What Do Babies Know?

By Otto Friedrich

COVER STORY

What Do Babies Know?

More than many realize, and much earlier, according to new research

Fantastic!" says Michael Lewis, a small, spry man with a gray-flecked beard. "This is great!"

What inspires such glee in Lewis is that two small and curly-haired sisters named Danielle and Stacy, ages twelve and 14 months, are starting to cry. The sound is heartrending, but not to Lewis.

"Exactly what we expected," he says cheerily as the girls' parents arrive to comfort them. The wailing soon subsides. Lewis, 46, is not a sadistic Scrooge; on the contrary, he is an eminent and kind-hearted psychologist who presides over the Institute for the Study of Child Development at Rutgers Medical School in New Brunswick, NJ. His laboratory is a friendly place filled with dolls and Teddy bears and jigsaw puzzles; blue-red-and-yellow rainbows streak across the walls. Along one of those walls runs a ten-foot-long two-way mirror so that Lewis can study children unobserved and record their activities on two videotape cameras.

Danielle's parents had adopted Stacy. Lewis wanted to observe how two sisters of similar age and upbringing, but totally different genes, would interact with their parents. All four started by playing with toys and puzzles in front of Lewis' mirror. The parents left, first individually, then together. The girls resorted to playing with each other. Then a stranger entered, and that seemed to make the girls more sharply aware of their parents' absence and their own aloneness--hence the outburst of tears. But why is that "great" or "fantastic"? "We're trying to determine exactly what normal behavior is," says Lewis, who sees the large in the small, "in this case the child's developing sense of self, the sense that it is separate from other people."

In a 17th century brick building on Paris' Boulevard de Port-Royal, once the abbey where the Mathematician Blaise Pascal underwent religious conversion, a quite different kind of experiment is taking place. Into a small room of the Baudelocque Maternity Hospital marches a nurse bearing a tiny, wrinkled infant named Gery. He is four days old and weighs 6 lbs. 6 oz. The nurse carefully deposits Gery in a waist-high steel bassinet that stands next to a computer. The computer is attached to an empty nipple. The question to be tested: Exactly what sounds can young Gery recognize?

The nurse pops the nipple into Gery's mouth and then turns on a nearby loudspeaker. A recorded male voice begins to recite a random series of similar syllables: "Bee, see, lee, see, mee, lee, bee, see, lee, mee." Gery's infant fingers clutch at the orange base of the nipple. Whenever he hears a new sound he sucks harder, and his heart beats faster. When he gets used to these sounds, his attention fades, and his sucking slows down. The computer tirelessly counts the number of sucks per minute.

"Da," the loudspeaker suddenly says. Gery sucks harder, then begins to cry. He is hungry, and the empty nipple brings him no food. The nurse comforts him. Even at the age of four days, the lessons of life can be hard.

All across the U.S., all over the world, medical and behavioral experiments like these are under way. Each by itself is a small and seemingly inconsequential affair; the results are sometimes inconclusive, sometimes obvious. But taken all together, they represent an enormous research campaign aimed at solving one of the most fundamental and most fascinating riddles of human life: What do newborn children know when they emerge into this world? And how do they begin organizing and using that knowledge during the first years of life to make their way toward the mysterious future?

The basic answer, which is repeatedly being demonstrated in myriad new ways: babies know a lot more than most people used to think. They see more, hear more, understand more, and they are genetically prewired to make friends with any adult who cares for them. The implications of this research challenge some of the standard beliefs on how children should be reared, how they should be educated, and what they are capable of becoming as they grow up. Yale Psychology Professor William Kessen, who has been studying infants for more than 30 years, says in admiration of the newborn baby's zestful approach to life, "He's eating up the world." Harvard Psychology Professor Jerome Kagan, another pioneer, offers only one caveat about the new research: "Don't frighten parents! The baby is a friendly computer!"

Many parents do get frightened, of course, particularly when a flood of books and articles keeps telling them what to do and not to do--and above all not to get frightened. The current discoveries about how much a baby sees and hears and knows at the very moment of birth make the parental responsibility seem even more formidable. Most important, in a way, is that these findings are changing the way people actually see their own children, changing how they talk to them, what they expect of them. And these slow and almost imperceptible transformations can hardly help altering, in subtle and equally imperceptible ways, the babies themselves, and thus the adults they will some day become.

The traditional view of infancy was that of Shakespeare, who described the helpless newborn as "mewling and puking in the nurse's arms." Nearly a century later, John Locke proclaimed it as self-evident that the infant's mind was a tabula rasa, or blank tablet, waiting to be written upon. William James prided himself on more scientific observations but wrote in The Principles of Psychology (1891) that the infant is so "assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin and entrails at once" that he views the surrounding world as "one great blooming, buzzing confusion." As recently as 1964, a medical textbook reported not only that the average newborn could not fix its eyes or respond to sound but that "consciousness, as we think of it, probably does not exist in the infant."

Such views have been increasingly re-examined and revised during the past two decades, and this research has now grown into a substantial industry. From the Infant Laboratory at M.I.T. to the University of Texas' new Children's Research Center to U.C.L.A.'s Child Study Laboratory, there is hardly a major university without teams of researchers poking and prodding babies. The number of studies of infant cognition has tripled in the past five years, according to Psychologist Richard Held of M.I.T. A conference of experts in Austin last year heard more than 200 research papers ranging from "Sleep-Wake Transitions and Infant Temperament" to "Right-Left Asymmetries of Neurological Functions in the Newborn Infants." These multitudinous studies do not go unchallenged: researchers in various disciplines fight for their own specialties, psychiatrists differ sharply in their views from neurologists, judgments are often subjective, and babies themselves are as different as snowflakes.

The search for data is being steadily pushed back from childhood to earliest infancy and even before birth. One French obstetrician, for example, inserted a hydrophone into the uterus of a woman about to give birth and tape-recorded what the fetus could hear: the mother's loudly thumping heartbeat, a variety of whooshing sounds, the muffled but distinguishable voices of the mother and her male doctor, and, from a distance, the clearly identifiable strains of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

The obvious obstacle that long hindered scientific research on babies was that they could not talk,* could not tell what they saw or thought; the consequence was a widespread belief that they saw little and thought less. But that belief was based primarily on adults' dim recollections of their past. As early as the 1950s, a few psychologists were searching for laboratory methods to discover what babies could learn. Case Western Reserve Psychologist Robert Fantz made an important breakthrough in 1958 by demonstrating that babies' fascination with novelty could be turned into a form of silent speech. Specifically, Fantz watched infants move their eyes when he showed them two different objects; he carefully measured what they looked at and for how long. Given a choice, he showed, babies will look at a checkerboard surface rather than a plain one, a bulls-eye target rather than stripes, and in general they prefer the complex to the simple. Says Rutgers' Michael Lewis: "Out of such elementary observations, monstrously important consequences grew."

Once the basic approach was discovered, a whole world of previously untried research opened up; new technology made it possible to devise tests that would have been unimaginable a generation earlier. At the most rudimentary level, the videotape machine enables a psychologist to record a baby's wriggling and demonstrate that it often moves in rhythm with its mother's voice. At the most complex levels, surgeons at Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago can diagnose prenatal hydrocephalus (a brain-damaging excess of cerebrospinal fluid) in a fetus, then introduce a plastic tube into the mother's uterus and into the fetus' head to drain off the surplus fluid inside its brain. Guiding many of these technological innovations is the ubiquitous computer, which can synthesize a mother's voice as easily as it can measure eye movements or count the times that young Gery sucks on his nipple.

The first area to attract a number of researchers was the newborn baby's senses, which were once thought to represent little more than hunger to be fed. Systematic testing soon showed that babies not only perceive a good deal but have distinct preferences in everything. An Israeli neurophysiologist, Jacob Steiner, found that a baby as young as twelve hours old, which has never tasted even its mother's milk, will gurgle with satisfaction when a drop of sugar-water is placed on its tongue and grimace at a drop of lemon juice. More mysteriously, a newborn will smile beatifically when a piece of cotton impregnated with banana essence is waved under its nose, and it will protest at the smell of rotten eggs. Other infant prejudices: vanilla (good), shrimp (bad).

The baby emerges from the darkness of the womb with a rudimentary sense of vision --it would be rated about 20/500, or "legally blind," as one expert puts it, but eyesight develops rapidly. Newborns start by looking at the edges of things, exploring. Even when the lights are turned out, as infra-red cameras show, an infant's eyes open wide to carry on its investigation of its surroundings. At eight weeks, it can differentiate between shapes of objects as well as colors (generally preferring red, then blue); at three months, it begins to develop stereoscopic vision.

Testing such perceptions can be complicated. At M.I.T.'s Infant Laboratory, for example, University of Tokyo Graduate Student Shinsuke Shimojo has programmed a computer to check whether seven-month-old Whitney Warren can differentiate between a straight bar and a slightly indented bar. The computer makes the indented portion of the second bar move slightly. If Whitney can see the indentation, he will see its movement, and Shimojo, crouching behind the computer screen, can see his eyes move. Most babies spot the movement easily.

Despite their esoteric quality, such experiments can have an immediate practical value: some infants suffer from eye ailments, such as cataracts, severe astigmatism and strabismus, which benefit from treatment much earlier than would once have been possible. No less important, the new research has demonstrated that an impairment of infant vision can damage those parts of the rapidly growing brain that rely on visual information. That brain damage can be permanent unless the eye impairment is treated early.

Unlike the eyes, the baby's ears have been functioning even before birth, and the newborn arrives with a whole set of auditory reactions. As early as the 1960s, tests indicated that babies go to sleep faster to the recorded sound of a human heartbeat or any similarly rhythmic sound. More recent studies indicate that by the time they are born, babies already prefer female voices; within a few weeks, they recognize the sound of their mother's speech.

Many mothers believe they can understand different kinds of crying by their babies (a controlled experiment in 1973 showed they could not), and they believe even more strongly that their babies can understand a parent's murmurings. And perhaps they can. Though children do not ordinarily say anything very elaborate before the age of one year, Psychologist Peter Eimas of Brown University has demonstrated that infants as young as one month can differentiate between sounds in virtually any language. They also have a "very sophisticated" ability to organize sounds into various categories. "A baby already knows which sounds communicate," says Eimas. "I've never heard a baby imitate the sound of a refrigerator, for example. So a child can put all of his energy into learning how to use the rules of the language."

Pursuing the origins of language back into earliest babyhood is an interesting approach to understanding the infant intellect. No less so is the discovery that this intellect is at work long before any language is available as a tool. The key element in that discovery was the baby's desire to imitate its mother's facial movements. Jean Piaget, the celebrated Swiss psychologist who pioneered in this field with extended studies of his own three children, declared that such imitations began only at about eight to twelve months. Earlier than that, he reasoned, the baby could not understand that its own face was similar to that of its mother.

Olga Maratos, a Greek student who was testing seven-week-old infants for her doctorate, went to Piaget's house one snowy day early in 1973 to tell him of her progress. "Do you remember what I am doing?" she said. "I am sticking out my tongue at the babies, and do you know what they are doing?" "You may tell me," Piaget murmured. "They are sticking out their tongues right back at me! What do you think of that?"

The venerable professor puffed on his pipe for a moment as he contemplated the challenge to his theory. "I think that's very rude," he said.

Maratos' thesis was never published, so the credit for the discovery went mainly to two young psychologists who now teach at the University of Washington, Andrew Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore. Their study, published in 1977, showed that babies only twelve days old could imitate an adult sticking out a tongue. Meltzoff and Moore demonstrated that if a pacifier in the baby's mouth prevented the infant from imitating the adult, it would remember what it wanted to do until the pacifier was removed; then the baby would promptly stick out its tongue.

That first study by Meltzoff and Moore aroused considerable skepticism, so they repeated and elaborated it in 1981, eliminating all uncertainties and using still younger children. "We had one baby 42 minutes old, with blood still on its hair," recalls Meltzoff. "We washed it and tested it. We found that even newborns could imitate adults."

These experiments demonstrated the infant's very early capacity for what psychologists call "intermodal perception"--that is, to combine the brain's perceptions of two different activities, in this case vision and muscular action, which is virtually the first form of thinking. Says Yale's Kessen: "The past 15 to 20 years have demonstrated that the child has a mind. The next several years will be used to find out how it works."

Meltzoff pursued his exploration of intermodal perception by a different test of vision and touch. He gave ordinary pacifiers to a group of month-old babies and pacifiers with bumps on them to another group. He then had the babies look at models of the two kinds of nipples. The result, says Meltzoff, was that "they would look at the ones they had felt." Now, with Speech Professor Patricia Kuhl, he has extended those tests to language. The researchers showed infants two films of faces saying "ahh" and "eee," then placed between the two pictures a loudspeaker that could make either sound. The babies invariably looked toward the picture that fit the sound. "This means that babies can detect the relationship between mouth movements and the sounds they hear," says Meltzoff. "Essentially, babies are lip readers."

As they begin to develop this rudimentary capacity for thinking, babies develop an important ability to recognize categories. This was once thought to require language--how can the unnameable be identified?--but babies apparently can organize perceptions without a word. Psychologist Elizabeth Spelke of the University of Pennsylvania showed four-month-old babies a pair of films in which two toys bounced around on a surface in different ways, each with a corresponding sound track. She then played one sound track, and the babies were able to match the correct film to its sound. From the babies' "highly differentiated ability" to decide what goes with what, Spelke went on to deduce that children are born with an innate ability to divide their experiences into categories. Says she: "Obviously, in order to make sense of anything that you're confronted with, you have to bring to bear certain conceptions about the world. Our hope is that we'll learn something about what those initial conceptions are."

It is a puzzle, for babies repeatedly demonstrate a variety of skills and actions that seem to have no basis in their previous experience. Examples:

> Bradley Feige, age 11 1/2 months, is sitting on a glass table at U.C.L.A.'s Child Study Laboratory. "Come here, Bradley, come here," his mother coaxes from the other side of the table, about six feet away. At her end, the cloth material under the glass top suddenly drops away to create the illusion that Bradley may plunge several feet if he does what his mother asks. At eight months, and again at ten months, Bradley ignored the illusion of peril and crawled across the table. Now he refuses to budge past the illusionary end of the table, not even when his mother holds out a toy as a lure. "We know that this response is not related to the experiences they've had," says Psychologist Nancy Rader, "but we've found that it relates to the age at which the baby starts crawling, and we're trying to find out why."

> At Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies, infants as young as two weeks were confronted with a cube (or sometimes only the shadow of a cube) that began moving slowly toward them. When it seemed about to hit them, they showed what psychologists call "a strong avoidance-reaction pattern." They turned aside and squirmed and tried to avoid being struck, though they had no previous experience that would make them think that the approaching object would hit them. When such a cube or its shadow approached the babies on an angled path that would miss them, however, the babies followed its motion with their eyes but showed no sign of anxiety. "The consummate skill of these infants in predicting the path of the moving object is astonishing," says Psychologist Jane Flannery Jackson, "and their evident wish to avoid objects on a collision course is even more so."

> At the University of Edinburgh, T.G.R. Bower and his associates have been conducting about 1,000 experiments a year on various infant abilities. One of their most startling claims is that babies can tell the gender of other infants they are looking at, and they prefer to look at those of their own sex. Bower made films of an infant boy and girl making various movements, and then deleted from the film a11 apparent signs of gender and even swapped their clothes. Some adult viewers had difficulty telling them apart, but something about the way the filmed infants moved enabled a group of 13-month-old children to distinguish the boy from the girl. Bower is still trying to figure out how they do that.

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 Behavior. "He demands to ride his bicycle in the street at eight").

Most current advice givers urge anxious parents not to take such standardization too seriously. Pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton (see box), who is publishing next month a revision of his 1969 bestseller, Infants and Mothers, begins by declaring: "There are as many individual variations in newborn patterns as there are infants." Still, though a child's development during its first year is far slower than that of a monkey or even an elephant, it is nonetheless so dramatic--from lying flat on its back to the first creeping across the floor to the first faltering steps around the corner of the kitchen table--that scientists persist in trying to pinpoint when and how it learns each new accomplishment.

Two months, eight months and twelve months seem to mark major periods of change: in brain developments, in various skills and perceptions, in sociability. At about two months, for example, the baby is awake much longer than it was, it smiles a lot and stares with fascination at a new discovery: its own hand. At eight months, the infant is acquiring the important sense of its separate identity, and even an understanding of what Piaget called "object permanence," the realization that an object hidden from sight is still there. It begins to develop fears of strangers and of separation from its parents. At twelve months, the golden age, the baby has begun to walk and talk, and knows that the whole world awaits. Sometimes, clinging to a chair, waving a spoon in a fist, the one year old will throw back its head and crow in sheer delight.

These physical and social achievements have long been obvious: any mother can see them in her own children. What the new research demonstrates is that babies' mental growth can be as early and as striking as the rest of its development. Robert Cooper, a psychologist with Southwest Texas State University, is even testing a group of ten- to twelve-month-old children on their ability to recognize different numbers. They can master up to four, but he adds that "beyond four, there's some controversy." By showing his little subjects various groups of objects, Cooper demonstrates that they can tell the difference between three and five, he says, though the difference between four and five sometimes baffles them.

The idea that infants can start acquiring an education has tempted ambitious parents for centuries. At the age of three, John Stuart Mill learned Greek, and Mozart was playing the harpsichord. Both were taught by their hard-driving fathers. Today, New York City's fashionable nursery schools not only interview two year olds (and charge their anxious parents $1,200 a year for two mornings of schooling a week), but they also report applications outrunning openings by as much as 5 to 1.

The vogue is spreading. Gymboree, a franchise operation that started seven years ago in San Mateo, Calif., now has 61 outposts operating in 14 states that provide educational play for about 10,000 children. "Learning to read begins at birth," says one of Gymboree's brochures, but the $4 classes are mainly physical, ranging from "wee workouts" for beginners up to "gymgrad" for tots as old as four. "We've tried to create a 'yes' environment for the children, to place them in a setting they can master," says Gymboree's founder, Joan Barnes, a former dance teacher.

More strictly pedagogic is a Philadelphia organization called the Better Baby Institute, which offers a training course to enable mothers to "multiply their baby's intelligence." Specifically, the school claims that parents can learn in one week of intense instruction (for a fee of $500) how to teach their infants to swim, to read, to do math, to speak foreign languages and to play the violin at the age of two. You can't make it to Philadelphia? "Better Baby Video," a California-based spinoff, can provide the same lessons in a weeklong course offered primarily in West Coast cities. Some critics believe that a11 this mainly makes babies learn a few skills by rote, but it is difficult to obtain any scientific assessment of the five-year-old institute.

Many of these ventures in infant education are fueled by eager parents who will try anything to give their children a head start. Similar experiments are arousing interest in those who work among the poor. Dr. Joseph Sparling, for example, has developed and published a series of 100 educational games at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. These games, which range from specific subjects like language development to vague concerns like self-image, have been tried out with some success over the past five years in a federally funded program called Project Care. Researchers use the games both in day care centers and in weekly visits to children's homes. They report that the children get "significantly" higher intelligence-test scores at the age of one year than children in a control group who are not exposed to the games.

If nothing else, the push toward earlier education gives infants a valuable chance at making friends. Says Psychologist Colwyn Trevarthen of the University of Edinburgh: "They really have this intrinsic social capacity, and that's what human beings have evolved for, just as giraffes have evolved for eating high leaves."

But is early education itself really desirable? Does the discovery that a young child can absorb large quantities of knowledge require that it be stuffed like a Strasbourg goose? There were social reasons for launching Project Head Start in the 1960s to get poor children into preschool programs. Most psychologists engaged in the new research, however, are strongly opposed to any formal schooling before the age of three or four, even if the child is capable of it. "We know that babies are coming into the world with a lot more sophisticated skills than we had previously thought, but I do not think reading, writing and arithmetic should be in their curriculum," says Psychologist Tiffany Field of the University of Miami School of Medicine. Warns Child Psychiatrist Robert Harmon, director of the Infant Psychiatry Clinic at the University of Colorado School of Medicine: "I think you're going to get children burned out on learning." And University of Denver Psychologist Kurt Fischer says of the baby's first year: "Don't worry about teaching as much as providing a rich and emotionally supportive atmosphere."

As Fischer's statement indicates, much of the new research emphasizes the extreme importance of the infant's relationship with its mother. (And/or its father, and/or what the linguistically liberated call the "caregiver.") She must not only feed it, and love it, but endlessly talk to it, play games with it, show it what is happening in the world. Rutgers' Lewis has tested 100 babies for mental development at three months and recorded their mothers' response to the infants' signs of distress. He was hardly surprised to find that those who had been more warmly cared for had learned more by the time they were retested at the age of one year. This kind of nurturing is essential to both emotional and intellectual growth; indeed, the two are inseparable. "The baby who doesn't smile may be giving us a more reliable indicator than cognitive tests," says Psychiatrist Eleanor Galenson of Manhattan's Mount Sinai Medical Center.

The baby's smile is also a kind of judgment on the care that its mother has been providing. "All these new data about how early the baby can distinguish things should upgrade motherhood, restore some prestige to it," says Dr. Benjamin Spock, 80, who taught a benign form of child rearing to a whole generation of Americans. "Motherhood has had an ever reduced amount of importance placed on it in our strange, overly intellectualized, overly scientific society."

According to traditional wisdom, all mothers know instinctively how to rear their children, but unfortunately that is not always true. Indeed, the instinct has been vehemently denied by Elisabeth Badinter, the French philosophy professor who wrote Mother Love: Myth and Reality. But even if a mother's nurturing is an instinct, it requires some experience as well, and if the ability is entirely a learned trait, it is sometimes none too well learned. To check on how consciously mothers interact with their babies, Psychiatrist Daniel Stern of the Cornell University Medical Center has been observing nearly 100 mothers playing with infants eight to twelve months old. "Whenever we notice that the baby has put on an emotional expression that the mother has seen, we look at how she responded to it," says Stern. "Then we ask her why she did it, what she thought the baby was feeling, what she expected to accomplish, and whether she knew what she was doing at the time." His preliminary findings: about one-third of the mothers were fully aware of what Stern calls the attunement with their infants, another third were quite unaware of it, and the rest were essentially unaware but could recall it when it was pointed out to them.

This extremely important emotional interplay, often described as "bonding," is a combination of love and play, but it is now seen as something else, a kind of wordless dialogue. The baby not only understands what the mother is communicating, or not communicating, but it is trying to tell her things, if she will only listen. Says Dr. Bennett Leventhal of the University of Chicago's Child Psychiatry Clinic: "We now know that babies send messages very early. In their first year of life, they are good students. They are also very good teachers, but they have to have someone to interact with them. There are sometimes very competent babies with very incompetent parents."

Many psychologists believe the new research enables them to anticipate future problems in even the youngest children. "We can now document where a baby may be unable to pick up sensory data; we can spot abnormalities in the emotional areas," says Stanley Greenspan, chief of the Clinical Infant Research Unit of the National Institute of Mental Health in Adelphi, Md. "There is no evidence that an infant's emotional problems are self-corrective. The environment that contributed to early damage will continue to contribute if one does not intervene."

One early and important symptom of trouble, says Greenspan, is the failure of mother or child to look at each other. Greenspan makes videotapes of such cases. Here is Amanda, age four months, who turns her head away and generally shows what Greenspan calls "an active avoidance of the human world." Small wonder. Amanda's mother was raising her alone and suffered bouts of deep depression. Greenspan and his therapists spent four months playing with Amanda and engaging her interest; the videotape taken at eight months shows the baby cheering her mother along. Says Greenspan, with some satisfaction: "She developed coping facilities stronger than those of her mother."

Psychologists talking about "environment" often mean primarily the psychological structure of the family, but the social and economic environment is hardly less important to a child's development. Fully 13.5 million children in the U.S. live below the official poverty line. Nearly 7.5 million children are currently on welfare. More than half a million babies are born every year to American teenagers.

The effects of such deprivation on infancy are hard to gauge scientifically, but Dr. Gerald Young of Manhattan's Mount Sinai Medical Center says flatly, "If you want to guess what a child will be like at age seven, look first to the socioeconomic background." This is not simply a matter of economic hardship or nutritional deficiency. Says Brown's Lipsitt: "The socioeconomic index is as powerful a predictor of later intellectual prowess as any variable we've got, but it doesn't operate in a vacuum. It is a representation of the way people live and relate toward each other, and the way they behave toward babies."

One interesting demonstration of this theory was undertaken more than a decade ago by a team of psychologists at the University of Wisconsin. Struck by the fact that many of the mentally retarded children in a Milwaukee slum had retarded mothers, they took 40 infants whose mothers had IQs of less than 75 and put 20 of them in special day care centers. From the age of three months on, the children began getting lessons in language and arithmetic as well as various other kinds of stimulation. By the time they reached school age, their average IQ was more than 100 (none was retarded); the 20 children who had received no special treatment had an average IQ of 85, and 60% were judged to be retarded.

The question of child rearing outside the home cuts across all classes. There are currently 4.1 million working women with children under the age of three, and one survey showed that nearly 70% of working women who have babies return to their job within four months. Overall, about 8 million of today's preschool children receive some form of day care (1 million in day care centers, 3.5 million in family day care homes and 3.5 million tended by relatives and baby sitters). If the nurturing mother is as important as psychiatrists say, hired substitutes may seem a poor alternative, but most psychological researchers reject any such conclusion. All a baby basically needs, they say, is at least someone who is consistently there and who really cares. All depends, obviously, on the quality of the day care--and of the home. In the case of the Milwaukee experiment with the potentially retarded, day care was a rescue service. But in one typical Maryland county, 788 regulated day care facilities have room for only 8,560 of the 65,000 children under 14 who have working mothers.

How good the average day care is remains something of a guess. Bernice Weissbourd, who founded the Chicago-based Family Focus groups to provide support and advice for new parents, argues that any day care service that has more than three infants per adult (and that includes most) is inadequate. "Too often," she warns, "the parents' main questions are simply how close to home is it and how much does it cost." But of day care as such, Cornell Psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner says categorically, "There is no hard evidence that day care has a negative effect."

Whatever the difficulties, the overwhelming majority of parents want very much to do the best for their children, if only they can be sure what that best is, and that is anything but certain. Most experts say the need is great. "Not more than one child in ten gets off to as good a start as he could," says Burton White, author of The First Three Years of Life. Harvard's Kagan, on the other hand, urges parents to provide "a nurturant environment" and declares, "It's easy. Oh, it's easy. There's not a lot of witchcraft here."

Important changes come so slowly that they are taken for granted. Children's sheets used to be all white; now they are explosions of color. The mobile over the crib, which first seemed arty and pretentious, has become almost a basic piece of furniture. The backpacks that were once associated with Indian women carrying papooses are now sold everywhere, not only as a convenience for mothers but as an opportunity for the baby to get out of the house and see the world.

Thus the old keeps becoming the new. Much of what modern research is so elaborately documenting is what parents have always known--whether from instinct or from common sense or from the teachings of their own parents--that babies need and respond to love, attention, stimulation, education, in perhaps roughly that order. The research documents not only the importance of such needs but the damage that can occur when they go unanswered. Yet even these blessings of the latest orthodoxy can be overdone. "We are learning that everything will have an impact on an infant, but we still need to know exactly what happens," cautions Psychologist Rose Caron of George Washington University's Infant Research Laboratory in Silver Spring, Md. "It's conceivable that a child's competency might be diminished because of too much early stimulation."

"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself," cried Walt Whitman. The creation of a baby is full of paradoxes and illogicalities. The cost of raising a child to 18, approaching $100,000 in the U.S., according to one estimate, would deter any sensible investor. So would the prospect of more than 20 years of anxiety and irritation. But having a baby remains, for most people, an act of faith. It represents a belief in better things to come, not just for themselves but for the world. That is a faith shared by the myriad baby researchers. Says Rutgers' Lewis: "Can we produce a better society with healthier children? The answer is yes." And in the very moment of birth, as a tiny, dark, wet head thrusts out into the world, every baby fulfills that belief. Then comes the first squall.

--By Otto Friedrich.

Reported by Ruth Mehrtens Calvin/Boston and Melissa Ludtke/New York, with other bureaus

* The very word infant derives from the Latin in fans, meaning incapable of speech.

* Named for German Pediatrician Ernst Moro (1874-1951).

With reporting by Ruth Mehrtens Calvin, Melissa Ludtke This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.