infantile behavior is vastly complex, but not, Dr. Gesell was certain, beyond recording.

For his prime tool Dr. Gesell chose the cinecamera. Money was forthcoming from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial in 1926, again in 1930 from the Rockefeller Foundation. Tactful emissaries scoured New Haven for young recruits. Hundreds of thousands of feet of cinema film were exposed. From this immense store the picture sequences for the Atlas were carefully selected, each picture made from a single cinema film frame.

Normative Survey-- For the first half of the investigation (Volume I), 107 infants were enlisted. They were observed from the age of four weeks onward at regular intervals of one lunar month. None of the babies was born prematurely and all were sound in mind and body. The parents, all U. S.-born and mostly of North European stock, were plain, solid, intelligent people, neither rich nor poor.

Arena of investigation was a paneled dome, big as an igloo. Two soundless cinecameras rode on tracks up the sides of the dome to the top. Inside was a specially designed clinical crib with accessories. The crib was in focus whatever the position of the cameras. The dome's interior was flooded with a soft, diffused light. The dome was encased in a one-way vision screen so that operators outside could see inside, but the performing infant could not see outside.

Purpose of this research, which Dr. Gesell calls "normative," was to obtain a comprehensive picture of how a normal baby acts in a variety of situations, uniformly created for each child and for the same child at successive periods. What does a baby do when he is lying on his belly, on his back? How fast does he master the sitting posture, learn to creep, to crawl? What are the exact mechanics of his methods of locomotion? How well, at successive ages, can he stand (with help), climb stairs (with help)? What does he do when tempted by toy "lures" beyond his reach? The cameras ground away, and in the Atlas every movement of hands, arms, legs, feet, heads, posteriors is described in formal and scientifically pompous language. Eight paragraphs are required to detail one stair-climbing sequence lasting 49 sec. (see cut).

To find how the babies perceived and exploited their environment, learning by experiment or imitation, they were confronted methodically with such gadgets as cubes, rattles, dangling rings, spoons, cups, pellets, bottles, bells, singly and in combination. In some situations the examiner showed how things were done, as building towers of two or three blocks, getting the pellet into the bottle, making marks with a crayon on paper, and the infants were encouraged to repeat.

Naturalistic Survey. Volume II of the Atlas shows the transportation of the home life of first-year children intact and in toto into the studio where it is painstakingly recorded. Dr. Gesell calls it "characteristic infant life under present conditions of American culture." The normative investigation emphasized normal trends; the naturalistic survey was planned to catch individual differences of normal children as displayed in their ordinary daily routine.

This volume confines itself to an intensive study of six babies, four boys and two girls. The two girls and two of the boys were first-born children. None of the six families kept a regular servant or had a family doctor. Five of the families had a church affiliation; three had club memberships and attended concerts; three had a piano and phonograph; everyone had a radio. The twelve parents all attended high school, one mother went to business school, and one father was a college graduate. One family lived in a six-room house; the others had apartments of three to eight rooms. On the whole Dr. Gesell regarded the six homes as "approximately normative and representative of high average living conditions."

Dr. Gesell recognized the difficulty of reconciling ideal conditions for cinematography with an atmosphere in which mother and child would feel at ease. Fortunately the clinic had a private residence in attractive, peaceful surroundings. At one end of the living room a one-way vision studio was set up with translucent silk panels through which mercury vapor light filtered. The studio could be converted into kitchen, bathroom, playroom, bedroom, living room. Mothers brought their babies to the house and stayed all day, sometimes two days. The mothers tended their charges in their own way from morning to night under the eye of the cinecamera, and the infants, as Dr. Gesell gratefully says, "expressed and exerted themselves without stint."

The babies exhibited their mannerisms while sleeping, waking up, being dressed and undressed, taking their baths and bodily exercise. They were nursed at the breast, fed with bottle, spoon, cup. With their own fingers they fumbled and mouthed chicken-bones, ate peas and toast. Sample bottle behavior: Girl A frets when she sees the bottle, looks at her mother, draws up her legs in anticipation, grabs the bottle, drinks, sucks her thumb when her mother removes the bottle to ease the nipple, drinks again, grows drowsy, pushes away the nipple with her tongue, falls sound asleep (see cut above).

The floor is of tremendous importance to any infant. On it he learns to get around, on it he learns to play. A multiplicity of play situations were recorded. A baby given a string to which a ring several feet away is attached finds it necessary to change the string from hand to hand before getting the ring within reach (see cut, p. 32).

Persons as well as things are part of a baby's environment. His response to persons is the beginning of social behavior, which he will manifest even toward himself if confronted by a mirror. On glimpsing his image Boy B pats the floor, "vocalizes," looks happily up at the attendant, pats the mirror, smiles again at the attendant (see cut below).

Dr. Gesell was born in Alma, Wis. 54 years ago. He was first a high-school principal at home, taught psychology in California, finally studied medicine at Yale. He has been director of the Clinic of Child Development since it was started in 1911. He has two daughters, both beyond the reach of his experiments. One is a senior at Vassar, the other a senior at Yale Law School. Mrs. Gesell had no official connection with the Atlas, but contributed shrewd advice, informal help. His five or six women assistants were specially trained in their fields.

Big-framed, rangy, grey-eyed and grey-haired, Dr. Gesell has a firm, soft-spoken manner that ingratiates him with parents and infants alike. He knows the value of patience, insists that every last detail contribute to the value of his work. For relaxation he sails, rides, swims.

Like an artist who completes an impressive mural and stands aside to let critics wrangle over its significance, Dr. Gesell withholds interpretative comment on his gallery of babies. He believes it will be useful as a standard of reference for judging abnormal or defective infant behavior, and to students of special aspects of infant psychology. Says he: "Perhaps we may hope that the Atlas will occasionally be put to uses for which it was not planned. . . . The infants have been given freedom to display a vast array of postural attitudes. Some of these attitudes must have import if not charm, from the standpoint of sculpture and the graphic arts. The art student who limits his observation to [adults] will miss distinctive aesthetic problems and opportunities which are peculiar to the first year of human life."

* Yale University Press ($25). First printing, 250 sets.

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