The forget-me-not babes

[motherengine]

I posted on imdb (internet movie database) concerning the use of infants in a scene in a film with much shouting and stress. the scene bothered me in the sense that I felt the use of the infants to be crass and unnecessary (according to the films director, several babies were used due to the fact that the mothers would take the babies away when they felt the children had become too upset). I was berated for my statement and told to “get a life”. the main issue of contention was the idea (which I had not stressed) that permanent psychological damage could occur to the infants from such actions. I remember sigmund freud (this guy has had way too much influence on common perceptions of the mind) being sited to justify the idea that babies do not retain enough information to allow for future related problems to occur. this made me question the validity of this popular theory which led me to the classical conditioning experiment with an eleven month old child by john watson [see j. b. Watson and little albert] and to articles such as the following from ‘psychology today‘:

 

"Buried Memories

Newborns face a lesson plan that would make college students quake. In their first two years, they learn to take their first few steps, single out favorite foods and begin the incredible feat of learning language. Despite the importance of these milestones, though, most of us remember almost nothing prior to our third birthday.

What happens to those first memories? Research has yet to find an answer, but a recent study suggests that the information a baby stores in his mind early on can have a subtle influence later in life.

Researchers Katharine Cutts and Stephen Ceci brought puppets to several day-care centers. Children 8 to 18 months old learned to remove the puppet's left mitten to get a treat hidden underneath, a game they played for three weeks. After four months, the researchers returned with the puppets to test the babies' memory of the mitten with the hidden treat.

Almost half of them pulled off the correct mitten, while only one infant in a group that had never played with the puppets chose the left mitten. Though the researchers had purposely removed the treat on their second visit, most showed no sign of surprise or distress when they discovered an empty-handed puppet."

 

this then led me to the idea that tracing memory and influence is an impossible feat for any scientist. the problem is that even the smallest thing could have a kind of chaos theory effect in the brain for all anyone knows. One screaming match between parents after going to the circus could cause someone to fear clowns later in life, or be related to bouts of anger or any number of things in any number of variations, or have no effect at all. it may actually be impossible for human beings to raise fundamentally functional offspring, especially considering the enormous complications technological influence affords contemporary existence. but the answer cannot be known because the chemistry of memory, thoughts and behavior cannot be definitively traced. seems better to me to err on the side of caution though when it comes to babies and aggressive displays (though this is just my humble opinion).

 

I am not saying that all of this proves anything. I just thought it would be worth mentioning and wanted to get it off my mind anyway.