Love at Goon Park by Deborah Blum Page B

the child had been there. Textbooks on the care of newborns still rang with the voice of Luther Holt and the dread fear of pathogens. Experts continued to recommend only the most essential handling of infants and a policy of excluding visitors. Even in the 1970s, a survey of wards for premature infants found that only 30 percent of hospitals allowed parents even to visit their babies. And less than half of those hospitals would allow a parent to touch her child.
    Bakwin argued that babies are emotional creatures, that they need emotional contact the way they need food. Of course, he put it in words becoming to the doctor he was: “It would appear that the physiologic components of the emotional process are essential for the physical well-being of the young infant.” But he wasn’t afraid to suggest that this could be a bigger problem than just what he saw in hospital wards. Orphanages and asylums also ran on the sterilization principle. And although children might stay days, weeks, occasionally months, in a medical ward, they might stay years in the foundling homes. Bakwin gave a simple example of the problem, centered on what might seem a trivial point: smiling. Somewhere between two
and three months, he pointed out, most babies begin to smile back at their parents. “This is not the case in infants who have spent some time in institutions.” They didn’t return a smile. He and his nurses, if they had time, could coax a response, but there was nothing spontaneous about it and they often didn’t have time. What if the child stayed longer? What would happen to her then? Or him? If people couldn’t make you happy as a baby, could they ever?
    Another New York physician, William Goldfarb, was also becoming worried about the fate of children in homes. The foundling homes were like a magnified version of a hospital ward; the emphasis was on cleanliness, order, self-control, discipline. Since psychology had declared affection unnecessary—perhaps even detrimental—to healthy child development, no one was wasting much warmth on these children, who were unwanted anyway. In the homes, youngsters were fed, clothed, worked, praised, punished, or ignored, but policy did not direct that they be cuddled or treated with affection. Often homes discouraged children from even making close friendships with each other because such relationships were time-consuming and troublesome. Goldfarb worked with Jewish Family Services, which operated a string of foster homes around the city. The children he treated were like the bomb escapees—apathetic, passive, and, which he found most troubling, they seemed to be extending their isolation zone. The foundlings often appeared incapable of friendship or even of caring about others. “The abnormal impoverishment in human relationships created a vacuum where there should have been the strongest motivation to normal growth,” he wrote in 1943. At least children in their own homes—even if they had cruel or hostile parents—had some thread of a relationship that involved emotional interaction. The vacuum, Goldfarb insisted, was the worst thing you could inflict on the child, leaving a small boy or girl alone to rattle about in some empty bottle of a life. The younger they were thus isolated, the worse the effect. “A depriving institutional experience in infancy has an enduring harmful psychological effect on children,” he said, and he meant all dimensions.

    Two other New York–based researchers, David Levy and Loretta Bender, took up the cause as scientists in that urban community began sharing concerns. Like Bakwin, Loretta Bender worked at Bellevue; she headed the hospital’s newly created child psychiatric unit, and many of her clients came from foundling homes. They were “completely confused about human relationships,” she wrote; they were often lost in a fantasy world that might have served as a kind of shelter were the