Pediatrician urged parents to smile
T. Berry Brazelton died March 13 at his home in Barnstable, Massachusetts. He was 99.
T. Berry Brazelton, a pediatrician whose best-selling guides to child-rearing soothed generations of parents, assuring them that they need not seek perfection and that the answers to many of their questions lay before them in their children’s behaviour, died March 13 at his home in Barnstable, Massachusetts. He was 99.
His daughter-in-law, Jennifer Brazelton, confirmed the death, but did not provide a specific cause.
Dr. Brazelton was perhaps the bestknown American pediatrician since Benjamin Spock, who revolutionized child-rearing by counseling parents to rely on their “own common sense” rather than on commandments dispensed by 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, Brazelton genially coached parents to see their children’s abilities as well as their own.
He bucked prevailing notions of his time by arguing that babies are not “lumps of clay”, but rather expressive beings whose behaviour conveys their needs. Rather than instructing parents on child-rearing, 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 told USA Today in 2013. “We were blaming parents for everything that went wrong with babies.”
Brazelton spent much of his career in Massachusetts, where he held appointments at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital and where he maintained a private pediatrics practice in Cambridge.
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 of babies: average, quiet and active.
Although the scale was widely regarded as one of Brazelton’s most significant contributions to medicine, his reach extended far beyond hospitals.
“Parents care so much they can’t smile,” he told an audience 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.”
Some of his views evolved over the years with changing social attitudes. After long arguing that mothers should stay home with young children, he acknowledged in the 1980s that some women needed to work outside the home and found fulfillment in their professions. He became a chief proponent of mandated maternity leave.
The greatest gift a parent could give, he said, was a loving home from earliest infancy. “Babies are competent to withstand ‘mistakes’ that their inexperienced parents might make,” he wrote in Infants and Mothers, “and even to let the parents know when they are on the wrong track.”