For the boys of the fourth grade in a private New England day school, the big question was: Should they bother to invite the girls in the class to go along on their picnic? Finally, one boy produced the ultimate argument for the opposition. "All I know," said he, "is that Dr. Gesell says that the interest of boys at our age in the opposite sex is purely negative."
By invoking the name of Arnold Gesell, the boy was indulging in a practice that has become something of a national habit.
As senior biographer of the "normal" child, the white-haired, 75-year-old research consultant of the Gesell Institute of Child Development in New Haven, Conn, has now become so thoroughly entrenched as the parents' guide and counselor that some may well wonder how they ever managed to raise their children without him.
Gesell's books (800,000 copies in the U.S. alone) have thrown a bright light on what a child goes through when growing up. For those baffled by a baby's crying, Gesell is on hand to say that the baby is only acting his age. For parents disturbed by a child's fidgets or moroseness, he is ready with the assurance that the youngster may only be passing through a standard phase of development. Until now, such guidance has been reserved only for parents' with children under ten. This week, with the publication of Youth: the Years from Ten to Sixteen (Harper; $5.95), Dr. Gesell and his chief collaborators, Frances L. Ilg and Louise Bates Ames, bring the young American through adolescence to the brink of adulthood.
Wiggles & Patterns. What goes on inside the U.S. teenager, whose manners and morals seem to arouse such agonized comments? To find out, Gesell and his 13-man staff studied the boys and girls of 200 families living in or around New Haven. The youngsters, no delinquents, came from average middle-class or professional homes, were subject to no extraordinary pressures or handicaps beyond those involved in just growing up. In the institute's two rambling buildings, the Gesell staff gave them a battery of IQ, aptitude, physical and psychological tests. But Gesell relied mostly on interviews, not only with the children but with their parents, probed into everything—from the way a child might wriggle to his attitude towards God. The result: a readable and useful chronicle of the normal growing pains of what is too often considered America's problem child.