Pediatricians and Parents: Remarks on Receiving the C. Anderson Aldrich Award

Abstract

When John Bartram phoned to tell me of this greatly appreciated honor, he said I could speak to whatever topic I chose. Implicit in such trust was the assumption that I would be brief. Dr. Aldrich played a major role in bringing the practice of infant feeding from an era of pseudo-scientific misapplication of metabolic data into a psychologic era.1 He recognized that feeding was the the most important early transaction between mother and infant and that appropriate pediatric advice could promote healthy personality development. His wisdom was derived from a large experience with mothers and babies, and a grounding in the philosophic concepts of Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. . . . Respect the child, respect him to the end, but also respect yourself."2 I propose to address briefly the lack of respect by some pediatricians for the felt needs of mothers. Dr. Aldrich saw the mother and infant as a unit. He considered the term "self-demand" feeding too autocratic and substituted "self-regulation," recognizing that limits should be set which respected the mother and her other responsibilities as well as the infant. He preferred a schedule of feeding which was neither rigid, leading to anorexia, nor virtually nonexistent, leading to early obesity and what Spock termed chronic resistance to sleep, the latter a family affair with tensions for father as well as mother. His conceptualization led us to summarize our own laboratory observations under the title, "A Metabolic Basis for the Individualized Feeding of Young Infants," and to a later study of self-regulation of intake of food by prematurely born infants, a step toward flexible, sound advice to anxious mothers on discharge of their infants.3