The New Dr. Spock: "A Great Dad"

Dr.T. (for Thomas) Berry Brazelton, 65, says he is no scientist, which shows a becoming modesty, but he would have a hard time denying that he is the nation's pre-eminent baby doctor. A whole generation of pediatricians has studied and worked with him at Harvard Medical School and the Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston. Tens of thousands of anxious parents have been reassured by his easygoing guidebooks (Infants and Mothers, Toddlers and Parents, Doctor and Child, On Becoming a Family). Millions of infants who never met him have been tested and evaluated by his Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale, generally known simply and naturally as the Brazelton.

It is a folksy sort of test, carried out with such implements as a pocket flash light, an orange rubber ball, a paper clip, some popcorn kernels. The exam starts when the baby is asleep, and it gauges the infant's reactions to a series of stimuli, including light in the eyes, the sound of rattling, a scratch on the foot: 20 reflexes and 26 behavioral responses in all. After 20 minutes or so, a Brazeltonized baby is wide awake and none too happy about all the testing.

Brazelton began devising the exam some 30 years ago to solve a problem that bothered him: babies available for adoption were being kept in institutions until the age of four months because doctors were reluctant to certify that any younger infant was fully normal. "Four months is just too long to deprive anybody of a new baby," Brazelton recalls, with a trace of a Texas drawl that has survived his years in Boston. "That led me to say, 'Well, gosh, anybody can tell whether a new baby's O.K. or not. What is it we're going by?' Then I began to put together all these things that any good clinician uses. Very little about the scale was really new. It was a compilation of a lot of clinical observations that hadn't been documented."

That all sounds rather routine, but Brazelton's tone changes as he starts to talk about his test, about the way a baby's eyes jerkily follow a moving ball. "If you give him a human face to look at instead, his eyes will widen and he'll get more intense and he'll follow you," says Brazelton, "and as he follows, his face gets more and more alert and more and more involved, and you can feel yourself getting more and more involved back. This kind of visual involvement is more than just looking. You've got another component from the baby, which says to the person doing this, 'You're terribly important.' And the person is bound to feel important. What I'm getting at is that the baby's competence will call up competence from parents. We used to see the parents shaping the child, but now we see the child also helping to shape the parents."

Brazelton once wanted to be a veterinarian. At age eight, already an experienced baby sitter, he decided on pediatrics. He went to Princeton, starred in Triangle Club theatricals, even got an offer in 1940 to try out on Broadway for an Ethel Merman musical, Panama Hattie, but he held on to the goal of healing infants. His hero, he says, was Benjamin Spock, and although Brazelton is now regarded as the new Spock, he considers himself more a disciple than a rival of the older man.

Brazelton and his wife Christina have three daughters and a son, ages 19 to 32. He still worries about his high expectations and pushing his children too hard. His son, however, calls him "a great dad."

Like Spock, Brazelton makes it a cardinal rule to reassure anxious parents and to encourage them to trust their instincts. "Parents in our culture are so hungry for people to tell them what to do and so vulnerable as a result," he says. "I feel very strongly that telling them what to do is destructive. Supporting them for what they can do is constructive."

Brazelton is in the midst of a project of "intervention research" that involves studying 100 undersized babies and trying to see which of them will need special assistance. Babies that have been undernourished in the uterus are "very scrawny, very hypersensitive to any kind of stimulation, and they become very fussy and difficult for the parents," says Brazelton. "They need help to see their baby as a person. You have to help parents see that you're seeing the same baby they are. And that the baby doesn't need to be like them. And they don't need to be like it. It can be just as exciting to find another kind of person to learn about." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.