The biography of a baby

by Milicent Washburn Shinn

This remarkable advance in sign language comes well under our definition of intelligent action: it was not a stereotyped sign, already fixed in her mind in association with a certain wish, like holding out her arms to be taken, but a device of her own, to meet the special occasion.

Her increased power of communication was not the only way in which her mind showed itself more wide awake to other people. A rather uncomfortable phase of this development was timidity. In the first week of the month, she was frightened by some one who came in suddenly between her and her mother, in a strange house, and spoke abruptly, in a deep, unfamiliar voice; and after that she often cried or became uneasy when strange men took her, or came near her, especially if they were abrupt. She drew distinct lines, according to some principle of her own, and certain people were affably accepted at once, while others, no more terrific that we could see, made the little lip quiver every time they came near. This timidity toward people was not at all deeply fixed in her temperament, and though it lasted all this month, it was never very marked afterward.

Some indications of the dawn of affection also appeared now. The baby’s desire to touch our faces with her mouth and hands seemed to have a certain element of attachment in it. The touches were often soft and caressing, and they were bestowed only on her especial friends, or on one or two strangers that she had taken at once into notable favor. Once she leaned out of her baby carriage, calling and reaching to me, as if she wished to be taken; but when I came to her, she wanted only to get hold of me, to put her hands and mouth softly on my face.

Up to about the middle of the month, in spite of her daily exercises with her toe, the baby had not altogether annexed her legs to her conscious self and brought them under her orders. She still had to hold the foot forcibly with her hands all the time her toe was in her mouth, or it would have kicked away from her as if it was none of hers. It is likely, too, that she had scarcely any idea of those parts of her body which she could not see and did not often touch. Indeed, the psychologists tell us that we ourselves have a decidedly inferior bodily consciousness in such parts—say between the shoulder blades. Even her own head must have been mainly unknown territory to the baby still, in spite of the curiosity she had felt about it the month before. But now she discovered by a chance touch that she could investigate it with her hands, and proceeded at once to do so, with a serious face.

In the latter half of the month, she went a good deal farther toward getting a roughly complete knowledge and control of her body. She investigated her ear, her cheek, and the back and sides of her head, from time to time. She became quite expert in using legs and hands, head and mouth, together, in get getting hold of her toe. She sat alone longer and longer, and by the end of the month could have done so by the half hour, if she had not always upset herself in five minutes or so by turning and reaching about. She had become very free in bending, squirming, and changing her position when she lay on the floor, and early in the third week of the month she had turned clear over, from back to stomach, in reaching after something. She followed up the lesson at once, and soon was rolling over whenever she wished—at first having much ado to get her arm disentangled from under her, but managing it nicely before long.

It is possible she would have begun creep creeping at this time but for the impediment of her clothes. She did stumble once upon almost the right movement, in trying to get forward to something she wanted; but her feet and knees became entangled in her skirts, and she gave it up. A week later, she was put into short skirts, but by that time the ability to roll over had diverted her mind from creeping.

Babies must lose a great deal of their normal activity through clothes. They are retracing a stage of human history in which clothes had no part, and this new element must hamper the repetition immensely. Clothes they must wear—they do not live in tropic forests nor own hair coverings; but we ought to leave the little limbs as free as we can without risk from cold. A chance to roll about nude in a room that is safely warm is a great thing for a baby.

She did not again use any sign language as advanced as when she had asked to be put on the table; that incident was a sort of herald of a later stage of development. But in the latter part of the month her regular means of communication were decidedly better developed than in the first part. She would coax for a frolic by leaning forward with an urgent “Oo! oo!” and expressive movements of her body; but if she was asking instead for an object she wished, or to be taken into her mother’s arms, there were small but quite definite differences in tone, expression, and movement, so that we usually knew at once which she meant.

About a week before the end of the month a great step toward intercommunication by speech took place. We began to suspect that the baby knew her own name, she turned to look so often just after it had been spoken. To test it I stood behind her, and in an ordinary tone accosted her as Bobby, Tom, Kitten, Mary, Jacob, Baby, and all sorts of other names. Whenever I said Ruth, Toodles, or Toots, she turned and looked expectantly at me, but not at any other name. Now, Ruth is our baby’s proper name; so it was evident that she really did have some inkling of the sound that meant her.

Not that she could rise yet to any such abstract conception as that of a person or of a name. But she had learned that this sound was connected with interesting experiences—with frolics, and caresses, and trips outdoors, with relief from discomforts, with dinners, and all the other things that happened when people were attending to her. It was out of such a beginning as this that full understanding of articulate speech, in all its logical intricacy, was to develop.