ABSTRACT
Arnold Gesell (1880–1961) was both a psychologist and a pediatrician. From the 1920s to the 1950s, his teaching and writing made him the foremost expert on parenting and child rearing until overtaken in popularity by his successor, Benjamin Spock. Although there is an institute that bears Gesell’s name, his influence today comes not from his students or followers but rather from an idea that he popularized and embedded in the national psyche: the widespread belief that there is a timetable of child development, a set of age-related stages through which infants and children pass, with each stage being characterized by typical behaviors. Although others, most famously Sigmund Freud, had also proposed stage theories of child development, no one had documented or laid out the landmarks of development so precisely or so comprehensively. One still hears parents explain the behavior of their toddler by referring to “the terrible twos,” or talk of a child “passing through a stage,” and parents or professionals still speak of “developmental readiness” or “school readiness.” These were ideas embodied in Gesell’s books, which bore titles such as The Mental Growth of the Preschool Child (1925b) and The Child From Five to Ten (1977). Arnold Gesell and infant. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203806135/53033083-3e02-48c0-88bf-b3501014f267/content/fig1_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> (Courtesy of Yale University, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library. With permission.)
