Medicine: Let Your Child Alone

A mother should not kiss and cuddle her baby, should turn a deaf ear when he cries, should feed and tend him with cold regularity. So ran the advice most pediatricians gave parents a few years ago. But many of these “scientific,” timetable children have grown up neurotic, unhappy. So the doctors have returned to Nature: they now believe in old-fashioned mother love and intelligent laissez faire.

Leader of this reaction is Dr. Charles Anderson Aldrich of Northwestern University Medical School, a modest, kindly man who turned to pediatrics after his three children broke all the textbook rules. In Boston last week, he aired his fatherly ideas at the eleventh annual convention of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Bits of Aldrich wisdom:

> Every child has a unique, dynamic pattern of growth. A mother, aided by her pediatrician, must find this pattern rather than impose an artificial schedule on her baby. A wise mother should be able to sense the time when her child is ready to graduate to the cup, solid foods, long pants, football. She must never try to force him to do certain tasks at a certain age because the books say so. Most of a pediatrician’s trouble, confessed the doctors last week, is not with children, but with neurotic, earnest parents.

> If baby cries constantly, he wants something; his mother should find out what it is. If he chuckles instead of going to sleep, he probably doesn’t need the sleep. Moderate thumb sucking does no harm; if it continues, he may need more affection, a change of routine.

> Babies need not be fed every four hours on the dot, but when they are hungry. They should be allowed to eat as much or as little as they want. When left to their own hunger pangs, most babies stick to an even schedule, eat the right amount necessary for growth and health.

> Pediatricians used to vie with each other to see who could find the earliest age to give infants solid foods. One even fed meat to toothless three-month-olds. But now doctors generally stick to milk, wait for a few teeth before feeding babies solids. As for the transition from bottle to cup, Dr. Aldrich suggests placing a cup on baby’s feeding tray, waiting till he starts to play with it and tries to drink out of it.

>Some zealous doctors used to advocate training tiny babies to evacuate at regular hours. Mothers would set their infants on “toidy seats,” fight with them to move their bowels. Such strict training, said Dr. Aldrich, makes bowel control a reflex act, rather than a conscious process. When the stimulus of the toidy is transferred to a regular seat, the training is lost and the whole fight must begin all over again. A child can go dirty and play in his puddles, said some of the doctors, until he understands what a toilet is for.