Education: Normal Child

At birth the average U. S. child weighs 7½ lb., contains 270 bones, measures just 20½ in. from top to toe. Its stomach holds 1 oz. of food, the capacity increasing to 6 oz. in six months. At 3 weeks its diapers must be changed 13 times a day; at 3 months 20 times. It begins to crawl at 9 months, toddles and babbles words on the first day of its second year. At 3 the child can name keys, knives, pencils and answer correctly whether it is boy or girl. At 6 it can count to 13, distinguish nickels, dimes and quarters.

Built to specifications laid down by doctors and psychologists during the past 40 years, this “average” child is described and dismissed as non-existent in Your Child Is Normal, by Dr. Grace Adams, published last week.* A psychologist whose 15 years of experience include research at Cornell University, social work among Southern mill children and psychiatric treatment of rich “problem children” in Manhattan, Dr. Adams is married, childless. Her book is a guidebook to children, “a unique, interesting and likable class of human beings.” Her advice to parents is never dogmatic. Interspersed with references to numerous moppets whose behavior has been minutely observed and recorded by psychologists, it may lead impartial readers to conclude that children are a terrifying breed, that successfully applying psychologists’ advice to them is a matter of luck alone.

On two matters—Sex and Fairy Tales— Dr. Adams sharply disagrees with “advanced” psychologists. A child, she says, is inquisitive, gullible but not equipped to understand scientific facts. It does not matter whether the parent attributes babies to God, a mother or a cabbage patch. Let the parent be casual, unselfconscious and not worry if the child refuses to believe what he is told or quickly forgets or misunderstands. Likewise Dr. Adams says fairy tales do no harm because the child’s world is an arbitrary one, “a definite period of living which has its own characteristic prejudices and predilections.”

Dr. Adams observes that children lie glibly, ask many a question for no particular reason, often fail to distinguish between cause and effect. (“The fire engine stopped because the wheel is not going around.”) Declares Dr. Adams: “The average child of 18 months cries ‘No,’ often and emphatically without having the slightest intellectual conception of its meaning. It screams ‘No’ decisively when a toy or a sweet is taken from it, and . . . when it is told to do something it considers disagreeable or unnecessary.”

*Covici, Friede ($2).