The biography of a baby

by Milicent Washburn Shinn

In a few days she had become a different baby, with a new world of interests, and a wonderfully more varied and vivid life. After this, she went on smoothly to the end of the fifth month (and for that matter, through the sixth), absorbed in looking, feeling, and handling, reaching this way and that to lay hold of everything she saw, and improving steadily in skill. A small steel bell given her in the twenty-first week was at first pulled and shoved about on the table, picked up with two fingers or more as might chance, and put into her mouth by any part that came handiest; but in three or four days it was taken up properly and rung. More and more all the time she found something to do with things besides putting them in her mouth.

She liked hard, bright, and rattling things best to handle, and preferred metal or bone to rubber. One can hardly think of a thing less useful to a baby educationally at this stage than soft, colored worsted balls; he needs something that he can feel, hard and definite, in his hand; something with distinctly unlike sides that he can see as he pulls and shakes it about; he loves glitter, but cares little for color, perhaps does not yet see it; and any dyes and worsted shreds that can come off in wet little mouths are conclusive against such a toy.

On the other hand, bright metal objects are apt in the course of their gyrations to deal bad thumps to little heads and noses; so one must compromise on rubber—uninteresting, but safe—and on such bone, metal (perhaps aluminum), and unpainted wooden toys as can be trusted to give only very mild thumps, such as a baby had better take now and then rather than be deprived of all really interesting toys.

This is one of the many dilemmas in which the baby is lucky who has a grandma, or whose mamma can spare time to associate with him a great deal; for no end of things can be trusted in the little hands, that ache for everything in sight, if only vigilant fingers hover close, ready to ward gently off any dangerous movement. Sitting in one’s lap at the table, too, the baby may push and pull at many things not safe for him to lift; or he may be allowed to handle something safely tethered with a string. Certainly the wider liberty of holding and handling he can by any device be allowed, the better; the instinct is very strong, and wholly healthy, and the thwarting of normal instincts is not good for any one’s nerves or mind.

In sight, important changes were no longer to be looked for: except possibly in the matter of color sense, the baby’s seeing had now passed through all the stages of development, and needed only practice and mental growth to become as perfect as it would ever be. She was evidently still at work somewhat, especially in new places, in reducing confused appearances to order; but so much of this work was already done that more and more she could sit and enjoy the varied spectacle. More than once she spent half an hour gazing thus out of the window with quiet pleasure.

There were for the first time signs that she could distinguish between the sounds of voices. She looked and listened one day in the middle of the month, as if she noticed something unusual, when I was hoarse with a cold. Late in the month, as I read to her mother while she nursed the baby, singing softly to her (a frequent custom), the baby suddenly raised her head and looked curiously at me, evidently for the first time distinguishing the two voices as separate sounds.

Her mother and grandmother had been saying to her a great deal, “Papa!” hoping to hasten her understanding of the word. This same day she imitated the motion of the lips, and seemed to find the feeling very funny, for she laughed, and laughed whenever she heard the sound explosively uttered during the next fortnight; she stopped in the midst of crying to laugh at it. Her amusement had not the faintest connection with the meaning of the word; indeed, she chuckled aloud with even more gayety when I ejaculated “poo-poo!” or “boo-boo!” instead. It was something in the explosive labial sound that struck her as comical.

In this beginning of discrimination in articulate sounds, we see the root of the later understanding of speech. But it was by another road that the baby now began to move toward human communication: by the way, that is, of signs and inarticulate cries. One day when she was four and a half months old, she raised a strange little clamor on catching sight of her grandfather, as if on purpose to call his attention, and was satisfied when she got it; she began to hold out her arms of her own accord, instead of merely to meet ours, held out to her; and in the very last days of the fifth month she made a sound of request when she wished to be taken, a whimpering, coaxing sound, leaning and looking toward her mother, instead of the mere fretting sounds of desire, addressed to nobody, which she had made for weeks.

When I have spoken before of the baby’s “addressing” her little noises to us, I have not meant that there was really anything of language in them. Some expression of interest in our presence, some sort of social feeling, there must have been, but no more than in her kicking up her feet or chuckling at our attentions. These first asking sounds and motions, on the contrary, were beginnings of real language—not yet of human language, but of such as the baby shares with all the beasts and birds.

A sort of intelligence shared with the beasts and birds, too, appeared in these same closing days of the fifth month—what may be called “adaptive intelligence,” the use of means to an end—in the patient devices by which the baby manœuvred her toe into her mouth; but this was a sort of anticipation of a development that belonged really to the next month, and so I shall leave the account of it to the next.