Arnold Gesell

American physician and educator

• Born: June 21, 1880
• Birthplace: Alma, Wisconsin
• Died: May 29, 1961
• Place of death: New Haven, Connecticut

Gesell was a pioneer in the study of the physical and mental development of children and the author of a series of popular books that influenced both psychologists and parents for more than thirty years.

Early Life

Arnold Gesell (geh-ZEHL) was born in Alma, a small village on the Wisconsin bank of the Mississippi River; he was the eldest of five children. His mother was an elementary schoolteacher, and both parents encouraged his intellectual curiosity. In an autobiographical sketch written when he was in his seventies, Gesell recalled that his childhood was filled with pleasures “accentuated by the everchanging, yet enduring river.” Roustabouts and riverboat crews gave Alma a diversity lacking even in many larger towns. Violence, alcoholism, and crime were not unknown in Alma, and Gesell felt that his childhood experiences sensitized him, thus preparing him for his later career.

Gesell was a precocious student who was graduated from high school at age sixteen. For his commencement exercises, Gesell ignited a tubeful of hydrogen, startling the audience. He also made a large electromagnet with the help of the village blacksmith and demonstrated its power by attaching a flatiron and hanging suspended from its handle. For the next three years, he attended the teachers’ college at Stevens Point, Wisconsin, where he studied, played football, edited the student newspaper, and participated in oratorical contests. On graduation, he taught American history, ancient history, German, accounting, and commercial geography in the Stevens Point high school.

After two years of teaching, Gesell entered the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he studied history under Frederick Jackson Turner and wrote a thesis titled “A Comparative Study of Higher Education in Ohio and Wisconsin.” Gesell then spent a year as principal of a high school in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin.

In 1904, Gesell received a scholarship to Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and earned a Ph.D. in psychology in 1906. At Clark, he studied under a number of important scholars in the new fields of psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology, including the founder of the field of child development in the United States, G. Stanley Hall. Gesell’s doctoral dissertation was on the manifestations of jealousy in animals and in humans at ascending age periods, beginning with infancy. In the months following his graduation from Clark, Gesell worked as a counselor in a boys’ camp, as an elementary schoolteacher and settlement worker at East Side House in were chosen, and as an instructor in psychology at the State Normal School in Plattesville, Wisconsin. An invitation from Lewis M. Terman, an innovator in intelligence testing, took him to a teaching position at Los Angeles State College, where he met and married a colleague, Beatrice Chandler, in 1909. With his wife’s encouragement, Gesell returned to Wisconsin and began to study medicine, anatomy, and histology. In 1911, he was appointed assistant professor of education at Yale University, where he completed his M.D. degree in 1915.

Life’s Work

Even before he completed his medical degree, Gesell helped organize the Yale Clinic of Child Development. The clinic provided laboratories, playrooms, and offices where Gesell, his colleagues, and graduate students carried out their studies. Gesell also served as school psychologist for the State Board of Education in Connecticut and as a member of the governor’s Comission on Child Welfare in 1919. These activities on behalf of Progressive reform led to the establishment of a Division for Educationally Exceptional Children under the State Board of Education.

Although Gesell never lost interest in disabled and exceptional children, it is for his studies of children without disabilities that he is best known. As part of his teaching technique, Gesell invited mothers to bring their infants into the classroom for observation and testing. Infants of different ages were given objects and their responses noted. Gesell also used photographs to illustrate his studies. In 1924, he began to use motion pictures to record infant and child behavior in the clinic. In 1930, a grant from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial allowed him to build a homelike studio where babies’ daily activities sleeping, walking, feeding, bathing, playing, body motions and their social behavior were filmed. Over the years, a photographic research library of more than 300,000 feet of thirty-five millimeter and sixteen millimeter film was established.

As interest in child development grew throughout the United States, Gesell and the Yale Clinic added a nursery school that made it possible for the staff to follow children from infancy through adolescence to adulthood. These studies were the basis of Gesell’s best-known and most important work. In 1934, he published Infant Behavior: Its Genesis and Growth with coauthors Helen Thompson and Catherine S. Amatruda. Five years later, he and the same collaborators joined Burton M. Castner in writing a work in two volumes entitled Biographies of Child Development: The Mental Growth Careers of Eighty-four Infants and Children . The title is indicative of Gesell’s approach. Focusing on the life histories of the children, Gesell discussed the differences in physical and mental development among what he called normal, superior, atypical, and premature infants.

In his conclusions, Gesell stressed that the growth characteristics of children are determined primarily by hereditary and constitutional factors, but that these factors do not operate independently of postnatal environmental influences. Heredity determines the direction and scope of the environmental influences. Every individual, Gesell argued, has a distinctive complex of growth, but each infant goes through fundamental sequences. Developmental norms are useful for comparison and diagnosis, but not as a unit of absolute measurement. Because of the rapidity of behavior growth, norms change at frequent age intervals.

As Gesell refined these concepts in his later work, he produced books that were popular because they both reassured parents and challenged them to stimulate their children’s development. Infant and Child in the Culture of Today , written with Frances L. Ilg, went through seventeen editions in the United States between 1943 and 1974. Originally published during World War II, the message of the book is affirmative and optimistic: The family is the basis of a democratic culture, a culture that respects individual freedom. This book, like several of Gesell’s works, was translated into dozens of languages. In 1946, Gesell and Ilg published The Child from Five to Ten , a book that provided parents with further norms for their growing children and recommended books, records, and games to stimulate their mental and physical growth. In the aftermath of the war, Gesell asserted that the intrinsic goodness of children offered the best hope for the perfectibility of humankind. In 1956, he, Ilg, and Louise B. Ames concluded their child development studies with Youth: The Years from Ten to Sixteen .

Gesell also worked on a study of Kamala, a child raised by wolves in India; on twins; and on the development of vision in children. In 1948, he retired from Yale University but continued to work in his field, first at Harvard, then again at Yale. He died in 1961, leaving a permanent legacy of studies that show the importance of prenatal and infant care.

Significance

Gesell began his work on infants and children during a period of reform directed at protecting children and their families. The American Pediatric Society was founded in 1889, Judge Ben Lindsey began working with juveniles in the courts in Denver in 1894, John Dewey founded an experimental school at the University of Chicago in 1896, the National Playground Association was created in 1906, the Boy Scouts and Campfire Girls were established in the United States in 1910 (and the Girl Scouts by 1915). Gesell was typical of his time in that he believed strongly that every child had a right to the opportunity to live up to his or her hereditary potential. Repeatedly, he expressed the belief that the science of human behavior and individuality can flourish only in a democracy.

Gesell’s faith in human potential was tempered, however, by an equally firm belief in the role of biology in setting limits on human development. His concern for the health of the body ran counter to the prevailing emphasis in American child psychology on psychoanalysis, learning, conditioning, and cultural environment. It is ironic that the scholar who tried to synthesize biological and psychological definitions of humans should be remembered only as an early inspiration for the study of child behavior, and not the field’s founder.

Gesell was also a great humanist, who wrote about children with deep understanding and compassion based on memories of his own childhood. Living through a time when thinking men and women had to combine science and religion in their philosophic outlook, Gesell could conclude his 1949 edition of Child Development (a textbook combining Infant and Child in the Culture of Today and The Child from Five to Ten) with the heartfelt observation that “One of the great tasks of postwar education is to impart the life sciences and the physical sciences in a manner which will preserve both rational and spiritual values.”

Bibliography

Boring, Edwin G., et al., eds. History of Psychology in Autobiography. Worcester, Mass.: Clark University Press, 1952. A brief autobiography that begins with Gesell’s acknowledgement of Herman Melville’s metaphor of the mat maker’s loom the shuttle, the warp, and the woof being like chance, necessity, and free will in the creation of an individual career. Gesell attributes much of his life to the interplay of these forces.

Cravens, Hamilton. “Child-saving in the Age of Professionalism, 1915-1930.” In American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook, edited by Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985. An analysis and evaluation of Gesell and some of his important contemporaries, such as Henry Herbert Goddard, Lawrence K. Frank, and John Dewey.

Gesell, Arnold, Catherine S. Amatrude, Burton M. Castner, and Helen Thompson. Biographies of Child Development: The Mental Growth Careers of Eighty-four Infants and Children. New York: Paul B. Hoeber, 1939. In part 1, by Gesell, the lives of the children are described from about 1928 to 1938.

Gesell, Arnold, H. M. Halverson, Helen Thompson, Frances Ilg, Burton M. Castner, Louise Ames, and Catherine S. Amatrude. First Five Years of Life. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940. This work refines the previous work outlining the studies of infants and young children.

Gesell, Arnold, and Frances L. Ilg. The Child from Five to Ten. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1946. Developmental characteristics of older children with chapters on hygiene, sex, play, and school life.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Infant and Child in the Culture of Today. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943. Popular discussion of the role of the family in a democratic society, the individuality of growth patterns in children, and the developmental sequence from birth to five. Illustrations of the Yale Guidance Nursery, lists of toys and play materials, and recommended books and music for children.

Gesell, Arnold, Frances L. Ilg, and Louise Bates Ames. Youth: The Years from Ten to Sixteen. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956. Continuation of the earlier volumes based on longitudinal studies of children in the Yale Clinic.

Hulbert, Ann. Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. This chronicle of the philosophies and scientific claims of twentieth century child-raising experts examines Gesell’s work and includes a discussion of his disagreement with John Broadus Watson about children’s personalities and maternal responsibilities.

Lazerson, Marvin, and W. Norton Grubb. Broken Promises: How Americans Fail Their Children. New York: Basic Books, 1982. Good review of local, state, and federal policies and programs for children.