It was the Germans who first thought baby life worth recording, and the most complete and scientific of all the records is a German one. The first record known was published in the last century by a Professor Tiedemann—a mere slip of an essay, long completely forgotten, but resuscitated about the middle of this century, translated into French (and lately into English), and used by all students of the subject. Some of its observations we must, with our present knowledge, set down as erroneous; but it is on the whole exact and valuable, and a remarkable thing for a man to have done more than a hundred years ago.
Perhaps Darwin, in 1840, was the next person to take notes of an infant’s development; but they were taken only incidentally to another study, and were not published for more than thirty years (partly in “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” 1873, partly in a magazine article in 1877). They are scanty but important. In the interval before they were published two or three small records had been published in Germany, and at least one paper, that of M. Taine, in France.
In 1881, the first edition of Professor Preyer’s “model record” was published, and before his death, in 1897, it had reached its third edition in Germany, and had been widely circulated in America in Mr. Brown’s excellent translation, “The Senses and the Will,” and “The Development of the Intellect.” It did more to stimulate and direct the study of infancy than any other publication. It has, however, the limitations that were to be expected from Professor Preyer’s special training as a physiologist, and is meagre on the side of mental, moral, and emotional development. Professor Sully’s “Extracts from a Father’s Diary,” published in part in 1881 and 1884 and fully in 1896, is richer on these sides, and also more readable.
Within the present decade, it is worth observing, the principal records have been American, not German, and have been written by women. Outside of America, only men, usually university professors, have made extended records. Professor Preyer and Professor Sully have both appealed in vain to their countrywomen to keep such records, holding up American women for emulation. My “Notes on the Development of a Child” were published in 1893 and 1899. In 1896 appeared Mrs. Hall’s “The First 500 Days of a Child’s Life,” a brief record, and confined to a short period, but a very good one, and perhaps the best for use as a guide by any one who wishes to keep a record and finds Preyer too technical. Mrs. Moore’s “Mental Development of a Child” is quite as much a psychological study as a record, but is based on full biographical notes; it will be more used by students than general readers. Mrs. Hogan’s “A Study of a Child,” 1898, is less scholarly than the others, but has a great deal of useful material; it does not begin at birth, however, but with the fourteenth month.
Perhaps I should say a word here as to the way in which I came to make a baby biography, for I am often asked how one should go to work at it. It was not done in my case for any scientific purpose, for I did not feel competent to make observations of scientific value. But I had for years desired an opportunity to see the wonderful unfolding of human powers out of the limp helplessness of the new-born baby; to watch this fascinating drama of evolution daily, minutely, and with an effort to understand it as far as I could, for my own pleasure and information. I scarcely know whence the suggestion had come; probably almost by inheritance, for my mother and grandmother had both been in somewhat notable degree observers of the development of babies’ minds. But, unlike them, I had the notebook habit from college and editorial days, and jotted things down as I watched, till quite unexpectedly I found myself in possession of a large mass of data.
A few days after my own notes began I obtained Professor Preyer’s record, and without it I should have found the earliest weeks quite unintelligible. For some months my notes were largely memoranda of the likenesses and differences between my niece’s development and that of Preyer’s boy, and I still think this is the best way for a new observer to get started. As time went on, I departed more and more from the lines of Preyer’s observations, and after the first year was little influenced by them. Later, I devoted a good deal of study to the notes, and tried to analyze their scientific results.
There is one question that I have been asked a hundred times about baby biography: “Doesn’t it do the children some harm? Doesn’t it make them nervous? Doesn’t it make them self-conscious?” At first this seemed to me an odd misapprehension—as if people supposed observing children meant doing something to them. But I have no doubt it could be so foolishly managed as to harm the child. There are thousands of parents who tell anecdotes about children before their faces every day in the year, and if such a parent turns child student it is hard to say what he may not do in the way of dissecting a child’s mind openly, questioning the little one about himself, and experimenting with his thoughts and feelings. But such observing is as worthless scientifically as it is bad for the child: the whole value of an observation is gone as soon as the phenomena observed lose simplicity and spontaneity. It should be unnecessary to say that no competent observer tampers with the child in any way. If Professor Preyer, observing the baby as he first grasps at objects, notes down the way in which he misdirects his inexpert little hands; if Mrs. Barus keeps record of her boy’s favorite playthings; if I sit by the window and catch with my pencil my niece’s prattle as she plays about below—and if these babies afterward turn out spoiled, the mischief must be credited to some other agency than the silent notebook.
Even direct experimenting on a child is not so bad as it sounds. When you show a baby his father’s photograph to see if he recognizes it, you are experimenting on him. The only difference between the child student’s experimenting and that which all the members of the family are doing all day with the baby, is that the student knows better what he is trying to find out, and that he writes it down.
Probably women are more skillful than men in quietly following the course of the child’s mind, even leading him to reveal himself without at all meddling with him or marring his simplicity. It has been so in a marked degree in the cases I have seen. But no one who has good judgment will allow himself to spoil both the child and his own observation; and any one who has not good judgment will find plenty of ways to spoil a child more potent than observing him.