(7 of 13)
How babies do any of the things they do is a matter of considerable complexity. Some theorists, like Thomas Verny, a Canadian psychiatrist who wrote The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, believe the infant begins learning behavior patterns while it is still in the uterus. Most experts, however, assume that the genes still carry messages that primitive humans once needed for survival. The so-called Moro reflex,* for example, which makes a newborn infant reach out its arms in a desperate grasping motion whenever it feels itself falling, implies some monkey-like existence at the dawn of time. Says Lewis Lipsitt, director of the Child Study Center at Brown and a pioneer in research on babies: "The human infant is extremely well coordinated and put together for accomplishing the tasks of infancy. These are: sustenance, maintaining contact with other people, and defending itself against noxious stimulation."
One of the oddest elements in their development is that infants soon lose many of the skills they had at birth. A newborn baby that is held upright on a table is nearly able to walk while suspended; immersed in a tub of water, it makes a fairly impressive try at swimming. Those abilities deteriorate within a few months. The same process seems to occur with intellectual skills that are not used. Psychologists Janet Werker of Dalhousie University in Halifax, N.S., and Richard Tees of the University of British Columbia have shown that babies of six to eight months can distinguish sounds that are not used in their native language, but they have much greater difficulty by the age of twelve months. Japanese babies, for example, have no trouble with the "ell" sound that their parents find difficult.
Most experts now think a baby is born with a number of reflexes that are gradually replaced by the "cortical behavior" dictated from the cortex of its rapidly developing brain. Brown's Lipsitt believes that a period of "disarray" during the course of this transition may be an important element in the "crib deaths" that can mysteriously strike during the first year. The struggle to escape from accidental smothering in bedclothes, known as the "respiratory occlusion reflex," is automatic at birth but then needs to be learned. Says Lipsitt: "The peak of 'disarray' is right at the point when crib death is most likely to occur, as if the baby doesn't know whether to be reflexive or cognitive. Suppose a child gets into a compromising situation where it has lost the reflex and has not acquired the learned behavior that has to come in to supplant the lost reflex." Lipsitt hopes to devise a specific test that will pinpoint those few children who may be in jeopardy.
Every test for every kind of trouble implies that there is a "normal" time for a baby to demonstrate various abilities. If it does not sit up by six or seven months or stand by nine or ten, a pediatrician may start neurological testing. The disciples of Yale's Arnold Gesell have applied this approach to all phases of childhood ("He wanders from home and gets lost at four," says the latest edition of the Gesell Institute's Child