The Experts’ Views on Bringing Up Baby : CHILDHOOD, <i> by Melvin Konner,</i> Little, Brown and Company, $27.95, 435 pages
The biggest villain, aside from outright child abusers, in Melvin Konner’s “Childhood,” is one John B. Watson, in his time a towering figure in American child-rearing history. Watson dedicated his 1928 parents’ manual to “the first mother to raise a happy child,” and offered the following advice:
“There is a sensible way of treating children. Treat them as though they were young adults. Dress them, bathe them with care and circumspection. Let your behavior always be objective and kindly firm. Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning. . . . Try it out. In a week’s time . . . you will be utterly ashamed of the mawkish sentimental way you have been handling it.”
The vision of mother and toddler in a sunrise hand-shaking ceremony says something about the imperfection of child-raising advice. For eons, we’ve been the one species that takes care of our children constantly; we keep feeding them at least through puberty. (I expect to be feeding my sons into their 40s if the economy doesn’t pick up.) We now know not to shove the little guys off our laps, but we still have a desperate need to be told the right way to raise our kids.
Rather than prescribe a right way and run the risk of giving advice that will look foolish 63 years from now, Konner offers for parental guidance the newest research results on child development from conception to adolescence. Konner’s style is questioning, groping. His book is not a work of art, but it is the work of a real parent. Which he is, to Susanna, Adam and Sarah, ages 12, 9 and 4. He is also a professor of anthropology and psychiatry at Emory University, and the author of an acclaimed book of science essays (“The Tangled Wing”) and a study of the !Kung hunter-gatherers in Botswana’s Kalahari Desert.
If you were the parent of a newborn, and you turned to Konner’s “Childhood” (after looking up crying in the index of Dr. Spock’s “Baby and Child Care,” of course) what message would you get?
You’d probably decide to be much less rigid than the Spock-parent about letting the baby sleep in your bed; most parents in the world would bring a crying baby into bed with them. Konner once translated and read advice from Spock on unspoiling a baby (let the little guy cry his guts out, essentially) to a !Kung mother. She replied: “Doesn’t he understand he’s only a baby, and that’s why he cries? You pick him up and comfort him. Later, when he grows older, he will have sense and he won’t cry any more.”
You’d wish you could carry her (babies are female in most of the new child-care books, intending to make up for centuries in which he was the dominant baby pronoun) most of the time. You’d also be convinced it’s a good idea to nurse the child as often as several times an hour. (The low-fat composition of human milk is evidence that nature intends us to be frequent breast feeders.)
On the other hand you wouldn’t feel guilty about day care, preferably at your place of work, after six months or so, so long as the people there could provide your child with a steady source of love.
After her day care years, you’d want to send your child to school in Japan, where, according to Konner, the atmosphere is not as charmless or competitive as you might have thought, and by the time she was 14, she’d be ready for MIT.
You’d worry less than you’d expect to about her adolescence. “In most adolescents,”’ as Konner sums up the latest studies, “conflicts with parents, as well as impulsive behavior, depression, and aggression, increase in early adolescence during the pubertal peak itself, but soon begin to decline, and by late adolescence are better than at prepubertal levels.”
Most significantly, you would give in to the knowledge that your child brought into the world a set of characteristics that you can’t do much to change. Like Konner, you would decide that Watson and Spock and others had underestimated the role of biology in child development, and you’d share his awe of the relentless force with which nature’s plan unfolds in each child. Like him, you’d find comfort in not having to take responsibility (though not being able to take credit, either) for the way your child develops.
Presuming your infant is protected from war, famine, serious disease or a crack-addicted parent, and presuming that she’s given affection, good food, comfort, and some interesting things to look at, your baby will tend to turn into herself. One example of this heartening indomitability comes from Konner’s younger daughter. He fails to resist the temptation of bringing in his own children, as in the insufferably cute, “A certain 12-year-old of my acquaintance . . . “
But, like all parents, he is humbled by his offspring. When he asked the 4-year-old Sarah what interesting things she did that he might put in his book, she smiled and said calmly: “I bite the heads off of fish, and suck their guts out. Then I spit ‘em in the trash.”
Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “The Honey and the Hemlock” by Eli Sagan (Basic Books)
