The biography of a baby

by Milicent Washburn Shinn

The baby entered on her second month well content with her fragmentary little world of glancing lights and shining surfaces, chords and voices, disconnected touches and motions. Her smiles began to be frequent and jolly. It was always at faces that she smiled now: nothing else seemed half as entertaining. The way in which a baby, in these early weeks, gazes and gazes up into one’s face, and smiles genially at it, wiles the very heart out of one; but the baby means little enough by it.

In this fortnight her pleasures were enlarged by introduction to a baby carriage. The outdoor sights and sounds were of course wasted on her at this stage of her seeing and hearing powers; but she liked the feeling of the motion, and lay and enjoyed it with a tranquilly beatific look. Perhaps also the fresher air and larger light sent some dim wave of pleasant feeling through her body.

Some days earlier, when carried out in arms for her first outdoor visit, she had found the light dazzling, and kept her eyes tight shut. In all I have said of babies’ pleasure in light, I have meant moderate light: the little eyes are easily hurt by a glare. There are nursemaids, and even mothers, who will wheel a baby along the street with the sun blazing full in his face, and who will keep a light burning all night for their own convenience in tending him; and in later years his schoolbooks will get the credit of having weakened his eyes. Nature protects the little one somewhat at the outset, for at first the eyes open by a narrow slit, which admits but scanty light: our baby was just beginning, at a month old, to open her eyes like other folk.

Pleased though the baby was with her new powers, her life at this period was not all of placid content. Ambition had entered in. It had already seemed as if the mechanical lifting of the head was passing into real effort to raise it; and day by day the intention grew clearer, and the head was held up better. Now, too, appeared the first sign of control over the legs. Laid on her face on the lounge, the baby did not cry, but turned her head sidewise and freed her face, and at the same time propped her body with her knees. This was on the first day of the month. A few days later she was propping herself with her knees in the bath every day.

With increase of joy and power came also the beginning of tears. This, too, was on the first day of the month. The tears were shed because she had waked and cried some time without being heard. When she was at last taken up, her eyes were quite wet. As every nurse knows, wee babies do not cry tears. When they do, it does not mean that any higher emotional level has been gained, only that the tear glands have begun to act. Nor have I any reason to suppose that in this case the baby felt fear at being left alone. It was simply that she was uncomfortable, and needed attention; and the attention delaying, the discomfort mounted, till it provoked stronger and stronger reflex expressions.

The first fright did occur, however, a few days later in the same week; but it was in a much more primitive form than fear of solitude. The baby was lying half asleep on my lap when her tin bath was brought in and set down rather roughly, so that the handles clashed on the sides. At this she started violently, with a cry so sharp that it brought her grandfather anxiously in from two rooms’ distance; she put up her lip at the same time, with the regular crying grimace known to every nursery,—the first time she had done this,—and it was fully five minutes before her face was tranquil again.

There had been reflex starting at sounds from the first week, and Professor Preyer calls this an expression of fright; but to me (and Professor Sully regards it in the same way) it seemed purely mechanical. Our baby would even start and cry out in her sleep at a sound without waking. But now there was clearly something more than reflex starting. It was not yet true fear, for fear means a sense of danger, an idea of coming harm, and the baby could have had no such idea. But there was some element of emotion to be seen, akin to fear; and (if we regard pleasure and pain as psychologists are disposed to do, not as emotions in themselves, but only as a quality of agreeableness or disagreeableness in our feelings) here was the first dawn of any emotion. Fright, that was but a step above mere physical shock, led the way into the emotional life.

This probably gives a true hint of the history of emotional development in the race: for in the animal world, too, fear appears earliest of all the emotions, and in the simplest forms of fright is hardly to be distinguished from mere reflex action; and it is caused oftener by sound than by anything else. When we remember the theory that hearing is developed from the more ancient motion sense, we are tempted to trace the origin of fright still farther back, to the very primitive reflex sensibility to jarring movement, of which I have spoken before.

And now the baby had come to six weeks old, and could hold up her head perfectly for a quarter of a minute at a time, and liked greatly to be held erect or in sitting position. Apparently all this was for the sake of seeing better, for her joys still centred in her eyes. She had made no advance in visual power, however, except that within a few days she could follow with her eyes the motion of a person passing near her.

Human faces were still the most entertaining of all objects. She gazed at them with her utmost look of intentness, making movements with her hands, and panting in short, audible breaths. Nothing else had ever excited her so, except once a spot of sunlight on her white bed.