Home v. Clinic

After six months at home, three-year-old Johnny Woods was last week behaving little better than his twin brother Jimmy, whom their father called a "mug." This was news because Johnny almost from birth had undergone special training at Manhattan's Medical Center whereas Jimmy had been allowed to develop like any ordinary child. As a result when the twins were sent home for good, "conditioned" Johnny was a fearless little acrobat with a personality far in advance of his years and "unconditioned"' Jimmy was just a plain laughing, crying, scary youngster (TIME, July 30). Last week Dr. Myrtle Byram McGraw, assistant director of the Normal Child Development Clinic where the Woods twins were under scientific control from their 20th day, explained: "Jimmy and Johnny have both, I think, lost out in their home environment and, while that is disappointing so far as these two particular children are concerned, it is theoretically encouraging. You can't take a child the first year up here and then throw him back and expect his experience to affect his entire life. Environment counts all of the time."

Last week Miss McGraw had a new pair of twins to display--Florie and Margie, 15 months old, born by caesarean section two months prematurely to a onetime domestic servant and an apartment house doorman. Like Jimmy, Margie has received only a child's ordinary training. As a result she is afraid to climb and jump, cannot yet walk or use a kiddy car. A double mastoid operation, from which she last week was recovering, has not noticeably impeded her development. Florie climbs and jumps as readily as Johnny used to. She has temporarily abandoned her kiddy car to learn how to roller-skate.

Professor Frederick Tilney, brain specialist who is overseeing the training of the twins, sees in the accomplishments of Florie and Margie, Johnny and Jimmy continuation of his observations on nerve growth. A baby is not born with a fully developed brain or with nerves fully developed to carry messages from the out-side world to the brain. As the brain and nerves ripen, the infant becomes able to learn more & more useful things.

Commented Dr. McGraw last week: "It doesn't make much difference what we do to the child during the first four or five months of life. . . . After that I would recommend intensive training and stimulation of those behavior patterns which are in a rapid period of development-- remaining careful, at the same time, to let up during the lulls.

"We have tended in the past, in trying to lay down principles to parents, to tell them that a child should or should not get freedom. So many controversial theories have gotten parents into a state of pandemonium. . . . You know the kind of bunk that's been handed out time and again.

"Let's look at this idea of freedom. I will permit a baby, which has just learned to reach for an object, to pull out and push in a bureau drawer as often as it wants to in order to develop its sensory experience. But to let your two-year-old child, who doesn't need that type of sensory experience, pull out and push in a bureau drawer just because it wants to, is downright damaging to his growth."

Having worked unremittingly with babies the past several years, Dr. McGraw last week left Manhattan for a Florida vacation among Yale's chimpanzees.

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