Psyching the Baby to Sleep

...It is a faith born of science, not a philosophic valuation ab extra, that tells us that the whole of reality is mechanical, that the one key to experience is science...

...As a sample, he presents the report of a mother who has used the method on her son from his second to his fifth year...

...or the mother who dances attendance on her daughter, builds up a lovely, unreal world about her, and eventually sends her, when she encounters reality much too late and discovers that a husband is not a parent, to the divorce court or the asylum...

...It hardly needed an elaborate piece of "research" carried out at the Hecksher Foundation to discover that the situations most provocative of temper in small children are: (1) having to sit on the toilet chair...

...These learned discoveries sound all too much like the ponderous inanities of a doctor's dissertation...

...Just this method is used by Dr...

...Dear old ladies say to him, "Thank God, my children are grown and that I had a chance to enjoy them before I met youl" The penny dreadful, the tuppenny blood and the shilling shocker, all for the price of one volume...

...The good doctor apparently does not know that not every family has been Dreiserian...

...Disappointment comes to the mother when the child, at the age of four years and ten months, hears a fairy story for the first time and is inclined to believe it...

...There are undoubtedly much more scientific ways of bringing up children which will probably mean finer and happier children...

...Holt's is on the care of the body," but, he added, "thousands of mothers have found in Dr...

...Modestly he confessed in the introduction that the book was "not as complete on the psychological side as Dr...

...He entered, in short, the national advertising field...

...So far, so good...

...Holt (having served his purpose) is left far behind, and Watson now follows the doctrines of such renowned and excellent pediatricians as Messrs...

...Bertrand Russell whose educational philosophy is based on the prevention of fear—who himself fears neither God, man nor devil, but only Mrs...

...Holt's nursery classic were to be maintained) to scatter throughout the book a great many physiological precepts that are now commonplaces in the American home...

...The common experience of any grown person will suffice to refute many another hasty generalization...

...even the soldiers in the trenches, trying to keep themselves in the vegetable kingdom most of the time occasionally had disturbing thoughts, if we are to believe the war books and plays...

...Once or twice he forgets himself, as when he says that "the behaviorist does not know enough today to do a thoroughly satisfactory job," and when he admits that "just ordinary common sense—this helps us to prevent fears in the home...

...2) having property snatched away by some other child...

...Holt something as valuable as the Bible...

...It is an ingratiating mixture of the age-old maxims of family life with the startling conclusions of the vicious philosophy which underlies Watson's system...

...After all, theories aside, while there is always a lazy tendency in humanity to let itself down to a lower level, while the doctrine of "be a good animal" always finds ready listeners, it is difficult for the normal adult to relinquish his intelligence indefinitely...

...This paper will endeavor to disentangle the old from the new and in addition will present some further criticisms of Watson's work and of his methods of presenting it to the public...

...After the usual prelude concerning the ways in which children learn about sex, and the inability of parents to better the instruction, Dr...

...There is nothing new in such cases, but the more parents ponder them, the better...

...The following, on the same point, though it contains the words "fact" and "proof" is another sample of Watson's impressionistic scientific method: The fact I brought out before, that we rarely see a happy child, is proof to the contrary [of the statement that the mother implants affection in the child...

...Such maxims as these give the unwary reader the impression that here is a standard and trustworthy manual...

...Watson, therefore, (having taken for himself the motto of Danton— "Toujours l'audace...

...Immediately, thousands of newspapers wrote scathing editorials on 'Don't kiss the baby.' Hundreds of letters poured in...

...It is, as we might expect, entirely naturalistic...

...Having questioned whether there is any truth save that of science, they have naturally taken the final step of questioning whether there is any truth at all...

...A second assumption is even more revolutionary, Dr...

...Undoubtedly this is an unwarranted generalization from Watson's own experience and an unfortunate indictment of Watson pere and Watson mere...

...No conclusion could be more false...

...Emmet Holt's Care and Feeding of Children...

...7) being bathed...

...The twenty-eight editions of this work abundantly prove this...

...It is well known that the world—especially the prosperous American world—is full of spoiled children, and that fears instilled into small children are deep rooted...

...Advanced" mothers complain that "the behaviorists are on the right track but they go too far...

...Intoxicated with the achievements of science—and indeed our age has few other achievements to boast of—countless people not only accept such truth as science can legitimately offer, but also follow the prophets to whom reality and scientific reality are one and the same...

...There is a great deal of sound sense, however, in the warnings against training children in "nest habits" that will make them utterly dependent on the parent, unfitted to play their parts as individuals later on, when their parents are no longer with them, and sending hundreds of them to neurotic graves...

...Watson launches his method...

...For it is a matter of faith...

...So revolting is this doctrine that even the most naturalistic philosophers shrink from it...

...In the light of this little lesson in biology," says Dr...

...When Watson goes on to treat of children's fears and tantrums we meet many another familiar landmark...

...Thus, while he sets himself up as an impersonal scientist, prefacing his book with two full pages of acknowledgments to everyone from Dr...

...Since this book is the full flower of the Watsonian doctrines—a final application of the behavioristic viewpoint and methods to everyday life—we must not ignore it in our examination of behaviorism...

...Now every publisher and theatrical producer knows that one way to make a best-seller is to tie a production up with a previous success...

...If you must," he goes on, "kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night...

...Russell is entirely against the book...

...5) being dressed...

...When we read the discussions of "the love life of the child at birth," however, we find ourselves quite on the other side of the fence...

...Discussing the book, he continues in the same vein: I am afraid that in boys brought up on Doctor Watson's principles the sex instinct would be stark, harsh and ruthless, and that both young men and young women would be incapable of physical companionship extending beyond the moments of passion...

...Louis Berman, says, behaviorism is not a science, it is a religion...

...He sees the whole world watching his every word...

...Undoubtedly" and "probably" are pretty shaky props for the purely objective scientist...

...You can see invalidism in the making," he says, "in the majority of American homes...

...Here Watson explains "how love grows up" and "the mechanics of love and affection" Laboratory studies satisfy the behaviorist that he can "bring out a love 104 THE COMMONWEAL May 28, 1930 response in a new-born child" by stroking its skin...

...Watson would be satisfied with twenty editions for his book—and Dr...

...Watson approaches his practical method by way of a mass of the wildest exaggerations, often contradictory, together with every appeal to ignorance, emotion and prejudice known to the street-corner orator or the advertising expert...

...Here we have no facts at all— merely the serene assumption that the observable responses of infants to caresses are identical with adult love—that "zones" are made "erogenous" by calling them so...

...Watson tells us that when he asks anybody how he slept last night, "almost invariably, if I am a person he does not have to keep up a front around, I get the answer, 'Not very well.' " On this he bases the conclusion that parents, as a general rule, make invalids of their children...

...To begin with, the book is "dedicated to the first mother who brings up a happy child...

...Obviously, mankind will never for long be sincerely faithful to scepticism...

...Holt is no longer here to tell what he thinks of his new partner...

...Bertrand Russell should have been mathematician enough to recognize that this one book alone flouts the laws of logic sufficiently to damn its author as a scientist...

...Watson is indeed driven to this naive explanation by the compulsion of his mechanistic doctrine, and he follows the "behavior history" right through adolescence, adulthood and marriage in the same strain...

...In his attempts to prescribe an "objective" attitude toward children Watson becomes highly romantic...

...We might as easily assume that the infant whose thumb misses his mouth and catches on his nose is seriously thumbing his nose at us...

...It would be quite unfair, however, to assume from the above quotation that Mr...

...6) being undressed...

...As such it will hardly survive the scrutiny of the twentieth century...

...As the eminent endocrinologist, Dr...

...Watson says (and here we might pause to ask how a behaviorist can have a serious question in his mind, since he admits no consciousness) It is a serious question in my mind whether there should be individual homes for children—or even whether children should know their own parents...

...The fact that our children are always crying and always whining shows the unhappy, unwholesome state they are in...

...When he is three his mother takes him gently but firmly through a book on the subject and further adds to his physiological knowledge, whipping up his interest to the point where his learning becomes, to say the least, extensive and explosive...

...Apparently little Jimmy—little Rollo, rather—is expected to say, "Charmed, I'm sure," when mother tells him to get up...

...In his second year, the boy participates in curious anatomical researches, the mother keeping his interest up when it tends to lag...

...announced that his book, Psychological Care of Infant and Child, was intended as a companion-piece to Dr...

...3) having the face washed...

...I have tried to trace in two previous articles in The Commonweal (The Metaphysical Behaviorist, which appeared November 6, 1929, and The Glorified Amoeba, in the issue of January 1, 1930) the attempts of Watson to put across the doctrine which would attribute to all human conduct only physical, mechanical causes...

...Most mothers know that "seven o'clock at night is a good bedtime for the ages two—five years," but the knowledge does not save the situation when the parent drops exhausted about that time, while the infants go on carousing far into the night It is also common knowledge that many hospitals and pediatricians advocate for [rubbing] children under two months of age the use of a firstgrade olive oil or mineral oil with no powder...

...so much so that it would be easy to make a tabular analysis of the book under the two heads, Old-True, and New-False, without doing appreciable violence to scientific truth...

...Here, as elsewhere, he avails himself of the old oratorical trick of mentioning accusations against himself, with the notion that the very mention constitutes proof of their falsity...

...Watson (the lesson concerns the attraction of female rats for male rats) "isn't it ridiculous for a mother to think that her girls are not interested in boys...

...We may expect, then, that behaviorism will remain only as an interesting museum piece, a vestige of nineteenth-century mechanism, of the philosophy of the Victorian generation that knew not Eddington...

...4) working at something that won't pan out...

...The grown reader is so flabbergasted at the naivete of this narrative that he passes over in breathless silence the analogy (at the end of the chapter) between the experiments of a Professor Moss on rats and the conduct of civilized human beings...

...May 28, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 103 PSYCHING THE BABY TO SLEEP By FRANK WHALEN 1ONG before Emerson advised the budding genius to "hitch his wagon to a star," it had been the custom of second-rate men to promote themselves to the first rank by hitching their wagons to other people's stars...

...Elsewhere in the same review his admiration for Watson's naturalism leads him to forget the lucid interval that gave birth to the sentence quoted and to say, Whether or not Doctor Watson is right in all his details, his book has undoubtedly one very great and rare merit, and that is that its approach to the problem is scientific...

...The philosophy it sponsors is more dangerous than the experiments it proposes...

...Hence he turned to the compilation of a "practical household manual" which would find a place on every family bookshelf and lighten the task of mothers from California to Maine...

...But mother is determined and starts him reminiscing: a few intensive review lessons soon bring him back to "objective reality...

...Truly a sentiment which is more spinsterish than scientific...

...There is then hope that the course of behaviorism will be short, and that the book we have been considering will hasten its end...

...Heywood Broun and Horace Liveright...

...Recently, however, certain scientists have doubted some of their safest and most cherished conceptions, and for a whole decade more and more laymen have slipped into pure scepticism, which may be defined as the denial of the possibility of valid knowledge...

...There grow up certain "erogenous zones" (as he calls them elsewhere...

...Treat them," he says, "as if they were young adults" —the rankest psychological heresy...

...Perhaps they have forgotten that the logical deduction from this sceptical dogma, as the ancient Plato and the modern Anatole France have shown, is simply silence, a refusal to make affirmations on any subject, which is more than human nature can endure...

...The climax comes in chapter six, entitled What Shall I Tell My Child About Sex...

...Adolf Meyer of Johns Hopkins down to the editors of McCall's Magazine, Watson is also the misunderstood pioneer, the martyr of progress...

...Watson takes the cases, well known to clergymen and physicians, of the father who makes all his son's decisions for him, tyrannizes over him, and leaves him at the mercy of stronger characters in business and the home all his life...

...One gathers that Dr...

...Once, he tells us, he let slip in a lecture some of his ideas on the dangers lurking in a mother's kiss...

...John B. Watson, the founder of behaviorism, in bringing his dogmas home to the parents of America...

...Norman Foerster sums up the situation very well in The American Scholar, which was recently published: Every age of history has its special faith, and the special faith of ours is the dogmatic dream of science...

...Shake hands with them in the morning...

...On every page there is evidence of Doctor Watson's lack of objective attitude, and even more evidence of another quality unseemly in a true scientist—pose...

...The author found it expedient (if the character of the book as a complement to Dr...

...This theory met with little applause from the scientists, and Watson soon saw that his public would have to be a far less critical stratum of humanity...

...Bertrand—is led to say concerning it, "I am afraid...

...The marvel of it is that neither the mother who wrote the report nor Watson who printed it had sense enough to see that it was a complete laboratory demonstration of the building up of a morbid interest in sex—a positive disproportion far more serious than the ignorance it sought to remove...

...But for the rest of the book he holds the pose very well, which is a man-sized job for anybody, even a behaviorist...

...It is a faith that causes us to extend to the whole of experience a method unquestionably suited to a part...