Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, Who Explored Babies Mental Growth, Dies at 99.

(Full obit.)

'Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, America’s most celebrated baby doctor since Benjamin Spock and the pediatrician who revolutionized our understanding of how children develop psychologically, died on Tuesday at his home in Barnstable, Mass., on Cape Cod. He was 99.

His daughter Christina Brazelton confirmed the death.

Before Dr. Brazelton began practicing medicine in the early 1950s, the conventional wisdom about babies and child rearing was unsparingly authoritarian. It was believed that infants could not feel pain. Parents were instructed to set strict schedules, demand obedience and refrain from kissing or cuddling. Babies were to be fed every four hours, by the clock, preferably from a bottle. When children were hospitalized, parents were allowed few if any visiting hours.

Dr. Brazelton, echoing Dr. Spock, whose book “The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care” became a best seller in 1946, rejected such beliefs and practices as being senseless, if not barbaric.

“He put the baby at the center of the universe,” Dr. Barry Lester, a pediatrician and director of the Center for the Study of Children at Risk at Brown University, said in an interview for this obituary in 2009. “We take for granted all the changes he helped bring about. He more than anyone is responsible for the return to natural childbirth, breast feeding and the ability of parents to stay with a hospitalized child.”

Nevertheless, Dr. Brazelton’s work never entered mainstream pediatrics and is not taught in most medical curriculums.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/14/obituaries/dr-t-berry-brazelton-dies.html?