Word: brazelton
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That all sounds rather routine, but Brazelton's tone changes as he starts to talk about his test, about the way a baby's eyes jerkily follow a moving ball. "If you give him a human face to look at instead, his eyes will widen and he'll get more intense and he'll follow you," says Brazelton, "and as he follows, his face gets more and more alert and more and more involved, and you can feel yourself getting more and more involved back. This kind of visual involvement is more than just looking...
...Brazelton once wanted to be a veterinarian. At age eight, already an experienced baby sitter, he decided on pediatrics. He went to Princeton, starred in Triangle Club theatricals, even got an offer in 1940 to try out on Broadway for an Ethel Merman musical, Panama Hattie, but he held on to the goal of healing infants. His hero, he says, was Benjamin Spock, and although Brazelton is now regarded as the new Spock, he considers himself more a disciple than a rival of the older...
...Brazelton and his wife Christina have three daughters and a son, ages 19 to 32. He still worries about his high expectations and pushing his children too hard. His son, however, calls him "a great...
Like Spock, Brazelton makes it a cardinal rule to reassure anxious parents and to encourage them to trust their instincts. "Parents in our culture are so hungry for people to tell them what to do and so vulnerable as a result," he says. "I feel very strongly that telling them what to do is destructive. Supporting them for what they can do is constructive...
...Brazelton is in the midst of a project of "intervention research" that involves studying 100 undersized babies and trying to see which of them will need special assistance. Babies that have been undernourished in the uterus are "very scrawny, very hypersensitive to any kind of stimulation, and they become very fussy and difficult for the parents," says Brazelton. "They need help to see their baby as a person. You have to help parents see that you're seeing the same baby they are. And that the baby doesn't need to be like them. And they...