Daniel N Stern - Diary Of A Baby: What Your Child Sees, Feels, And Experiences

Diary of a Baby

OTHER BOOKS BY DANIEL STERN

The First Relationship (1977)

The Interpersonal World of the Infant (1985)

The Motherhood Constellation (1995)

The Birth of a Mother (1998)

Copyright 1990, 1998 by Daniel Stern.

Published by Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016-8810.

Designed by Ellen Sue Levine

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stern, Daniel N.

Diary of a Baby / Daniel N. Stern

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-786-72307-2

1. Infant psychologyCase studies. 2. Child psychologyCase studies. I. Title.

BF719.574 1990

This book is dedicated to my wife, Nadia.

Contents

... also partly because it struck me, on my walk yesterday, that these moments of being of mine were scaffolding in the background: were the invisible and silent parts of my life as a child.

Virginia Woolf

T HIS book is the personal diary of a baby named Joey. It is a diary I have invented to answer the questions that we all pose about a babys inner life. What is going on in your babys mind when she is gazing at your face or looking at something as simple as a patch of sunshine on the wall? How does your baby feel when hes hungry? When hes fed? When hes sad? When youre playing face-to-face? How does he feel when hes separated from you?

But how can we determine the answers to these questions?

I have made up Joeys experiences and invented his voice, but not out of whole cloth. My insights are drawn from three sources: facts about infants based on extensive research, speculations based on those facts, and my own imagination. I will begin with the facts. What do we know about infancy and how do we know it?

Over the past three decades, there has been a revolution in the scientific observation of babies; in fact, we have more systematic observations on the first two years of life than on any other period in the entire life span. This revolution turned, in part, on our learning to ask the sorts of questions that babies could actually answer. For instance, even a newborn can turn his head from side to side in response to a stimulus. With this in mind, a good question for a researcher to pose might be, Can a four-day-old baby know his own mother by her smell? The question and its answer got yoked as follows. A breast pad, wet from his nursing mother, was placed on a pillow to the right side of the head of a baby several days old. A second wet breast pad, brought from another mother, was placed to the left side of his head. The baby turned his head to the right. When the pads were reversed, he turned to the left. He not only knew his own mothers smell, he preferred it, and he answered by turning his head.

Another way to elicit a response is through the sucking mechanism. Infants are, of course, good suckers. All babies suck in short bursts, then pause for a moment, then begin another burst, and so on. They can control the length of these bursts and pauses. To answer the question What do babies like to look at? we can place an electronically bugged nipple into a babys mouth and hook it up to a slide projector so that the baby can see the projection. A three-month-old baby quickly learns that each time she wants to see a new picture, she needs only to start to suck; and when she just wants to look at it, she pauses. The baby will turn over the slides at a rate that reflects her interest in each picture. From this, it is easy to know what babies find interesting to look at and what is boring to them.

The bugged nipple can also be hooked up to two audio-cassette machines. One has a recording of the mothers voice; the other, the voice of another woman saying the same words. In this setup, the baby will suck so that he can spend more time listening to his own mothers voice, thus answering the question Does a baby recognize his mothers voice? There are many other ways to measure a babys response to the myriad questions researchers want answered, including gazing, eye movements, leg kicks, heart rate, and so on, all of which are used in research today.

Television has also revolutionized our ability to observe babies and parents together. With television we can freeze a frame, review a gesture or facial expression many times over, and measure its duration exactly. As a research tool for exploring human behaviorespecially nonverbal interactionsit has opened up new worlds.

This, then, is where the facts come from. So far as possible, I have based Joeys diary on our current knowledge about infants. Some of this information comes from almost thirty years of my own research; some, from researchers and observers around the world. (At the end of this book is a highly selective bibliography of the principal research findings that inspired his work.)

Another part of this knowledge base comes from my personal contact with babies and parents over the last three decades. As a father, I have lived with five children. As a clinician, a psychiatrist specializing in the earliest years, I have observed and treated disturbances in the parent-infant relationship. This research and clinical experience is the trampoline from which my speculations have been launched.

What part of this diary, then, is pure imagination? That is hard to know. How much of what is imagined comes from experiences actually lived but have been reassembled? How much comes from vague memories of our own past? And how many of these inchoate memories are really just memories, and not a present part of the child still living in us? We as adults have many ways of viewing the world. Sometimes we need to be rational and logical to make sense of what is happening. Other times, such as when we listen to music, we need to rely more on intuitive, emotional responses and bodily feelings that resist being easily put into words. My assumption is that the baby views the world predominantly through feelings since he hasnt developed a more rational approach. But this feeling-way does not disappear with infancy. It remains with us, operating in the background, hardly noticed. It may move into the foreground when, for instance, we go to a concert or unexpectedly fall in love. This is why even the parts of Joeys story that are made up are still rooted in the reality of common human experience.