on every hand, we should not lack evidence on the beginnings of human
locomotion; but as a matter of fact, the stage that precedes walking
is involved in a good deal of confusion. Records are scanty, and
children seem to vary a good deal in their way of going at the thing.
Most of them “creep before they gang”; but there seems to be a stage
before creeping, when, if the child is given full freedom of movement,
he will get over the floor in some cruder way, rolling, hitching,
dragging himself by the elbows, humping forward measure-worm fashion,
or wriggling along like a snake. Perhaps, as I have already suggested,
this is because skirts delay the natural beginning of creeping, and
these other movements require less freedom of the legs; perhaps there
is some deeper reason connected with race history. Sometimes the baby
makes these less efficient movements answer till walking is acquired,
and never creeps at all.
Our baby, as we have seen, had already made her first ineffective
attempts to pull herself forward and reach something; and lying face
down, unable to turn over, had so propped herself with hands and knees
that when she tried to move she almost stumbled on creeping unawares.
But soon after she was six months old, she discovered the other half of
the trick of rolling--reversing herself from front to rear as well as
from rear to front; and this gave her such an enlarged freedom that it
stopped all aspirations in other directions.
She did not deliberately turn over and over to get anywhere. She simply
rolled and kicked about the floor, turning over when she felt like it
or when she wished to reach something, highly content, and asking odds
of nobody. If by chance she turned in the same direction a number of
times in succession, she would drift halfway across the room, meeting
no end of interesting things by the way--mamma’s slipper tips, chair
rockers, table legs, waste basket, petals dropped from the vases, and
so on. It was a great enlargement of life, and kept her happy for six
or seven weeks.
During this time, her balance in sitting grew secure, so that she could
sit on the floor as long as she chose, occupied with playthings; but
she cared more for the rolling.
It was in these weeks, too, that two great new interests came into
our baby’s life. The first was a really passionate one, and it seized
her suddenly, the week after she was half a year old. The door had
just opened to admit a guest, amid a bustle of welcome, when a cry
of such desire as we had never heard from our baby in all her little
life called our attention to her. Utterly indifferent to the arrival
of company (she who had always loved a stir of coming and going, and
taken more interest in people than in anything else!) she was leaning
and looking out of the window at the dog, as if she had never seen him
before--though he had been before her eyes all her life. She would
think of nothing else; the guest, expert in charming babies, could not
get a glance.
Day after day, for weeks, the little thing was filled with excitement
at sight of the shaggy Muzhik, moving her arms and body, and crying
out with what seemed intensest joy and longing. When he came near, her
excitement increased, and she reached out and caught at him; her face
lighted with happiness when he stood close by; she showed not the least
fear when he put his rough head almost in her face, but gazed earnestly
at it; she watched for him at the window, or from her baby carriage. No
person or thing had ever interested her so much. Muzhik, on his part,
soon learned to give the snatching little hands a wide berth; and his
caution may have enhanced his charm.
Later in the month, she showed somewhat similar excitement at sight of
a cow. About the same time, too, she first noticed the pigeons as they
flew up from the ground.
This was the beginning of a lasting interest in animals, animal
pictures, animal stories. It is not easy to account fully for this
interest, appearing in such intense degree, at so early an age. All
children show it to some extent, though in many it is mingled with a
good, deal of fear. One is tempted to connect both the fear and the
interest with race history--the intimate association of primitive
man with animals; but a six-month baby is traversing a period of
development far earlier than that of the primitive hunter. Professor
Sully has some good suggestions about the sympathy between children
and animals, but these, too, fail of application to a baby so young.
Probably to her the main charm was the movement, the rough resemblance
to people, joined with so many differences, now first noticed with the
interest of novelty--and (as later incidents made me suspect) the
quantity of convenient hair to be pulled.
The other new interest waked late in the seventh month: that joy in
outdoors that was for many months of the little one’s life her best
happiness. Up to this time, she had liked to be taken out in her
baby carriage, but mainly for the motion. Now, one morning, grandma
took her and sat down quietly on the veranda, saying that she wanted
her to learn to love the sunshine, the birds and flowers and trees,
without needing the baby carriage and its motion. The little one sat
in her lap, looking about with murmurs of delight; and after that, her
happiness in rolling about freely was much greater when we spread a
blanket on veranda or lawn, and laid her there. Within two weeks, she
would coax to be taken outdoors, and then coax till she was put down
out of arms, and left to her own happiness. She would roll about by the
hour, the most contented baby in the world, breaking occasionally into
cries and movements of overflowing joy.
I did not think that at this age the novel sights and sounds outdoors
had much to do with her pleasure; she did not yet notice them much. Nor
could it have been the wideness and freedom of outlook, for she had not
yet come to distant seeing--a hundred feet was as far as I had ever
seen her look. Later, all this counted; but now I thought that the mere
physical effect of activity in the fresh air, together with the bright
light, and perhaps the moving and playing of lights in the leaves, must
make up most of the charm.
In the early weeks of the seventh month idle baby’s rollicking spirits
were striking; in fact, she became for a time quite a little rowdy,
ho-ho-ing and laughing in loud, rough tones, snatching this way and
that, clutching at our hair with exultant shouts and clamor. In the
latter part of the month, her manners were better--indeed, it was fully
a year before I saw them as bad again; but she was much given to
seizing at our faces, flinging herself at them with cries and growls
(exactly as if she had been playing bear), and mouthing and lightly
biting them. And indeed it must be confessed that while our baby’s
behavior was often very pretty for weeks together, she had many fits
of rough play and hoydenish spirits, and our faces and hair were never
quite safe from romping attacks before she was two years old. This
boisterousness was not overflowing spirits (real joyousness showed
itself more gently) and I could never trace its psychological origin.
At intervals during the month, she continued to improve her bodily
knowledge of herself, investigating her head and face and even the
inside of her mouth, with her fingers; she rubbed her forefinger
curiously with her thumb; she ran out her tongue and moved it about,
trying its motions and feeling her lips. And the very first day of
the month there had appeared that curious behavior that we call
“archness” and “coquetting” in a baby (though anything so grown up
as real archness or coquetry is impossible at this age), looking and
smiling at a person who was somewhat strange, but very amusing, to
her, then ducking down her head when he spoke, and hiding her face on
her mother’s shoulder. Whatever the real reason of such behavior may
be, there is plainly self-consciousness in it. So, too, when, at seven
months old, she began to try deliberately to attract the interest of
callers, wrinkling up her nose with a friendly grimace till they paid
attention to her.
Both these forms of self-consciousness were common after this. Neither
is what we could call human or rational self-consciousness. Any dog or
kitten will show them. But they certainly are something more than mere
bodily feeling of self. If we need a name for it, we might call it a
beginning of _intelligent self-perception_, as distinguished both from
bodily self-feeling, and rational self-knowledge--in which the mind,
years later, will say to itself clearly, “This is _I_.”
We now began to suspect (as she ended her seventh month) that the baby
was beginning to connect our names with us; and when we tried her by
asking, “Where is grandpa?” or “mamma” or “aunty,” she really did look
at the right one often enough to raise a presumption that she knew what
she was about. The association of name and person was still feeble
and shaky, but it proved to be real. In a few days it was firm as to
grandpa (who was quite _persona grata_, because he built up blocks for
her to knock down, and carried her about from object to object, to let
her touch and examine); and in a week or two as to the rest of us.
Professor Preyer complains of teaching babies mere tricks, which have
no real relation to their development; and certainly it is a sound rule
that self-unfolding, not teaching, is the way in which a baby should
develop in the earliest years. But Preyer’s baby learned to wave his
hand, and play “patacake,” and show “How big is baby?” and the rest of
it, just as other babies do; mammas and nurses cannot resist it. And as
long as the babies like it, I do not see that it can do any harm, if it
is not overdone. Besides, it may be said that these standard tricks are
all closely related to the sign language, and so fall in well with the
natural development at this stage. And again, the extreme teachability
of the human child is his great superiority over the brute--all our
civilization rests on it; and when the time comes that he is capable of
receiving training, it may be as well that his power of doing so should
be used a little, and that these simple gesture tricks of immemorial
nursery tradition are good exercises to begin with. It is possible to
make a fetich of “self-development,” beyond all common sense.
At all events, as our baby approached seven months old, her mamma had
begun to teach her to wave by-by. For a couple of weeks, the mother
would hold up the little hand and wave it at the departing guest, and
before long the baby would give a feeble waggle or two after her mother
had let go; next, she would need only to be started; and a week after
she was seven months old she waved a spontaneous farewell as I left the
room. There was a long history of the gesture after that, for it was
lost and regained, confused with other hand tricks and straightened
out, and altogether played a considerable part in the story of sign
language and of memory, which I shall not have time to relate. But
at all times it paid for itself in the delight it gave the baby: it
reconciled her to almost any parting, and even to going to bed.
Her objection to going to bed, which had been evident since the fifth
month, was because she thought sleeping was a waste of good playtime,
not because she had any associations of fear and repugnance connected
with it. She had never been left to cry herself to sleep alone, but was
rocked and sung to in good old fashion. But she did show signs at this
time of timidity and distress in waking from sleep, clinging piteously
to her mother and crying. She had waked and cried alone a number of
times, and, as I have already said, she seemed to have formed some
associations of fear in this way. But I think there were deeper reasons
for the confused distress on waking, which from now until halfway
through the third year appeared at times.
I have spoken several times of the ease with which even we grown people
lose our sense of personal identity; and changes in brain circulation
make such confusions especially likely at first waking from sleep. With
babies, whose feeling of identity is but insecurely established, this
must be much more common; moreover, a baby’s conditions of breathing
are less regular than ours, and it is probable that as he comes out of
sleep, and the circulation and respiration of the waking hours slowly
reestablish themselves, he has all sorts of queer, lost feelings. I was
pretty sure, from our baby’s behavior I in the next two years, that she
struggled back to the firm shores of waking consciousness through dark
waters of confusion, and needed a friendly hand to cling to. This, I
suspect, is the secret of the wild crying in the night, which doctors
call “night terror”: it is not terror, I think, but vague distress,
increased by the darkness--loss of self, of direction, of all one’s
usual bodily feeling.
In these sensitive states attending sleep it is likely that some of
the emotional conditions for life are formed, and the ties between
mother and child knit firmest. My observation is that the one the baby
loves most is the one that sleeps close by, that bends over him as he
struggles confusedly back to waking, and steers him tenderly through
the valley of the shadow of sleep; and next, the one that plays most
patiently and observantly with him--not the one that feeds him.
In her absorption in her growing bodily activity, the baby had taken no
marked steps in intellectual development, though in skill of handling,
and in ability to understand what went on about her and put two and two
together, she made steady progress. Early in the eighth month, some
definite instances of this appeared. She showed a discreet preference
at bedtime for anybody rather than her mother, and clung vigorously
round my neck or her grandfather’s when that messenger of fate came for
her. She dropped things to watch them fall, with a persistent zeal and
interest such as she had not shown in earlier experiments of the sort.
She knew what it meant if one of us put a hat on, and pleaded with
outstretched hands and springing motion to go too. Once she found that
in moving a long stick she was moving some twigs at its farther end,
and kept up the experiment with curiosity.
It was about this time--the first fortnight of the eighth month--that
taste first became a source of pleasure to our baby. She had been given
an experimental taste of several things before, but beyond the grimace
of surprise (it looks like utmost disgust, but there seems no doubt
that it really means surprise only) with which little babies greet
new tastes, she had shown no great interest in them. Now, as nature’s
supply grew scant, she was introduced more seriously to several
supplementary foods, and at least once rejoiced over the taste a good
deal. Still, she was apt soon to tire of them, and on the whole taste
did not at any time in her first year take a large place among her
interests.
As the middle of the eighth month approached, it was evident that an
advance in power of movement was coming. The baby was getting up on
hands and knees again; she made daily a few aimless creeping movements;
and in her bath she would draw herself to her knees, and partly to her
feet, holding by the edge of the tub, and somewhat supported by the
water. A few days later she drew herself forward a few inches, flat on
her stomach, to get something. But she still did not catch the idea of
creeping, and rolling remained her great pleasure for another fortnight.
In this fortnight, which brought our baby to eight months old, the
rolling grew very rapid and free. She would now roll over and over
in the same direction, not to get anywhere in particular (she never
learned to use rolling for that purpose), but just for fun. She
varied the exercise with the most lively kicking--heels raised in air
and brought down together with astonishing vigor and zest; and with
twisting about and getting on hands and knees, or even on hands and
feet, prattling joyously, and having a beautiful time all by herself,
for as long as the authorities would leave her alone. I have no note or
memory that she ever tired of it, or asked for attention or change; it
was always some one else who interfered, because meal-time or nap-time
or something had come.
In the last week of the month she learned to raise herself to a sitting
position; and as she could now sit up or lie down at will, she tumbled
about the floor with still more variety and enjoyment. In the same week
she began to pull herself daily quite to her feet in the tub. It was
an ordinary wooden wash-tub which was bridging the interval between
her own outgrown one and the grown-up bath-tub; and she would stand,
leaning her weight partly on her hands, on the edge of the tub, with
her feet planted wide apart, quite on the opposite side, giving her a
pretty secure base.
In this fortnight the baby’s understanding of us and feeling of
nearness to us were noticeably greater. Her attachment to her favorites
was striking. She would cling to us with all the strength of her little
arms, sometimes pressing her lips against our faces in a primitive
sort of kiss. Her desire for our attention was intense--little arms
stretched out, face full of desire, while she uttered urgent cries. Now
and then she was entirely unwilling to eat a meal till the person she
had set her heart on at the moment had yielded to her pleading, and
come to sit close beside her, for company.
She understood one or two little directions--“by-by,” and “patacake”;
or, at least, associated them with the acts. She had some idea of what
“No, no!” meant, and she knew perfectly that she must not keep paper
or flower petals in her mouth, and after biting off a bit would put
out her tongue, laughing, to have the forbidden scrap removed. And one
day when I said to her, “Don’t you want to come to aunty?” without any
gesture, she surprised me by leaning forward and putting out her hands
to me, exactly as if I had reached my arms out for her. She could not
have understood the whole question, for she hardly understood words
at all at the time; but she must have made out “come,” and, putting it
with “aunty,” which she had known for weeks, got at my meaning.
On the day she was eight months old, at last, the baby half sprawled,
half crept, forward to get something. The early, aimless stages of
locomotion were over, and she was about to start in in good earnest to
learn to creep and to stand.
XI
CREEPING AND STANDING
Now, at eight months old, began a fortnight of rapid development in
movements, all branching out from the position on hands and knees which
the baby often took as she sprawled on the floor.
First she hit on two ways of sitting up, beginning on hands and knees.
One of them, in fact, had appeared in the last days of the preceding
month. She would tilt over sidewise till she was half sitting, leaning
on one hand, then straighten up, raising the hand--and there you are,
sitting. The other way, a few days later, was to begin as before on
hands and knees, separate the knees, and lift herself over backward
till she was sitting, turning the legs out at the knee. No grown person
but a contortionist could do it, for our hips have not enough play
in the socket to carry the movement through the last inch or two; but
babies’ joints are flexible. This became our baby’s regular method, and
the position it left her in--legs spread out before her, bent directly
out at the knee--was her every-day one for many months. Most babies, I
believe, sit monkey fashion--legs straight, with soles turned in.
Watching carefully, we were sure that the baby did not at first use
either method intelligently; she wanted to sit up, and shifted and
lifted her body, scolding with impatience, and never knowing whether
she would bring up in the desired position or not, till she found
herself by luck where she wanted to be. In a few days, however, the
right movements were sifted out from the useless ones, and she sat up
and lay down at will.
In the same early days of the ninth month, another movement came of
experimenting while on hands and knees--a backward creeping, pushing
with the hands. The baby at once tried to utilize it to get to people
and things, and it was funny to hear her chattering with displeasure as
she found herself borne off the other way--backing sometimes into the
wall, and pushing helplessly against it, like a little locomotive that
had accidentally got reversed. She soon gave up trying to get anywhere
by this “craw-fishing,” however, and then she enjoyed it, merely as
movement.
The only reason I have heard suggested for this curious back-action
creeping (which is not uncommon just before real creeping) is that the
baby’s arms are stronger than the legs, and as a pushing movement with
them is more natural than a stepping one, a backward impulse is given,
which the baby, as a rule, resents with comical displeasure.
Next, from hands and knees the baby learned to rise to hands and
feet; to kneel, and then to sit back on her heels; and to make sundry
variations on these positions, such as kneeling on one knee and one
foot, or sitting on one heel, with the other foot thrust out sidewise,
propping her.
In spite of two or three chance forward steps, she was eight and a half
months old before she hit at last on real creeping; then one day I saw
her several times creep forward a foot or two, and presently she was
rolling an orange about and creeping after it. I tried in vain to lure
her more than a couple of feet, to come to me or to get a plaything;
she would creep a step or two, then sit back on her heels and call me
to take her. Until almost the end of this month, indeed, she would
creep for but very short distances, and always to reach something, not
for pleasure in the movement.
But while she fumbled in such chance fashion towards creeping, she
was carried on towards standing by strong and evident instinct.
She pulled herself up daily, not to reach anything, but from an
overwhelming desire to get to her feet; and when she found herself on
them she rejoiced and triumphed. At this stage she almost invariably
used a _low_ object to pull up by, so that she could lean over it,
propping her weight with her hands--or with one hand, as she grew
more confident. It was after the middle of the month that she first
drew herself up, her knees shaking, by a chair, to reach a favorite
plaything; but thereafter chairs became her great “stand by,” in a very
literal sense.
In kneeling, too, she showed joy. She could not keep her balance on her
knees for more than a few seconds, but while she did she exulted in the
exploit, and patted and waved her hands in glee. Aside from standing
and kneeling, her advances in movement were made with a curious lack of
intelligent consciousness of what she was about, as well as of clear,
compelling instinct. She seemed to progress by blind experimenting,
selecting gradually out of a medley of others the acts and positions
that were most useful and best fitted to the structure of her joints
and muscles.
Many babies before this stage show the walking instinct quite clearly.
If they are held from above, so that their soles press lightly on a
flat surface, the legs will begin to make good stepping movements. Our
baby had failed to make this response hitherto; in this fortnight,
however, it appeared, very imperfectly and irregularly, but steadily
better; and with another week she took great delight in the exercise.
Amid all these new movements, rolling rapidly declined and disappeared.
The baby was absorbed in her new powers, and during the latter half of
the month her joy in them was exquisite. She was a thing to remember
for a lifetime as she played on a quilt spread on the lawn in the hot
June days--sitting and looking about her with laughter and ejaculations
of pleasure, gazing up with wonder and interest at the branches swaying
in the warm breeze, watching the dog, creeping about and examining
the grass with grave attention, pulling to her feet at our knees as
we sat by with our reading and sewing. And when we let her take the
benefit of the warm weather, and creep about the floor stripped to the
inmost layer of garments, arms and legs bare, she was at the height of
joy. She would go from one position to another, sitting and kneeling,
tumbling and scrambling and creeping about in endless content.