The Nursery Years: The Mind of the Child from Birth to Six Years

The Nursery Years (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1929) is Susan Isaacs's short book for parents on the mental life of children from birth to six. Isaacs observes that the physical care of infants had passed from custom to science, while the care of their minds was still left to mood, habit and moral principle. Since the most important events of a child's mental life happen before school, it is parents who need to understand why a child behaves as it does, and to bring intelligence as well as affection to the task. Drawing on psychoanalysis and on the developmental research of Gesell, Binet, Burt and Terman, she presents play as the child's work and the means by which it grows, and holds that the infant has a rich emotional life from birth, with wants, fears, anger, love and hate. She traces the early centrality of the mouth, the meaning of feeding as love, the biting phase and the feeling invested in the bowel and in toilet training, and asks for patience, gradual weaning and calm prevention rather than punishment. Developmental norms, built from the observation of many children, help parents neither baby the child nor demand too much of it. Chapters on the child from two to six, in relation to the world and to its parents, are followed by answers to common problems, advice on playthings and a short list of don'ts for parents. Enlarged in 1932, the book was reprinted many times until 1971 and became Isaacs's most widely read work for parents.