The biography of a baby

by Milicent Washburn Shinn

The day after she would lie a while unusually silent and sober, looking about her and moving her hands a little; then she would fret to be lifted and held against one’s shoulder, where she could hold her head up and look about. She was able now to hold it up a long time by resting it for a few seconds every half minute or so, against my cheek, which I held close to give her the chance. But to-day she was not satisfied with having her head erect: she persistently straightened her back up against the arm that supported her—a new set of muscles thus coming under control of her will. As often as I pressed her down against my shoulder, she would fret, and straighten up again and set to work diligently looking about her.

After this her progress in holding up her head was suddenly rapid, and by the end of the month, four days later, she could balance it for many minutes, with a little wobbling. This uncertainty soon disappeared, and the erect position of the head was accomplished for life.

During these last days of the month the baby was possessed by the most insatiate impulse to be up where she could see. It was hard to think that her fretting and even wailing when forced to lie down could mean only a formless discontent, and not a clear idea of what she wanted. Still, it is not uncommon, when an instinct is thwarted, to feel a dim distress that makes us perfectly wretched without knowing why. As soon as she was held erect, or propped up sitting amid cushions, she was content; but the first time that she was allowed to be up thus most of the day, she slept afterward nine unbroken hours, recuperating, probably, quite as much from the looking and the taking in that the little brain and eyes had been doing as from any muscular fatigue there may have been in the position.

Such is the “mere life of vegetation” the baby lived during the first two months. No grown person ever experiences such an expansion of life, such a progress from power to power in that length of time. Nor was our little girl’s development anything unusual for a healthy, well-conditioned child, so far as other records give material for comparison. Preyer’s boy was later than she in getting his head balanced, but he arrived at full accommodation (and that is the most important work of the first two months) at almost exactly the same age as she; and so did Mrs. Hall’s boy. I do not know of any other records that make a clear statement on this point.

VI
PROGRESS TOWARD GRASPING.

The baby’s development, as I have said, consisted now mainly in forming association groups in her mind in two series, which we might call a sight-motor series and a touch-motor series. There had been a leap forward in the sight-motor series when “accommodation” was learned. Now the touch-motor series came to the front, and step by step led on to the great accomplishment of grasping.

First, when we laid the baby’s face up against ours, her little tongue was put out to lick the cheek that she felt, warm and smooth, against her lips. This was a more advanced use of active feeling than the mere passing of her tongue over her own lips, for that must have been done accidentally many times before she began to do it on purpose; and the association between the movement and the feeling had been helped by the double sensation—one feeling in the lips and another in the tongue every time they touched.

This doubling of sensation, which occurs every time one part of the body touches another part, often seemed to wake special attention in the baby, and thus help on a development. Later, it had a great part to play in teaching her the boundaries of her own body, and the difference between the Me and the Not-me. Even now, she must have been somewhat aware of a different feeling when she passed her tongue over her own sensitive lips, and when she passed it over the unresponsive cheek of some one else.

So far, the tongue, not the hand, was her organ of touch. But now the fingers were showing the first faint sign of their future powers—nothing more than a little special sensibility, such as the lips had shown in the first month: we would see the baby holding her finger tips together prettily (when by chance they had collided), as if there were a feeling there that interested her. Here again there was double sensation.

In these same early days of the third month there was beginning another development that was to end by making the hand the successful rival of lips and tongue for purposes of grasping and feeling. The baby was trying to get her fists to her mouth.