Born in Alma, Wisconsin, Arnold
Gesell was a psychologist and physician who influenced the way many
Americans thought about childrens development. “Nothing
in the field of social welfare needs more deliberate and conscious
regulation than child adoption,” he declared, neatly summarizing
the goals of adoption reformers during the first half of the twentieth
century. Throughout his long career at Yale University, Gesell championed
minimum standards and
professionally governed family formation. He worked with the most
important advocacy organizations of his day, including the U.S.
Childrens Bureau and the Child Welfare
League of America. Gesell spoke and wrote widely on such topics
as placement age, preplacement testing, and clinical supervision
in adoption. He favored the confidentiality
of adoption records. His public reputation was a hallmark of his
career and he tried hard to popularize methods of scientific selection
and matching in adoption.
Like other adoption reformers, Gesell believed that adoption agencies
run by trained experts would arrange adoptions far superior to those
arranged through baby farms
or black market adoptions based on commerce or sentiment.
Gesell attended the University of Wisconsin, where he was swept
up in the tide of Progressive reform. After completing his Ph.D.
at Clark University, he moved to New York City, where he taught
elementary school and lived in the East Side Settlement House before
launching an academic career. He headed Yales Clinic of Child
Development, founded in 1911. It was here that Gesell conducted
his famous studies of hundreds of New Haven children, from the late
1910s through the 1930s. His project brought children into his Yale
laboratory, where they were given mental and behavioral challenges
ranging from bells and balls to stairs and strangers. He meticulously
recorded their responses in numbers, pictures, and films. Whatever
more than half of the children he studied did regularly was defined
as “normal.”
Gesells ambitious goal was to establish universal developmental
norms beginning at birth. The idea that development follows regular
patterns over time is commonplace today, but it was then a novel
way of thinking about growth. It also had significant practical
consequences. The applied technology that Gesells research
produced was a scalea testthat promised to measure whether
children were developing normally or deviating from expected patterns
of mental, motor, linguistic, and social growth. By measuring more
than intelligence, or I.Q. (“intelligence quotient”),
the Gesell scales moved beyond the first generation of mental tests.
They were widely utilized by clinicians working in medical and educational
fields. In adoption, they were used to determine if children were
qualified for adoption in the first place. At a time when social
workers worried about under- and over-placement (errors that gave
bright children to dull parents and dull children to bright parents),
the Gesell scale also guided which children were placed with which
parents.
Gesell believed that adoption was risky and even inappropriate
for some children, but he also believed that the risks could be
measured and predicted in advance. This made him a technological
optimist. He was less inclined than many of his peers toward eugenics
and the view that most dependent children were unadoptable because
they were products of bad heredity. Gesell trusted developmental
testing to prevent the adoption of defective children, but he also
trusted it to make adoption better for the children and adults involved.
Here is how he put it in 1926: “[Adoption] can not be entrusted
altogether to good will or to intuitive impulse, or even to unaided
common sense. There are too many opportunities for error and miscarriage.
The combined critical judgment of the social investigator, the court,
the physician, and the mental examiner should enter into the regulation
of adoption. . . . Systematic psychoclinical examinations
not only will reduce the wastes of error and miscarriage but will
serve to reveal children of normal and superior endowment beneath
the concealment of neglect, of poverty, or of poor repute. Clinical
safeguards can not solve all the problems of child adoption but
they can steadily improve its methods and make them both more scientific
and humane.”
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