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s urely as an avenging ghost. You and I would not be able to see this
psychic damage until it was too late. But Watson could peer into its
heart, looking directly into the unseen world of the human mind. After
all, he was a psychologist.
Research indicates that Watson's advice was just short of
criminal. Anthropological studies of the !Kung of the Kalahari show
that children whose mothers pet them constantly often turn into far
more self-confident adults than the coldly-raised progeny of civilized
Londoners.62
Why did parents follow experts like Watson into what was
apparently a pit of hellish error? Why are they today following
specialists who say that you must deal with your child's misbehavior
only by reasoning with him or her or that you must encourage a child
to vent all his or her hostile feelings? Because raising our young is
another area in which we are wrestling with invisible forces. We do
not know what spoils a baby. We often do not know why he or she is
crying at this very minute. We certainly don't know what effect our
picking him up today is likely to have twenty years from now.
And when we are pathetically attempting to deal with the
invisible, when we have the least evidence of reality, that is when we
are most vulnerable to the experts.
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