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of two ideas popular at the time—a worship of sterile, aseptic conditions at
all costs, and a belief among the (overwhelmingly male) pediatric establishment that touching, holding and nurturing infants was sentimental maternal foolishness.” It wasn’t just that doctors were engaged in a quest for germ-free perfection. Physicians, worshipping at the altars of sterility, found themselves shoulder to shoulder with their brethren who studied human behavior. Their colleagues in psychology directly reassured them that cuddling and comfort were bad for children anyway. They might be doing those children a favor by sealing them away behind those protective curtains.
    Perhaps no one was more reassuring on the latter point than John B. Watson, a South Carolina–born psychologist and a president of the American Psychological Association (APA). Watson is often remembered today as the scientist who led a professional crusade against the evils of affection. “When you are tempted to pet your child remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument,” Watson warned. Too much hugging and coddling could make infancy unhappy, adolescence a nightmare—even warp the child so much that he might grow up unfit for marriage. And, Watson warned, this could happen in a shockingly short time: “Once a child’s character has been spoiled by bad handling, which can be done in a few days, who can say that the damage is ever repaired?”
    Nothing could be worse for a child, by this calculation, than being mothered. And being mothered meant being cradled, cuddled, cosseted. It was a recipe for softness, a strategy for undermining strong character. Doting parents, especially the female half of the partnership, endowed their children with “weaknesses, reserves, fears, cautions and inferiorities.” Watson wrote an entire chapter on “The Dangers of Too Much Mother Love,” in which he warned that obvious affection always produced “invalidism” in a child. The cuddling parent, he said, is destined to end up with a whiny, irresponsible, dependent failure of a human being. Watson, who spent most of his research career at Johns Hopkins University, was a nationally known and respected psychologist when he trained his sights on mother love. Articulate, passionate, determined, he was such an influential leader in his
field, that his followers were known as “Watsonian psychologists.” And like him, they came to consider coddling a child as the eighth of humankind’s deadly sins. “The Watsonian psychologists regard mother love as so powerful (and so baneful) an influence on mankind that they would direct their first efforts toward mitigating her powers,” wrote New York psychiatrist David Levy in the late 1930s.
    Watson believed that emotions should be controlled. They were messy; they were complicated. The job of a scientist, of any rational human being, should be to figure out how to command them. So he was willing to study emotions, but mostly to show that they were as amenable to manipulation as any other basic behavior. The emotion of rage, he said, could be induced in babies by pinning them down. That was a simple fact, observable and measurable and controlled by the mastery of science. If it sounds cold, he meant it to be. Watson, as many of his colleagues, was driven by a need to prove psychology a legitimate science—with the credibility and chilly precision of a discipline such as physics.
    Psychology was a young science at the time, founded only in the nineteenth century. Until that point—perhaps until Darwin—human behavior was considered the province of philosophy and religion. Scientists considered physics, astronomy, chemistry as serious research subjects, but those disciplines had hundreds of years behind them. Even one of the founders of the American Psychological Association, William James of Harvard, said that psychology wasn’t a science at