Baby doctor soothed generations of parents
T. BERRY BRAZELTON
T. Berry Brazelton was a pediatrician whose bestselling guides to child- rearing soothed generations of parents, assuring them they need not seek perfection and that the answers to many of their questions lay in their children’s behaviour.
Dr. Brazelton, who died last week at his home in Barnstable, Mass., aged 99, was perhaps the best-known American pediatrician since Benjamin Spock, who revolutionized child- rearing by counselling parents to rely on their “own common sense” rather than on purported experts.
Brazelton — who described Spock as his “hero” and who counted Spock’s grandchildren among his patients — picked up where the older physician left off. In books such as Infants and Mothers ( 1969), in his hit Touchpoints book series, in commentaries in Redbook and Family Circle, and on the Emmy Award- winning TV show What Every Baby Knows, Brazelton coached parents to see their children’s abilities as well as their own.
He bucked prevailing notions by arguing babies are not “lumps of clay” but rather expressive beings whose behaviour conveys their needs. Rather than instructing parents, he sought to help them read their babies’ cues.
“People assumed babies were all the same and that it was parenting and the environment that made the difference,” Brazelton said in 2013. “We were blaming parents for everything that went wrong with babies. I thought if I could assess these babies early ... we could use this in understanding the child more and give the parents a better chance of understanding the child, too.”
Brazelton spent much of his career in Massachusetts, where he held appointments at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital. In 1973, he developed the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale, often called the Brazelton. The now- widely used test relies on simple tools such as popcorn kernels and a pocket flashlight to test a newborn’s response to sound and light. He identified three broad categories: average, quiet and active.
On his TV show, he was said to project a “combination of Sigmund Freud, Mister Rogers and Phil Donahue.” Mainly, he tried to persuade parents not to worry. “Parents care so much they can’t smile,” he said in 1979. “They can’t smile and give children a feeling of the excitement of being a parent. I would like to look at what can be done to get parents to relax and not to take (parenthood) quite so seriously.”