Conditioning the Child
The most consequential conditioning of the American child was not performed in a laboratory. It was printed in childrearing manuals and sold to mothers by the hundred thousand.
This has to be said first, because the story of behaviorism and the child usually opens with a famous experiment, and the experiment is the least reliable part of it. In 1920 John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner reported that they had conditioned an eleven-month-old infant, remembered as “Little Albert,” to fear a white rat by pairing it with a sudden loud noise, and the study became the textbook emblem of conditioning. It is also, in nearly every particular beyond the bare fact that it happened, contested: the rigour of the method, the extent and durability of the fear, whether it generalised as claimed, and even the identity and fate of the child have all been disputed by later researchers. A project with this one’s discipline cannot lean on it, and has no need to. The real evidence is duller and far heavier, because it was published as advice and taken.
Begin before Watson, with the schedule. L. Emmett Holt, the most influential American paediatrician of his day, wrote The Care and Feeding of Children in 1894 — a catechism of questions and answers for mothers and nurses that ran through some seventy-five editions. Its counsel was regularity: feed by the clock, sleep by the clock, handle the infant as little as fondness would like, and defer in all things to the physician rather than to custom or instinct. Holt was a serious, humane, scientific man, and the point is not that he was a villain. It is that a generation learned to treat the infant as a small system to be regulated on a timetable — the child constituted as an object of expert management — decades before anyone attached a psychology to it.
Watson supplied the psychology, and stated the goal without flinching. In Psychological Care of Infant and Child (1928) he turned behaviorism into parenting. The aim, in his words, was “not more babies but better brought up babies,” and the ideal was a child who “has no great attachments to any place or person.” The method is one notorious passage, quoted here because paraphrase would soften it: “Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning.” Engineered detachment, named by its designer as the goal, addressed to ordinary parents in a book that sold. He did not need Little Albert to be alarming. He wrote it down as instruction.
That the same man spent his second career in advertising is worth stating plainly. Forced out of the university in 1920, Watson joined the agency J. Walter Thompson and rose to vice-president, applying the psychology of conditioned response to selling. The discipline that told mothers to shake hands with their toddlers and the discipline that arranged a stimulus to make a stranger buy were, across one career, one discipline. Conditioning the child and conditioning the consumer were a single science, aimed at two ages of the same person.
Two boundaries keep the reading honest. The first is the base rate: Holt and Watson were the respectable mainstream of their moment, and most of the parents who followed them were doing their sincere best by the best expert advice going. That is what makes the rail heavy rather than lurid — the management of the child was normal, credentialed, and kindly meant. The second is that Holt did not hand Watson a programme; the scheduled nursery and the behaviorist nursery are the same disposition arrived at twice, once by a hygienic paediatrician and once by a laboratory psychologist, each reaching it on his own. The continuity is a shared conviction — that the child is a system to be regulated by experts — not a plot.
So set the laboratory aside; it was never the evidence. The evidence is a stack of manuals in seventy-five editions and a bestseller that told parents to shake hands with their sons, and the millions of homes that took the advice because a physician and a scientist had signed it. Whether a colder childhood produced a colder adult is a question this rail does not settle. That the coldness was prescribed, in plain print, by the most trusted authorities of the age is the documented fact, and it required no experiment on a frightened infant to do its work.
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