Skinner, the behaviorist guru, championed the belief that our feelings and actions were simply robotically conditioned responses to stimuli. To prove his theory, he raised one of his daughters for the first eleven months of her life in a labor-saving “baby tender,” a standard-size crib with removable safety glass and its own air circulation system, like a fully functional baby-scale house. No more pesky adjusting of nightclothes or bedding. No more midnight feedings. By simply keeping the baby in a clean diaper and adjusting the temperature of the baby tender, the Skinners found that their baby was very happy. So cheerful, in fact, that she was almost entirely silent. “During the past six months,” Skinner writes, “she has not cried at all except for a moment or two when injured or sharply distressed.” The proud Skinners found that the many hours they may have wasted in playing, touching, feeding, and comforting their baby were much better spent in some “welcome leisure.” This was, as Skinner writes, a “brave new world which science is preparing for the housewife of the future.”
As outrageous as the baby tender sounds, the idea that children are simply mechanical beings, reliant solely upon things like food and shelter in order to thrive, was pervasive. The behaviorists explicitly frowned upon showing children too much affection, as if loving attention would make babies “soft” and needy. Both the cupboard love theory and the behaviorists try to explain away an emotion as wild and inconvenient as the kind of love that parents and their babies have for each other.
I get it. Love has a way of taking over.
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FOR A FEW very happy months, Mary traveled through the villages, observing the women, their children, and their world. Mary was with these families through their children’s milestones, first-wife/second-wife dramas—there was a group of polygamous families in her sample—and one tragic death. She watched the mothers cradle their ill infants, sit them up for photographs, bathe them several times a day, carry them on their backs, and smile at them from across the room. She brought the children candy and relished watching them eat it, their little bodies sticky with sweetness. Mary’s days were completely absorbed in her observing and her wondering, showering these unbelievably lucky families with her wise and loving attention.
As payment to the twenty-six families who finally agreed to be involved in the study, Mary offered to drive the women and their children to and from the clinic in nearby Kampala for their routine checkups and shots and whenever they were sick; it was a valuable service in a community where transportation was difficult and illness was common. Here she had a chance to sit with the babies in a new, strange, and slightly scary situation and to watch them be afraid and then be soothed by their mothers. Or not. Trying to distract them, she let the babies play with the pencil in her purse or watched them get momentarily distracted by her oddly white, sandaled feet. Then she’d watch them retreat from her, back onto their mother’s lap, when they’d had enough of her games or were afraid.
What she learned in those hours of sitting with babies and their mothers in the hot waiting room planted the seeds for the development of what would come later—one of the most important laboratory procedures in the history of psychology.
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INFANCY IN UGANDA, the book Mary published in 1967, is filled with intimate black-and-white photos she took of babies in strappy rompers or wearing little anklets and long, quaint dresses. It’s filled with the affection she developed for the mothers and their gentle but confident child-rearing, undramatically raising their adorable and physically precocious children, who were “clearly accelerated in their rate of sensorimotor development” and thus walked, talked, and were potty-trained so far ahead of Western babies. Some babies had achieved “elimination control” by the age of four months, but almost all by the time they were a year old. She admired the way mothers so seamlessly offered their breast, and just as effortlessly tucked themselves back into their dresses, designed for easy nursing, when they or their babies were finished.
A rather proper Canadian lady of the 1950s, Mary was impressed by this culture of such fine manners,