Box-Bred Babies

Harvard Psychologist Burrhus F. Skinner has taught pigeons to play pingpong, invented teaching machines for people. But for sheer practicality, nothing he has yet devised beats his "Skinner baby box"--a household incubator for human chicks.

Invented in 1944 for his daughter Debbie, Skinner's box is a combination crib-playpen that a baby can call home for as long as two years. It has Plexiglas windows, and inside, the temperature is kept at 80DEG or so and the humidity at 50%. The baby is free of confining clothes and "prisonlike" crib bars. He wears only a diaper, sleeps on a trampoline-like plastic mesh that drains away any leakage. The idea is to let him thrash about, play better and develop faster. Pop saves on baby clothes, and with less lifting, laundry and bathing, Mother's work is ever done. If all systems are not go, a battery-powered alarm buzzes loud and clear.

"This thing is a crusade with me," says John M. Gray, a Long Island electronics engineer, who raised his own son (now a 16-year-old Explorer Scout) in a Skinner box and custom-builds them under the trademark Aircrib ($335). To cut the price, Gray aims for mass production and dreams of the day "when half the babies in America will be bred in boxes." He adds: "Even if just the nuts buy it, there's still a sizable market."

Many of those who buy it now are avid disciples of Psychologist Skinner. Among them: Mr. and Mrs. Walter Farrell of Miami, a couple of earnest young (23 and 17) psychologists, who boxed their daughter Kelly as soon as she was born a month ago. Mrs. Farrell already has cut her baby chores to 1 1/2 hours a day. Farrell, a doctoral candidate at the University of Miami, argues that this makes Kelly all the more loved and avoids "a psychologically negative framework for the mother."

To such a leading child psychiatrist as Manhattan's Dr. William Langford, it is not the box that helps or hinders so much as "the quality of the parent-child relationship--how much the child is taken out to be played with, the warmth in the family and so on." So far, most box-bred babies--there have been more than 400--seem to have had the right kind of parents. Among them: bright-eyed Debbie Skinner, 18, who hopes to enter Radcliffe.

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