‘How well the child has fared in the infant home’

The notion that babies and toddlers need sensitive care is accepted as common sense today, being espoused in not only parenting guidebooks, but also in the works of US bestselling author Harvey Karp, Dutch therapist Jesper Juul and Swiss paediatrician Remo Largo. Even authors who warn against ‘spoiling’ children do not extend their demands for discipline to the first months of life. From a historical perspective, however, this consensus on the needs of babies has not always been widely accepted. A few decades ago, ideas of ‘good’ and harsh infancy predominated in Europe and especially in Germany.

Historian Felix Berth examines this idea of childhood for the two German countries – the socialist GDR and the capitalist FRG – that existed after the Second World War. A report from March 1952 may serve as an example. It was published by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, an important newspaper in the western part of the country. The article contained pictures that had been taken in a home near Munich. One of the photos shows a young woman on a balcony, carrying a warmly dressed toddler in her arms. Her white cap identifies her as a professional caregiver. In the snowy garden below a car is waiting, with two pairs of skis on the roof. The caption reflects a contemporary view of early childhood:

“It is an issue that occurs in almost every family: To whom should you entrust your toddler when you want to go on vacation or are sick? Parents are often reluctant to place their child in an infant home because the baby might lack personal care there. In most cases, they are surprised how well the child has fared in the infant home.“

The babies were supposed to be well-treated in this home, and have everything they needed, at least from a contemporary point of view: regular food, meticulous cleanliness, well-trained staff. The emotional needs of a toddler? The author probably did not even think about that. Similar articles can be found again and again in German newspapers of the 1950s and 1960s, both in the capitalist West and the socialist East. Infant homes were sometimes even described as ‘holiday locations’ for children. ‘One lives healthy and merrily in a “baby hotel”-, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ran as a title in 1961.

In the post-war years, German paediatricians proposed great harshness towards the smallest children to ‘teach the baby that it is part of everyday life to bear feelings of displeasure without outbursts of affect’, as a paediatric handbook demanded in 1950. According to this book, ‘the role of the infant must be a purely passive one. He does not eat, but is fed; he does not sleep either, but is put to sleep.’ Correct infant care ‘thwarts any attempt by the infant to violate this order’. From this perspective, an infant home provided a ‘good’ early childhood.

The widespread counter-thesis was developed by psychoanalysts and psychologists in the Anglophone world after the Second World War. The Briton, John Bowlby, and the American, René A. Spitz, both published influential essays emphasising the importance of sensitive caregivers (at that time, this mainly meant mothers). In an infant home, babies and toddlers would lack the security that would be provided by a constant caregiver. As early as 1946, a psychoanalytically based guidebook in the USA promoted warm-hearted, sensitive education; with an estimated circulation of 50 million books, Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care became the best-selling parenting guidebook worldwide.

It is interesting how quickly these ideas caught on among German experts. Although dissemination of scientific knowledge in the middle of the 20th century was much slower than it is today, it took less than two years for Bowlby to be noticed. In West Germany, the pioneer was a young psychoanalyst from Berlin who founded a successful journal on child psychology. In one of the first issues, Annemarie Dührssen presented Bowlby’s book Maternal Care and Mental Health from 1951 by reporting its essential findings and considerations. In the following years, the knowledge of maternal deprivation and attachment seeped into the pedagogical arena. Soon, authors adopted the arguments of Bowlby and Spitz, often using the term ‘hospitalism’. In turn, descriptions of ‘idyllic’ home life became rare towards the end of the 1950s.

Surprisingly, Bowlby’s work was also received in East Germany (GDR), as Berth’s analysis in the journal The History of the Family shows. At that time, Stalinism had a grip on East German research, and scientific papers had to refer primarily to Soviet, supposedly groundbreaking, work. Nevertheless, the paediatrician Eva Schmidt-Kolmer introduced the term ‘hospitalism’ into the academic debate. At least in the early years, she praised Bowlby’s monograph. Other socialist paediatricians compared infant homes, weekly crèches, and day nurseries and – like their Western colleagues – always found the biggest risks for children in infant homes. By the end of the 1950s, East German experts were also informed, one can quite comfortably assume.

After this – rather unexpected – parallelism in the history of knowledge, however, growing differences in scientific discourse and in residential care can be observed in the 1960s. In the socialist GDR, the alarming findings briefly became a political issue when a justice minister summarily forbade criticism of infant homes and weekly crèches (in which children were placed from Monday to Saturday). The minister demanded an ‘ideological clarification among doctors’ to ‘secure women’s equal rights’ in 1962. In her view, women with positions of responsibility could not ‘constantly check the clock from 4.00 or 5.30 so as not to be late to fetch their child from the crèche’.

The infant home in the GDR became scientifically taboo, and the Bowlby reception ended. East German media, proudly proclaiming infant homes as socialist achievements in the 1950s, barely broached the subject anymore. In 1989, just before the Wall came down, there were still more than 5,000 places in these institutions in the GDR. Berth estimates for that time that about one in sixty infants spent a – longer or shorter – part of early childhood there.

In West Germany, the critical debate continued in the 1960s. Youth welfare authorities reacted quickly. Within a few years, they massively reduced admissions to infant homes, and many institutions were closed. Many infants were returned to their (often unmarried) mothers, also due to a liberalisation concerning illegitimacy. By 1975, the infant home had almost completely disappeared in West Germany.

Concerning the history of knowledge, it is striking how influential research was in this case: the abolition of infant homes – at least in West Germany – happened largely due to the work of Bowlby and his colleagues. However, this only tells half of the story of Bowlby’s impact. His ideas also reached the broader German public, but with considerable delay. In 1967, a renowned paediatrician pointed out the importance of Bowlby’s work and admonished young parents: “Only the loving devotion of a mother or a permanent mother substitute guarantees that the physical, mental, spiritual and social abilities can fully develop.” The prerequisite, however, would be “that the mother devotes enough time to her child”.

This would be sharply disputed in the next years and decades, with Bowlby perceived as an opponent of the women´s movement, at least in West Germany. However, this is a different story to be told.

Photo: Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 1st, 1952, Stadtarchiv Munich, collection Rudi Dix, FS-NL-RD2430A33

All translations from German by Felix Berth