Box-Reared Babies

A pair of bright-eyed twins named Roy and Ray Hope celebrated their sixth birthday in Bloomington, Ind. this week in the noisy, rambunctious fashion of six-year-olds everywhere. Their father, Henry Hope, head of Indiana University's fine arts department, thought they might be "physically precocious," to which Mrs. Hope retorted: "That sounds like a father talking." Roy and Ray seemed disarmingly normal, and that was news. For they had spent the first 18 months of their lives in a "Skinner baby box."

Devised by Harvard Psychologist Burrhus F. Skinner,* the box is a big incubator with the temperature-kept at 88DEG, humidity at 50%. In it, the Hope twins wore nothing but diapers. The idea was that without confining clothes they could thrash about, play better and grow faster, and that in a controlled atmosphere they would catch fewer colds.

As it turned out, the Hope twins got as many colds as the rest of the family, because they were hauled out of the box many times a day and exposed to adult-polluted air. No psychologist can say whether the box helped or harmed them because none has been asked--to their parents, it seems obvious that they're doing fine. Mrs. Hope's verdict: the box is a boon to mothers because it cuts down on laundry and bathing.

# Whose Walden Two is a depressingly serious prescription for communal regimentation, as though the author had read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and missed the point.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.