The biography of a baby

by Milicent Washburn Shinn

Professor Preyer and most other observers have tried to account for this persistent drift of everything to the baby’s mouth by the theory of taste association: the baby’s most agreeable experience has been that of tasting milk, and so he connects all pleasure with the idea of getting things to his mouth. This seems to me quite untenable. An association between taste and the feeling of something in the mouth would not be formed unless the two occurred together quite regularly; and what with the washing out of a baby’s mouth each time he is nursed, and the frequent stumbling in of his hands, and later the deliberate sucking of fists, he finds tasteless objects there oftener than milk. Again, it is not the movement of the hands up to the mouth that would become associated with food, but rather the feeling of being laid at the breast (which our baby did in fact associate early with food, as I have related). And in the third place, there is not the least evidence that taste is the most agreeable experience of young babies; on the contrary, the tests go to show that they have a low taste sensibility.

The craving of hunger, of course, is an intense feeling in babies, and its satisfaction (rather than taste pleasure) is greatly enjoyed; but except just at the hungry moment, they pay far more attention to looking, and hearing, and feeling than to eating. Our baby, after the first edge of hunger was off, was always ready to desert the breast to look at something interesting. She would nurse a little, then throw herself back on her mother’s arm to smile up into her face. She cried quite as hard over being obliged to lie down, where she could not look around her, as over being hungry; and getting her meal caused no such marked signs of pleasure as light and motion, the bath, and the free use of her own powers.

Some babies are hungrier than ours was, and some are like her; but I think close observation would show all alike more taken up with their higher powers than with food. And as all alike put everything into their mouths when they first learn to grasp, we must find some other reason for the act than food association.

If we regard it as an exercise of the sense of touch, in what is at the time the main touch organ, we have an activity closely parallel with the constant interest in the use of sight in the early months. Observers have been misled by failing to realize that the mouth, not the hand, is the primitive touch organ. The baby behaves with the things in his mouth as if he was interested in feeling them, not in eating them. He does not try to swallow them (though he may be depended on to do it without trying, if they are small), but licks, sucks, mumbles them about, and in every way gets the utmost touch sensation out of them. Preyer saw a look of pleasure caused by sucking a pencil, before the baby had ever tasted food, when he could not have had the least taste association with the feeling. There is plenty of evidence that the act of sucking (the muscular sensation as well as that of touch) is in itself highly agreeable to babies.

I have spoken of the great and active interest, at this time, in studying the visible world. By the end of the fourth month the baby had certainly learned the look of many things, and was well aware when it was in any way changed. In a strange room she would renew the eager and surprised staring about which had nearly ceased in familiar rooms; and if one of us appeared in a bonnet she would look with curiosity and interest at our changed aspect. She doubtless knew us all apart by this time, though she gave no clear evidence of it, except in the case of grandpa, whom she often greeted with cries of joy and flying hands.

From the middle of the fourth month she followed us constantly with her eyes as we moved about. Her eyes were thus drawn to greater distances, and her range of vision increased; before this she had hardly noticed anything across the room. In the latter part of the month she looked with especial curiosity at people’s faces on the other side of the room, and I guessed that it was because they looked so much smaller to her—as they would to us if we had not learned to allow for the distance. A face fifteen feet away can be completely hidden by a fifty cent piece held out at arm’s length; our friends shrink to small dolls in our eyes every time they cross the room, but we bring them up to their real size by trained imagination. The baby, who had not yet the trained imagination, must have seen strange shrinkings and swellings as people moved from her or toward her, and as she was carried about the room.

She saw a complete change of appearance, too, each time any one turned around, and each time she was carried from one side to another of a person, or of a piece of furniture. We have become so used to this that we do not notice it; but to the baby each side of an object must have looked like an entirely new thing. I think it was some time before she learned to associate together the different sides and the different sizes of each object—all the aspects one chair could take, for instance, gathering into one group in her mind, and all the aspects a table or a person could take, into another; but she was learning. It was an enormous piece of work for the baby brain, but babies are not lazy, and she enjoyed it.

The changes that people went through, as they moved about, were much more complicated than those of the furniture; but that only made them the more interesting. No wonder that as soon as the baby knew she could touch and feel what she saw, it was our faces she dived for with especial zeal, to explore their surfaces with her mouth; and a fortunate thing it is for the baby’s progress in knowledge that mothers do not mind having great and moist liberties taken with their faces. Our baby learned, too, at this time, with the connivance of her grandfather, and afterward her father, to fix her fingers in their beards and tug. This was doubtless educational, and it brought still another interest into the number that gathered about the faces of her fellow beings: but it led to trouble later, as her hands grew quicker and stronger in clutching.

She was a joyous and sociable little being in those days, and while her serious business was looking about and studying out the visible world, or exploring with her mouth the feeling of things, her delight was as always in people’s faces and attentions. She had become charmingly responsive, and answered to nods and prattle and cuddling with the gayest of smiles and crows, and lively flourishing of arms and legs. From early in the month she acquired an ecstatic little chuckle, and once or twice even broke into a genuine laugh when she was played with a little more boisterously than usual.

For by this time, and more and more every week, she began to like a frolic, and when she was tossed, rolled over, or slid down one’s knee, she crowed and beamed and chuckled in high delight. She was such a tiny baby for rough play that we tumbled her about most gingerly, but she seemed ready for anything herself. She was a baby singularly free from fear or nervous excitability, showing already quite clearly the temperament she has carried through her later childhood.