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Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY Spock�s book was boon for parents There are few things more terrifying for a couple than their first night at home with a new baby. We had done all the right things before our first was born, including attending classes on birthing taught by a nurse at the Portland hospital where Nora was scheduled to give birth. We even practiced diapering a doll. Then I brought mother and child home after they spent several days in the hospital following delivery, and that night became a night to remember. This was our problem: What do we do when the baby refuses to stop crying? We couldn�t exactly remember what the nurse had said to do about that, so we turned to the book, "Baby and Child Care," by Dr. Benjamin Spock. In his 1948 book, Spock reassured mothers that "You know more than you think you do." "Children in loving families want to learn, want to conform, want to grow up. If the relationships are good, they don�t have to be forced to eat, forced to learn, forced to use the toilet," he wrote. Spock drew fire from those psychologists who preached regimentation, but most families used his book as a steppingstone to creating their own methods of raising their children. After all, the good doctor had said that mothers knew more than they thought they did. One of the reasons that Spock�s book became a best seller was that his ideas on child-rearing directly opposed those of the previous child-psychologist guru of the 1920s, Dr. John B. Watson. As early as 1922, the year before I was born, Watson began forming a new theory or "school" of psychology which he called "behaviorism." I have more than an academic interest in Watson. My mother told me, just a few weeks before she died, that she had followed his methods of baby-raising. It all began when she read Watson�s article about child care in a popular magazine. He claimed that picking up a baby after just a few minutes of crying would lead to a moody child. Crying was good for a baby, he said, giving him or her strong lungs and an aggressive view of life. I contracted pneumonia when I was 3 months old, and was sickly for some time. My mother figured that withholding attention just might help me to make a quicker recovery, but it really didn�t work. After a few months, she turned her back on Watson�s theories, and when my brother Lee was born, she just used her common sense Watson finally took all of his articles and put them together into a book called, "The Psychological Care of the Infant and Child," which was published in 1928. He recommended that children should be treated as little adults, not coddled, cuddled, hugged or kissed. He recommended shaking hands with children instead of kissing them good morning or good night. The book jacket described the contents as "scientific mothering." The doctor�s most outrageous quote is this: "Mother love is a dangerous instrument which may inflict a never-healing wound; a wound which may make infancy unhappy, adolescence a nightmare, and an instrument which may wreck your son or daughter�s future and chance for marital happiness." Everything in that quotation is completely wrong. His theories led to physical and mental problems for thousands of children around the world, and most of them carried a residue from those experiments into their adult lives. All of the above is background to what I�ll be writing about next week, when we�ll look at some of the results of Dr. Watson�s theories from 70 years ago. Many of the people born in the 1920s and �30s came into families where the psychologist�s theories were considered to be the genuine gospel. Next Tuesday, I�ll write what this all meant to the children. (Hank Henry is a retired Jackson County commissioner and a former radio and television announcer. Call him at 772-9055.) Obituaries | Sports | Business | Classifieds | Tempo | Prime Times | So Oregon Sites | Outdoor Journal | Subscribe | Contact | Movies | Advertise | Real Estate Showcase | Archive | Editorials | Letters to the editor | Religion | Wake-up Call | NIE | Cyber Chef | Job Network | So Oregon Weather | WSJ Northwest | Forums | AP Wire | AP Money | F.A.Q. | Awards Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. The Community Newspaper Subsidiary of Dow Jones & Co, Inc Copyright �The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA