To Test a Baby
THE child psychologist and the supervisor of a child placement agency had finished whatever business had drawn them together and were chatting a moment before they separated.
‘I’m having to send another baby down to Winfield,’ remarked the supervisor.
The psychologist looked her sympathy. It was an old grievance with them. In their town was a Salvation Army Home and Hospital to which unmarried mothers from over the state came to be confined. When one of these girls seemed of suspiciously low mentality, it: was the custom to give her an intelligence test. If her score was so low as to indicate that she would never be able to get along in the world, she was ‘sent down to Winfield’ — that is, to the state school for the feeble-minded. With her was sent her baby, on the assumption that it had of course inherited her mental inefficiency, and so might as well be institutionalized early as late. And since the children thus cared for invariably grew up according to prediction, the state felt that it was handling the matter very sensibly and scientifically.
But something within the supervisor and the psychologist was deeply offended by this summary disposal of a human being without giving him his chance. Between themselves, when they were not. on their professional dignity, they said it was plain wicked.
‘This case has bothered me more than usual,’ the supervisor continued. ‘Because he was sick when his mother went, we’ve had to keep him until he was six months old, and really he seems like a pretty good baby to me. He haunts me. I keep thinking about him when I’m supposed to be doing something else. And yet I know he has to go.’
The psychologist opened her mouth for her usual words of protest and condolence. But before she could say them she had one of the flashing ideas which occasionally shatter our habitual patterns of thought.; Dr. Arnold Gesell of Yale University had rather recently published a set of tests which he had standardized for measuring the mental development of infants and small children at different age levels. Why not see what this little waif would do on the tests?
The supervisor agreed to the experiment. She was genuinely troubled, and another day or two of boarding care would not bankrupt the agency. The psychologist went out to assemble the materials required for the test.
The next day a baby boy within twenty-four hours of confinement for life in an institution for the feeble-minded was given the tests which a scientist half across the continent believed would measure the mental progress an infant had made.
That event was important. It was important not only to the baby himself, bul. to child placement agencies everywhere and to all the thousands of couples who are suffering the emotional distress recently described on these pages in the anonymous article ‘We Adopt a Child.’ Beyond that, it was important for parents and society in general, because out of it there grew a ten-year experiment in comparing the developmental progress of an infant with his mental growth at later ages.
When she had completed the test, Dr. Edwina Cowan, Director of the Wichita Child Guidance Center, reported to Helen Gant of the Kansas Children’s Home and Service League that the baby had responded to the test stimuli in a way that showed perfectly normal development for a child of six months.
Mrs. Gant set her lips. Regulations or no regulations, small Davy was not going to Winfield. Not just yet, anyway.
After six months in a good boarding home he was tested on the twelve-month schedule. Again he displayed the normal development. By this time both the League and the Center were excited about him. Through another year and a half he was watched and tested, and always he kept right on making the progress which Dr. Gesell had found normal. Then he was placed in a substantial farm home which had become interested in him. Today he is a wholesome-looking boy of eleven, plugging sturdily through the sixth grade and out of school hours learning to operate the farm he will some day inherit. If he had been placed in the institution, this child, who is indistinguishable in his achievements from a million or so other farm youngsters, would in all probability be indistinguishable from the lumpish incompetents around him.
Under the impetus of the drama provided by this first case, the League established the policy of giving intelligence tests to all mothers whose babies came to it from the Home and Hospital for placing, and at the same time sending the babies themselves to the Child Guidance Center for a Gesell test. During the early years of this program, the workers at the Center and the League were often startled at the wide discrepancy between the intelligence level of the mothers and the developmental progress of their infants. Sometimes, to be sure, a thoroughly incompetent mother had a backward baby. But often the baby was normal or even superior.
Here, for instance, was a mother with a rating of D on the Army Alpha test. This is so low a score that the men who made it in the army were not trained for soldiers, but given routine menial jobs around camp. Her mental age was not over eleven. Yet her four-months-old son had made good normal development. At eleven months he showed better than normal progress. At twenty months, after adoption into a good home, he was maintaining a rate of developmental progress that characterized him as superior. On a recent test, when nearly four years old, he showed an I. Q. of 123.
This frequent wide divergence between the mother’s intelligence and the child’s development was startling enough, but as the work went on those connected with it began to be even more impressed with something else. The tests seemed to have predictive value. An infant who had made normal developmental progress at the age of four months, or even two, continued to make it all along the way — provided, of course, that he had an environment which gave him a chance to develop. Better than normal progress at that early age was followed by superiority at later stages. Less than normal progress then usually meant backwardness later on. And these results appeared to have no relation to the degree of the mother’s competence.
After a while Mrs. Gant began to accept the test as an answer to placement officers’ prayers. At first tentatively, and then more and more confidently, she began to place babies in foster homes on the basis of their own development instead of the social and vocational attainments of their parents and grandparents. When a couple who would be able to give their adopted child superior educational opportunities came to the League asking for a baby, she gave them one whom the tests showed to be making a better than average development. To another couple, whose home could offer the child as much affection and security but not so much opportunity for intellectual development, she gave a baby who was progressing just normally. The babies who made a poor showing went into boarding homes for observation and later tests.
The rules of the League provide for a probationary period of a year, during which case workers watch the adjustment of the child in the foster home. As the new program of placement got under way, the workers began to notice that the babies were ‘fitting’ their adoptive homes better than formerly. Under the old system, cultivated and intellectual couples had sometimes adopted babies with good ancestral background, expecting to send them to college and on into business or professional prominence, but later found them hardly able to get through elementary school.
This situation is, of course, as completely tragic as the committal of unfortunates like Davy to schools for the feeble-minded. To have showered love on and centred hopes in a disappointing child is a bitter experience for any couple. To grow up in a home where more is expected of him than he has the capacity to be is one of the cruelest situations any child can have to meet. This fundamental disparity happens sometimes with the parents’ own offspring, but all responsible placement agencies yearn to keep it from happening in foster homes, where the fitting of child to home is not an act of God. Elimination of this element of chance should be part of the compensation of adoption.
Five years ago the Center and the League felt it time to make a thorough survey of the new program. Accordingly, social workers and psychologists carried on together a study of fifty-one placements which had been made solely on the predictive value of the tests, with complete disregard of the mothers’ case histories.
In every case the child had continued to develop mentally in accordance with the rate he had shown in infancy. In every case the foster parents, no matter what their economic or intellectual standing, not only loved the child but were fully satisfied with him. And the children were a remarkably happy, welladjusted lot.
Results like these are impressive in any field of activity. The League immediately decided to accept no babies from any source for placement without first having them given the tests. To date, over two hundred children have been adopted on this basis. Some of the first ones are now nine or ten years old. All along the way their progress has been watched and tested, for the foster parents have become interested in the project and have cooperated enthusiastically. And always there has been an amazing correspondence between the rate of development made in infancy and in later stages.
In fact the workers at the League have become so convinced of the dependability of the tests that they have begun to use them as a way of checking on their wards’ environment. If a baby who at four months and later at eight months has made good or superior progress suddenly drops low at the twelve-month test, the supervisor has learned promptly to reëxamine his environment.
One youngster, for instance, had been coming along at a consistently advanced rate until he was two years old, when his developmental level suddenly dropped. Investigation showed that he had been for several months in a boarding home where discipline was so rigid and strict as to be almost military. Naturally the poor little mite was afraid of everything and everybody — and naturally his development had slowed down. When he was shifted to a new boarding home, he soon resumed his former rate of progress.
Now, admittedly two hundred may not be enough cases or ten years a sufficiently long period on which to make dogmatic statements or start laying down scientific laws. Much experimentation still needs to be done. But the uniformity of the results thus far achieved is certainly enough to give pause to everybody concerned with the placing, adopting, or rearing of children — which takes in most of us.
In spite of its present vogue, adoption is still so new a social custom that it usually constitutes a real emotional upheaval for those who undertake it. Although it is no experience to run into lightly, surely some of the anxiety and hesitance with which most couples approach it can be allayed without inviting frivolity. Foster parents who have much to offer a child in the way of cultural advantages should be able to rest quietly in the knowledge that only a superior baby will be given them. And it would be a great help during the first precious months of adjustment to their new estate if they could be free from the nagging little fear that after all the baby may not come up to their expectations.
Foster parents are not the only ones for whom the Gesell tests can be a real boon. At Wichita more and more women who have come to motherhood by the usual biological routes are bringing their babies and small children to the Center for testing. They do it partly out of curiosity to see if their Juniors and Mary Lous are as bright as they think, and partly because other women have told them that the tests are a big help in training and planning.
All the experts in child guidance are preaching that children must be treated according to their age. They are beginning to recognize that a large share of the small imps who drive their parents frantic by their general obstreperousness are simply bored.
A baby who has reached the developmental level of twelve months needs to be treated like a child a year old, no matter whether he happens to have been born eight or eighteen months ago. A three-year-old who is nearly five in his development will make life miserable for his parents if they persist in treating him like a three-year-old. By tantrums, incessant mischief, constant rebellion, or some other form of infantile depravity he will tell the world that he is bored stiff with his routine and learning materials. But, unfortunately, his world will not understand. It will merely be annoyed and worried by his conduct, and probably redouble its determination to keep him in his three-year-old place. Trouble — and serious trouble — is ahead for any family where that sort of situation begins to develop.
On the other hand Dr. Cowan, at least, is convinced that the very best way to help a child who is somewhat retarded is by giving him the experiences and play materials which can be utilized at the developmental stage where he happens to be. An attempt to do what nurserymen call ‘forcing’ works harm rather than good. It sets up tension and self-distrust in the child and is responsible for another whole train of family discords.
Either way it is of first importance to parents to know exactly what progress the child has made and to know it early, so that they can plan his program intelligently on the basis of his own capacity rather than their ambitions or social status.
It is too soon, perhaps, even to speculate about the still wider social uses which may be found for the tests. But it must be apparent that in the hands of competent psychologists they are a clinical instrument with immense potentialities.