The
Infant as a Human Being
by
Herbert Ratner, M.D.
Adapted from a talk at a national seminar of the American
Montessori Society, June 14-16, 1963. The late great Dr.
Ratner was editor of Child and Family.
I think that at one point we all have
a hard time fully appreciating Dr. Montessori – this is
when she insists that her “method” begins for the child at
birth. As Americans we are prone to take a
technological approach to our children: we put them on the
assembly line of preschool education and expect to take
them off the line 18 years later with a baccalaureate. But
when Montessori thought and talked about the child, she
had in mind the infant born into a culture which accepted
and respected nature’s overall plan. In her culture the
baby had a 99.4 percent chance of being breastfed. When
Montessori was a young woman, the baby was born into a
loving human environment – the home. Today the child comes
forth in the coldness of the delivery room of the hospital
to be promptly shunted off to the hospital mass nursery –
which resembles a concentration camp for displaced
persons. The mass nursery was the invention of an
architect more interested in efficiency and an economic
usage of space than in the welfare of the newborn. It was
not the brainchild of a physician, since early in the
century physicians viewed mother and infant as an
inseparable couplet.
In this century of progress we have reduced
infant mortality and have eliminated or controlled many
bodily diseases. But as fast as we have progressed with
the physical growth of the child, we have retrogressed in
the far more important area of physic growth. Because of
our concentration on somatic medicine we now have a taller
and more bodily healthy population, but this gain has been
daily offset by the simultaneous production of more people
with mental illness and emotional problems. With a dim
realization that these problems have their root in
childhood, parents have gotten caught up in many movements
and activities that will “do something for the child.”
Unfortunately, most of these are programmed to permit
parents to get away from the home and away from the child.
I mention this not to criticize the
Montessori movement (I am, in fact, an ardent admirer of
Maria Montessori) but to point out the pitfalls which
movements like this face. In this age, much of our
motivation and energy leading to involvement in movements
and organizations stem from escapism from the obligations
of parenthood and from underlying anxieties over
responsibilities. Hopefully, some of these movements will
have a steadying influence and will restore a sufficiency
of mental health so that our children will not suffer from
the same shortcomings and anxieties as their parents. This
applies particularly to the Montessori movement, but only
to the extent that is recognizes the primacy and the
irreplaceability to the family in the life of the child,
and only to the extent that is does not restrict its
concept of Montessori to several scheduled hours of
exposure to Montessori materials five mornings a week.
I often see the disappointing results in
children when parents are no more than faddist enthusiasts
of Montessori, more interested in their new parental image
and stylish dedication to Montessori than they are in the
persistent giving of themselves to their children.
In your own preoccupation with the Montessori movement,
don’t allow yourself to view the child in other than a
proper perspective – the perspective of the total child.
Otherwise he will suffer the results of a Montessori
experience that did not take, and the Montessori movement
will be viewed as another one of those pretentious
programs rich in promise but poor in performance.
Accordingly, be sure that your interest in this
exceptionally worthwhile movement is based upon sound
foundations, and not, as so often the case, on an
unhealthy preoccupation with intellectual development.
Twenty or thirty years ago, when mothers
promenaded down the street with their baby carriages, they
asked one another, “What did your baby eat today?” (This
perhaps in reference to a six-week-old.) The answers went
something like this: “My baby now eats chicken!” with the
other responding exultantly, “My child eats steak!” To
these mothers the rapidity with which an infant could add
adult foods to the diet was the measure of maturity. Now,
I am afraid, when the Montessori mothers query one another
about the child’s development, the questions may take this
form: “How far along the alphabet is your child now?” or
“What words can your baby write?” Though intellectual
development is of tremendous importance, emotional
development is even more important. If your vision of
Montessori loses focus by lopsided emphasis on the
academic aspect, you are headed for trouble. Our greatest
problem today is the emotional immaturity and insecurity
of adults – difficulties which have their genesis in
childhood.
It is significant that many parents become
attracted to the Montessori movement because they are
having difficulties in being parents. Their insecurities
and anxieties concerning their capacity for unselfish love
of their children lead them to seek external signs proving
to the world that they do indeed love their children. Thus
the intensity with which they try to get the child into a
Montessori school.
I need not tell
you what a great person Dr. Montessori was. The question
is this: Are you willing to accept her teaching? Or do you
choose from her teaching only those items that have a
special appeal to you but disregard tenets which may be
central to her approach?
To me Montessori in many ways is greater than
Freud. She is the forerunner of the mental health movement
throughout the world, though mental hygienists have yet to
grasp her message.
In this country, we tend to look upon the
newborn as a slightly more complicated Thumbelina doll.
Our attention is taken up by the mechanics of keeping
babies dry, of getting food into their mouths, and of
getting them to sleep. We have gotten into the habit of
considering the baby’s sleep as the great liberator for
the parent. When the day comes that we have a deep-freeze
to accommodate a baby, there will be some who will be more
than happy to cache the child out of the way until he is
old enough to enter a Montessori classroom or
kindergarten.
It has been my professional experience that
getting the child off to sleep is one of the great
preoccupations of the American parent. Immature parents
seek the satisfaction of their own adult desires rather
than attending to the child’s needs. A mother may say, “I
don’t understand why my baby always gets up at 4 a.m. to
break into our sleep.” By drawing her out, you may
discover that she gets the child to bed at p.m. because
she wants a long, free evening to herself. Actually, most
of the time we permit ourselves to believe that what we
are doing is for the good of the child. Some candid
examination of motives, however, will quickly show that
for the most part what we do is more for our own benefit
than for the child’s.
For a while I flirted with the notion of
reading to you twenty to thirty pages of the secret of
childhood and commenting on it. This book contains
tremendous insights. Dr. Montessori’s overall
comprehension of the child made it possible for her to
assimilate much important work on the genesis of emotional
problems. The problem of mental illness in this country is
overwhelming. The fact is that of the millions of healthy
normal babies that nature turns over to us each year, one
out of ten will enter a mental institution sometime during
the course of his life. We have yet to fully grasp what
Montessori knew: that nature’s norms should be our guide
and that deviations from nature’s script get us in
trouble. We will never have enough psychiatrists,
paramedical help, nurses, clinics, and institutes to take
care of people’s illnesses. Our hope rests in such
movements as the natural childbirth associations, which
are trying to maintain natural deliveries for normal
cases, restricting pathological deliveries to pathological
cases, and La Leche League, which is helping mothers
rediscover the simplicity and the joys of breastfeeding.
The former have as their goal the delivery of a wide-awake
baby to the arms of a wide-awake mother, and the latter
has as its goal the initiation of a lasting bond between
them. Dr. Montessori is very eloquent upon the newborn
infant’s need to get into the mother’s loving arms and to
be kept out of the hands of doctors and nurses and spared
the inequities of hospital technologies.
The mental illness problem will only be
solved by parent’s growth as human beings. In the
parent-infant relationship it is the parents who need to
learn what they must do, how they must grow. The baby is
born knowing where he wants to go and how to grow and,
given half a chance, will gain the goal – nature is
resilient, and the child can accommodate to a certain
amount of bumbling on the part of his parents. But
adults-hopefully the maturing adults in process-have to
learn to become parents through the daily exercise of the
art of parenting. This learning centers on their total
dedication to the needs of an infant totally dependant on
them.
There seems to be a rule of nature. God is
going to exact a certain measure of time from you as a
parent. An old Jewish proverb goes something like
this: “If you don’t get up for your crying child when
young, you will be getting up for your crying child when
old.” This is to say that if you don’t want to give
yourself to the child when he needs you and is most
dependant on you, you will end up having to give time to
him when he is of an age to be happily self-reliant but
instead finds himself in difficulties he can’t cope with
by himself. There is a kind of justice he can’t
cope with by himself. There is a kind of justice built
into nature that cannot be avoided. When nature’s norms
are interfered with, she invariably retaliates.
The baby’s fundamental need –
precisely because he is a human being- is to be loved.
And love centers about a one-to-one relationship. This is
why babies don’t come in litters, but come one at a time.
But it takes a mature person to love a baby, because
love takes time, love takes patience, love takes
fortitude, love even requires a certain kind of humility:
to love another better than one’s self. The baby
needs time to be understood: he needs time in everything
he does. It is a basic Montessori principle that the
preschool child has to establish his own pace in doing
things so that everything has a beginning, a middle, and
an end.
The emotional framework in which the
child lives does more for him than the intellectual
framework. The emotional formation of the child centers
about those who are important to him. Here the mother is
the cardinal figure. It doesn’t make any
difference how competent the teacher is. If the child is
uncertain of the mother as the one most important person
in his life, he can’t function will. Similarly, a mother
has difficulty functioning well if she does not have the
security of knowing that her husband really cares for her
and appreciates her. Analogies are often the simplest way
of going from the known to the unknown. Perhaps the best
way to understand your child is to put yourself in the
infant’s place analogically by likening your feelings
toward your husband to your infant’s feelings toward you.
Do not do unto your child, what you do not want your
husband to do unto you. I don’t think most women could,
without crying, tolerate a husband who yelled at them. Yet
how often they yell at their children, how often their
faces register an expression of hatred.
Your happiness is going to come out of your
long span of parenthood. The latter years of life are just
as long as the early years of parenthood. And when you
enter those years, you will receive the same rewards you
gave your children, now adults, in their childhood. You
don’t receive of those rewards unless you gave of yourself
when your growing children needed you. For instance, you
can’t possibly make out well in life if you think of the
house as not belonging to the children as well as to
yourself, of the living room as not being for them but
only for you and your husband and adult guests. You cannot
think of your children as people who are constantly
threatening, imposing, encroaching on all of your material
possessions – your new lamp, your clean sheets, your clean
upholstery, your good dishes. You are much better off in
this relationship of love to think less about your rights
and more about your duties – as you would want your
husband to do in relation to you.
In The Secret of Childhood
Montessori’s notion about sleep and the child is just
beautiful, She describes cribs and playpens as prisons
with bars. She suggests that a bed for the child should
just be a little off the floor so that the preschool child
can climb into it when tired and out of it when rested.
This would be revolutionary in the American home. The
whole notion of this approach is ordered and dedicated to
the needs of the child. Dr. Montessori feels that
orderliness is built into the infant – an orderliness
that is connatural with nature’s intended prepared
environment, the mammalian mother. When the baby
has the urge to suck, there is a breast to suck on. When
the baby has hunger, milk comes out of the breast. When
the baby looks up from the breast, a smiling face shines
upon him. When the infant is cold, a pair of loving arms
envelops him with love. When wet, he is changed. When he
cries, somebody picks him up and comforts him. This is a
wonderful, orderly world. For every question of need,
there is a responsive answer. This natural orderliness
only ends up in chaos nowadays because, from the moment of
birth, the baby is presented with a disorderly world.
George Bernanos, the famous French
intellectual, said, “Hell is the absence of love.” I think
that the modern preschool child goes through much hell.
The baby starts life by being dedicated to the proposition
that he or she wants to grow up. More often than not the
parent does everything possible to prevent him. Yet
preventing the baby from growing up is hard work. Someone
once said, “It takes years of hard work to turn out a
juvenile delinquent.”
Nature goes out of her way to give
each human infant a private tutor. We go out of
our way to develop a litter situation: the mass nursery,
as if it were more appropriate for the newborn to be
raised in litters like kittens and puppies; the day-care
center for the older child. If we are not careful, the
Montessori system, under the guise of progress, will also
reach down to rob the struggling toddler of his private
tutor and place him in neutral, nondiscriminatory,
impartial but foreign, antipathetic environment of litter
life.
Yet a private tutor is essential to the
preschool child from infancy on. The mother has been
ordained by nature to be that tutor. She is the prime
educator. And her prime function is to teach her child how
to be loved and then how to love. The most important
educational need of the child is to feel himself worthy of
love and a worthy dispenser of love. If infants learn what
love is, they can go through life with sanity and
happiness.
Reprinted with permission. (Emphasis added).
A
tribute to Dr. Herbert Ratner http://www.lalecheleague.org/memorials/NBMarApr98p48.html
