What Do Babies Know?

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nurturing mother is as important as psychiatrists say, hired substitutes may seem a poor alternative, but most psychological researchers reject any such conclusion. All a baby basically needs, they say, is at least someone who is consistently there and who really cares. All depends, obviously, on the quality of the day care—and of the home. In the case of the Milwaukee experiment with the potentially retarded, day care was a rescue service. But in one typical Maryland county, 788 regulated day care facilities have room for only 8,560 of the 65,000 children under 14 who have working mothers.

How good the average day care is remains something of a guess. Bernice Weissbourd, who founded the Chicago-based Family Focus groups to provide support and advice for new parents, argues that any day care service that has more than three infants per adult (and that includes most) is inadequate. "Too often," she warns, "the parents' main questions are simply how close to home is it and how much does it cost." But of day care as such, Cornell Psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner says categorically, "There is no hard evidence that day care has a negative effect."

Whatever the difficulties, the overwhelming majority of parents want very much to do the best for their children, if only they can be sure what that best is, and that is anything but certain. Most experts say the need is great. "Not more than one child in ten gets off to as good a start as he could," says Burton White, author of The First Three Years of Life. Harvard's Kagan, on the other hand, urges parents to provide "a nurturant environment" and declares, "It's easy. Oh, it's easy. There's not a lot of witchcraft here."

Important changes come so slowly that they are taken for granted. Children's sheets used to be all white; now they are explosions of color. The mobile over the crib, which first seemed arty and pretentious, has become almost a basic piece of furniture. The backpacks that were once associated with Indian women carrying papooses are now sold everywhere, not only as a convenience for mothers but as an opportunity for the baby to get out of the house and see the world.

Thus the old keeps becoming the new. Much of what modern research is so elaborately documenting is what parents have always known—whether from instinct or from common sense or from the teachings of their own parents—that babies need and respond to love, attention, stimulation, education, in perhaps roughly that order. The research documents not only the importance of such needs but the damage that can occur when they go unanswered. Yet even these blessings of the latest orthodoxy can be overdone. "We are learning that everything will have an impact on an infant, but we still need to know exactly what happens," cautions Psychologist Rose Caron of George Washington University's Infant Research Laboratory in Silver Spring, Md. "It's conceivable that a child's competency might be diminished because of too much early stimulation."

"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself," cried Walt Whitman. The creation of a baby is full of paradoxes and illogicalities. The cost of raising a child to 18, approaching $100,000 in the U.S., according to one estimate, would deter any sensible