Los Angeles Times – August 3, 1983
By PAULA LYNN PARKS
Magda Gerber sits relaxed on the couch with her bare legs tucked under her. Her slight roundness gives her a warm grandmotherlyness. She has a youthful, independent, self-possessed nature. It is a confidence born of the knowledge that she is an authority on respecting infants and not treating them like toys. “I know I know more. In infants, I’m not modest. I feel very secure,” Gerber said.
Method From Hungary
She has a self-assuredness that she wants to instill in infants and that many mothers trust in. She has brought the controversial Pikler method of infant rearing from Hungary and given it roots in the United States. Gerber, like pediatrician Emmi Pikler, wants infants to be respected as individuals. She disagrees with rearing methods such as patting them on the head, confining them in playpens, never giving them a choice of toys, or pushing them to learn when it is more appropriate just to let them experience their environment.
Gerber, instead, teaches parents to respect their infants. She teaches parents to observe the behavior of their infants. Since everything is new to an infant, she believes infants need simple toys, like a colorful scarf, within their reach. She feels infants need time away from their mothers to play alone and explore a safe environment. Gerber teaches parents not to push infants to turn over, sit, or stand because they will do that on their own when ready.
Gerber began her study of infants years ago in her native Hungary. There she studied under pediatrician Pikler, executive medical director of Loczy Institute. Since coming to the United States, she has studied infant rearing at the Reiss Davis Child Study Center, and from 1972 until 1976, she co-directed the Demonstration Infant Program in Palo Alto. In 1978, she founded Resources for Infant Educarers in Los Angeles, which offers instruction for parents and professionals involved in the care of children. She said that she has had a “long life,” but would not specify how long. “I don’t like to talk about it. How old one is, is in the mind,” she said.
Ambitious Parents
“I came from a rather upper-middle-class family with ambitious parents,” Gerber said. Part of her distaste for pushing infants probably stems from the way her parents pushed her. They hired a French child nurse to care for her until a German-speaking grandmother complained that she couldn’t talk with her granddaughter. So the parents hired a German nurse. “When I went to kindergarten, a progressive private school, I didn’t know how to speak Hungarian (the native language).” Gerber guessed that she spoke to her parents in gestures.
She finished an accelerated study program in linguistics and married at 18, what she calls a “very young” age. When her first child was born, her mother advised her to hire a caretaker for the child. Looking back on that period, she says she was “scholarly”, but about real life, I knew very little.” She hired the woman even though she said she didn’t feel good about it. One day she saw the woman trying to put something in her daughter’s mouth. “There was a struggle. I got deeply upset. I pushed her and said, ‘Leave! Leave! And don’t touch her again.’ ”
When her husband, the owner of a stocking factory came home she told him that she would rear her baby. Then she realized that she didn’t know how. Gerber studied early childhood education and by the time her second daughter arrived three years later, she thought she was an expert. But her second daughter was different from the first. Gerber was again bewildered and continued studying.
Difference Between Doctors
Then she met Pikler. When her youngest child was ill and she couldn’t reach her pediatrician, Gerber tried the mother of her oldest daughter’s friend. The mother was Pikler. Usually, when the doctor arrived, Gerber would very animatedly describe the child’s symptoms. But Pikler responded to Gerber by just holding up her hand; a sign that Gerber said meant “Shut up.” Pikler then turned to the child and asked how she felt. “I heard my child be more intelligent than I had ever heard. She told more than I had and in a neat, precise report,” she said.
“That was my ‘aha’,” Gerber said. “Her old doctor talked down to her in a way that was desperately appalling. I asked Pikler to be our pediatrician.” But since Pikler took families only from the point of the wife’s pregnancy, she said no. Her philosophy included weekly visits to the mother and child to discuss any concerns of the mother and to check on the child. The contract was renewed yearly.
Pikler believes that gross motor development is adversely affected by propping, positioning, and the use of restrictive devices, such as infant seats and walkers. She tested her theory in Budapest at the National Methodological Institute for Infant Care and Education, called Loczy. Founded in 1946, Loczy reared more than 2,000 orphaned infants, later found to be well within the normal range for mental health, intelligence, and economic achievement.
Gerber said she aggressively pursued Pikler before the doctor finally agreed to become her children’s pediatrician as an exception. Gerber also studied under her. When Gerber’s third and last child, a son, was born in 1943, she felt secure in her parenting skills.
“End to Affluence.”
“All horror broke out in Hungary” soon afterward, Gerber said. Because of the political situation, the family was forced to end its affluent way of life and live in what Gerber termed “famine.”
Her husband spent a year in jail, and his factory was taken from him. “As a capitalist in a communist country”, she said, “he was considered the enemy.”
In 1957, the family left Hungary, arriving at a refugee camp in New Jersey. Gerber said she soon found out that the field of infant psychology she was involved with in Hungary did not exist here. The family moved to Boston, where she worked at Harvard’s Language Resource Engineering. The next year they moved to Los Angeles, and she worked at the Reiss-Davis Child Study Center. Through working with disturbed children, Gerber said, she learned that the first step is not just to change a symptom such as aggressive behavior, but to help the parent understand its causes and be able to see the baby as a person.
Gerber dislikes pacifiers. She calls an infant’s finding his thumb the first step toward autonomy. “ They cannot lose it. They can put it in and take it out. They are not dependent on their mother to give it to them or to throw it out when she thinks they are too old for it,” she said. Deciding when to have a pacifier is the first power struggle between the infant and mother. “The act of pacifier insertion is quick and aggressive,” Gerber said. “The message is ‘Shut up.’ I tell you when to cry or not to. I don’t want to hear your complaining”.
“Babies who are told by having pacifiers stuck in their mouths that it is not OK to cry are the ones who end up relearning to cry in primal scream therapy,” Gerber said. “How can you prepare a child for life without allowing them to go through the negative emotions?” she asked.
In 1978 she founded Resources for Infant Educarers (RIE) in Silver Lake, a nonprofit organization, in the duplex unit under hers. She trains professionals in infant care and teaches classes for mothers on how to raise their infants, concentrating on the first two years. She estimates that she has trained 50 in the method, as well as lecturing around the world. The six-week classes for mothers are $120 and hold a maximum of six mothers with their infants. As part of the mother-infant class, a day is set aside for the fathers to participate.
“Teaching Parents Not to Push.”
At a time when it is fashionable to push children to learn more sooner, Gerber is teaching parents not to push any learning, not even walking or sitting up. She believes that babies will advance in their motor skills when they are ready. “Babies who sit up and walk on their own,” she said, “will sit straighter.” “Time is not wasted,” she said, “because what babies are learning is an approach to their self and mind. Much of learning is sifting the old knowledge with the new.” “It is too much to add curriculum to that. They are busy learning the curriculum of life, deprived, not enriched,” she said.
She disapproves of advanced learning programs. which she said are based entirely on anxiety. Children will spend so much time in school learning situations that it is unnecessary to start too soon.
“Children are overstimulated, and their minds cannot digest it all,” Gerber said. “It produces people who don’t know how to relax, and they go from one therapy to another,” she added.
Gerber wants to produce babies who can appreciate the importance of peaceful quiet time. “That is what I value. It is not for everyone, just those with similar values,” she said.
Paula Lynn Parks is a graduate of the Columbia Graduate School.