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One early and important symptom of trouble, says Greenspan, is the failure of mother or child to look at each other. Greenspan makes videotapes of such cases. Here is Amanda, age four months, who turns her head away and generally shows what Greenspan calls "an active avoidance of the human world." Small wonder. Amanda's mother was raising her alone and suffered bouts of deep depression. Greenspan and his therapists spent four months playing with Amanda and engaging her interest; the videotape taken at eight months shows the baby cheering her mother along. Says Greenspan, with some satisfaction: "She developed coping facilities stronger than those of her mother."
Psychologists talking about "environment" often mean primarily the psychological structure of the family, but the social and economic environment is hardly less important to a child's development. Fully 13.5 million children in the U.S. live below the official poverty line. Nearly 7.5 million children are currently on welfare. More than half a million babies are born every year to American teenagers.
The effects of such deprivation on infancy are hard to gauge scientifically, but Dr. Gerald Young of Manhattan's Mount Sinai Medical Center says flatly, "If you want to guess what a child will be like at age seven, look first to the socioeconomic background." This is not simply a matter of economic hardship or nutritional deficiency. Says Brown's Lipsitt: "The socioeconomic index is as powerful a predictor of later intellectual prowess as any variable we've got, but it doesn't operate in a vacuum. It is a representation of the way people live and relate toward each other, and the way they behave toward babies."
One interesting demonstration of this theory was undertaken more than a decade ago by a team of psychologists at the University of Wisconsin. Struck by the fact that many of the mentally retarded children in a Milwaukee slum had retarded mothers, they took 40 infants whose mothers had IQs of less than 75 and put 20 of them in special day care centers. From the age of three months on, the children began getting lessons in language and arithmetic as well as various other kinds of stimulation. By the time they reached school age, their average IQ was more than 100 (none was retarded); the 20 children who had received no special treatment had an average IQ of 85, and 60% were judged to be retarded.
The question of child rearing outside the home cuts across all classes. There are currently 4.1 million working women with children under the age of three, and one survey showed that nearly 70% of working women who have babies return to their job within four months. Overall, about 8 million of today's preschool children receive some form of day care (1 million in day care centers, 3.5 million in family day care homes and 3.5 million tended by relatives and baby sitters). If the