The biography of a baby

by Milicent Washburn Shinn

In all this we seem to see quite clearly the first steps in language making. The baby begins slowly to turn some of his commonest chattering sounds to special uses—not to carry thought to other people, but as mere exclamations to relieve his own mind. It was just twice within her first year that our baby turned to me when some one left the room, looked in my face, and said “Gông!” At all other times it was only murmured to herself. And most of the exclamations express a mood rather than a real idea; they are halfway between mere cries and words proper. Even when there is plainly an idea, as in “All gone,” it is a big, vague blur of an idea, slowly taking form in the little mind, as the blurs of light and dark slowly outlined themselves into objects before the little eyes months before.

At this point the modern baby catches the trick of helping himself to our words ready made, and (though many glimpses of primitive speech show through the whole process of learning to talk) he thus saves himself in the main the long task of developing them, through which his ancestors toiled.

In fact, the next word our baby took into use, a fortnight later, was lifted bodily from our speech: a reproving “Kha!” by which we tried to disgust her with the state of her fingers after they had been plunged into apple sauce or like matters. She quite understood what it referred to, though she did not share our objection to messy fingers, and thereafter surveyed her own complacently in such plight, and commented, “Kha!” And I may here run ahead so far as to say that this was the full list of her spoken words within the first year, except that in the next month she used an assenting “Ĕ!” which may have been “Yes;” and in the last days of the year she began to exclaim first “By!” then “My!” (corrupted from “By-by”) in saying farewell.

During this fortnight of swift language development the little one’s progress in movements had been slight. But towards the middle of the eleventh month she took a fresh start. One day she raised herself to her feet without anything to hold to; stood on tiptoe to peer over the seat of her high chair; forgot to hold to me, in her eagerness for a fruit I was peeling, and stood alone for a minute and a half at least, while I peeled it and fed it into her mouth; clambered into my lap (as I sat beside her on the floor), setting one little foot up first, laying hold of my shoulder, and tugging herself up with mighty efforts.

She chanced, too, on the art of shoving a chair before her for a step or two; and the next day, in her eagerness to reach a glass of water her father was bringing, she took one unconscious forward step, which ended in prompt collapse on the lawn. But neither of these beginnings was followed up by any real advance in learning to walk. During the rest of the month she edged about more freely, and in the last week pushed chairs before her a little again; and if we supported her and urged her forward, she would walk clumsily, much as a puppy will if you lead him by the fore paws; but she seemed to find the movement scarcely more natural than the puppy does, and always wanted soon to drop down to all-fours.

But climbing was a different matter. Here the baby seemed laid hold of by strong desire and instinct. The day after she climbed into my lap, she spent a long time zealously climbing up a doorstep and letting herself down backward from it. The day after that, she tackled the stairs and climbed two steps. Later in the day, I set her at the bottom of the stairs and moved slowly up before her. The little thing followed after (her mother’s arms close behind, of course; no one would be crazy enough to start a baby upstairs without such precaution), tugging from step to step, grunting with exertion now and then, and exclaiming with satisfaction at each step conquered; slipping back once or twice, but undiscouraged—fifteen steps to the landing, where she pulled to her feet by the stair-post, hesitated, made a motion to creep down head first, then crept, laughing, across the landing, and up five steps more, and shouted with triumph to find herself on the upper floor. She even looked with ambition at the garret stairs, and started towards them; but an open door tempted her aside to explore a room, and she forgot the stairs.

For the rest of the month the baby dropped to hands and knees and scrabbled joyously for the stairs at every chance of open door; she was not satisfied without going up several times daily; and having people who believed in letting her do things, and insuring her safety by vigilance while she did them, instead of by holding her back, she soon became expert and secure in mounting. She made assaults, too, on everything that towered up and looked in the least climbable—boxes, chairs, and all sorts of things, quite beyond her present powers. She seemed possessed by a sort of blind compulsion towards the upward movement.

What are we to make of this strong climbing impulse, this untaught skill in putting up the foot or knee and pulling the body up, while walking is still unnatural? I sought out every record I could find, and the indications are that our baby was not an exception; that as a rule climbing does come before walking, if a baby is left free to develop naturally. Of course in many cases walking is artificially hastened and climbing prevented.

Can we help suspecting a period, somewhere in the remote ages, when the baby’s ancestry dwelt amid the treetops, and learned to stand by balancing on one branch while they held by a higher one? when they edged along the branch, holding on above, but dropped to all-fours and crept when they came to the ground now and then to get from tree to tree? The whole history of the baby’s movements points to this: the strong arms and clinging hands, from birth; the intense impulse to pull up, even from the beginning of sitting; the way in which standing always begins, by laying hold above and pulling up; the slow and doubtful development of creeping, as if the ancestral creature had been almost purely a tree-dweller, with no period of free running on all-fours.

Tree-dwelling creatures, living on the dainties of the forest, fruit and nuts and eggs and birds, are better nourished than the ground-roaming tribes; but that is not half the story. The tree mothers cannot tuck their babies away in a lair and leave them; the tree babies cannot begin early to scramble about, like little cubs—their dwelling is too unsafe. There is nothing for it but the mother’s arms; the baby must be held, and carried, and protected longer than the earth babies. That was the handicap of the tree life, our ancestors might have thought—the helpless babies. But, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, it was that long, helpless babyhood that gave the brain its chance to grow and made us human.