Word: brazeltonized
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Most current advice givers urge anxious parents not to take such standardization too seriously. Pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton (see box), who is publishing next month a revision of his 1969 bestseller, Infants and Mothers, begins by declaring: "There are as many individual variations in newborn patterns as there are infants." Still, though a child's development during its first year is far slower than that of a monkey or even an elephant, it is nonetheless so dramatic-from lying flat on its back to the first creeping across the floor to the first faltering steps around the corner...
...Brazelton began devising the exam some 30 years ago to solve a problem that bothered him: babies available for adoption were being kept in institutions until the age of four months because doctors were reluctant to certify that any younger infant was fully normal. "Four months is just too long to deprive anybody of a new baby," Brazelton recalls, with a trace of a Texas drawl that has survived his years in Boston. "That led me to say, 'Well, gosh, anybody can tell whether a new baby's O.K. or not. What is it we're going...
Dr.T. (for Thomas) Berry Brazelton, 65, says he is no scientist, which shows a becoming modesty, but he would have a hard time denying that he is the nation's pre-eminent baby doctor. A whole generation of pediatricians has studied and worked with him at Harvard Medical School and the Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston. Tens of thousands of anxious parents have been reassured by his easygoing guidebooks (Infants and Mothers, Toddlers and Parents, Doctor and Child, On Becoming a Family). Millions of infants who never met him have been tested and evaluated...
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...