Emily Anthes' Wonderland blog has an amazing story up today about "practice babies"—orphans taken in by elite colleges in the early 20th century, to serve as hands-on education tools for women enrolled in home economics courses.
Cornell's program ran from 1919 to 1969 (which strikes me as incomprehensibly recent). At Cornell, eight female students at a time spent a full semester living in a fully-kitted out practice apartment.
During this time, homemaking (as the name home or domestic economics makes clear) was considered to be something that could be conquered by science. Running a home based on instinct was considered to be woefully old-fashioned; the idea that raising a child and maintaining a home could be optimized by following a set of scientific rules was gaining currency. And these practice apartments were designed to teach young women the latest, scientifically "proven" techniques for running a home.
Accordingly, the practice babies were raised according to strict rules that governed everything from naps to diets. A paper published in The Journal of Home Economics in 1920, reveals this kind of thinking. The report, called "The Training of Children as A Part of Laboratory Work in Home Management," chronicles the practice baby program at the University of Minnesota during the 1918-19 school year.
After they got too old to be practice babies anymore, the children were offered up for adoption. Anthes wasn't able to find any information on what happened to the practice babies later in life, or how spending infancy in a research environment affected them.
I'd love to see follow up research on this. It's worth noting, though, that the outcome isn't necessarily guaranteed to be grim. These practice apartments weren't sterile laboratories. And, while they would not have ever had a single caregiver to bond with, there's a good possibility that at least some of the practice babies ended up with a better babyhood than they would have in an orphanage. Given what we know about human development, adult/child interaction is extremely important in the first couple years of life. Having a bunch of adults paying attention to one or two babies seems like it could be better, developmentally, than having a few adults trying to care for a large number of small children.
My hypothesis would be that, if the practice babies did experience problems growing up, those problems would have had less to do with the practice apartment environment, itself, and more to do with the child-rearing techniques being tried out on them, or the experience of being taken away to a new environment at an age where they were already forming memories. It would be really interesting to know the truth.
Via Steve Silberman
