(dramatic instrumental music)
(buzzer blares)
- [TV Announcer] Never hug or kiss them.
Never let them sit in your lap.
Mother love is a dangerous instrument.
- [Narrator] Today, you're not likely to find
a popular parenting book
that warns you about cuddling your own baby.
But take a look into history,
and you'll see a time when touch was deemed taboo.
And one psychologist was setting out to prove
that love isn't such a bad thing.
(man groaning)
- The early 20th century psychologists
were all about trying to make science
kind of a thing of formulas and calculations.
Relationships, and even worse affectionate relationships,
become something that just doesn't enter
into the calculations.
- [Narrator] This is Deborah Blum,
science journalist and author of "Love at Goon Park:
Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection".
- This is a white male-dominated science.
These are men who are often not in the least involved
in parenting, themselves.
And in the white male version of reality,
everyone had their place,
and women's place was in the home,
and children were to be seen, not heard.
Love and affection were messy, girly things.
- [Narrator] And to be taken seriously,
no scientists had time for such messy, girly things.
Instead, people like Freud, Pavlov, Skinner and others
converged to explain the mysteries
of the human mind and body in far less sentimental terms
- You saw a push to establish human behavior
as sort of a series of drives and responses.
The only important part of the relationship
between mother and child
is that the mother satisfies the hunger drive
and feeds the baby.
- [Narrator] Plus, any signs that a child
returned their mother's affection
were simply brushed off as classical conditioning.
And one person making this point was John Watson.
- One of the things that John Watson found really important
was what you might think of as conditioning a baby.
We know this from Pavlov's dog experiment.
(bell jingling) (dog panting)
Watson believed you could do this with babies as well.
- [Narrator] In fact, he said mothers
over-condition their babies by coddling them.
(dramatic orchestral music)
- Mothers should not pick up their children.
If you held them too much or comforted them too much,
you would destroy their moral fiber.
- [Narrator] Watson's book even goes as far as to say
that mother love is a dangerous instrument.
- Wait a minute.
- [Narrator] And may wreck your adult son
or daughter's vocational future.
- Show me why I shouldn't fire you!
- [Narrator] And their chances for marital happiness.
- And do you wanna do that to your child?
(baby crying)
Of course you don't, right?
So people actually set aside their own instincts.
- [Narrator] There were a few people
who disagreed with Watson's advice.
- There were doctors and also psychologists
who started to see health issues
related to this kind of isolation of touch and affection.
- Stressing experiences in childhood
will produce mental conflict.
- [Narrator] But unfortunately, many people speaking out...
- [Man] You nincompoop!
- [Narrator] Were mocked for not having
enough scientific proof.
(laughing)
It would take a number of years
for someone to emerge with the right amount of gumption
to challenge these ideas head on.
(cheering)
That person was Harry Harlow.
- He was a poetry writing, chain smoking,
philandering, alcoholic, psychologist,
completely work-obsessed,
and he was a complete street fighter.
I'm going to say this, and you can bleep me out.
He would just take notes no (monkey screeches)
when he had an idea that he thought was worth doing.
- [Narrator] Harlow started up a primate laboratory
in the 1930s to study monkey intelligence.
But as time went on,
he and his students noticed something very odd.
- Mothers who would reject their babies,
those babies became very attached
to the blankets that they put in the cage,
and when they had to remove the babies from the cage,
the babies were traumatized by letting the blanket go.
- [Narrator] Which made them wonder, what's going on?
- He was married at that time to a child psychologist,
Margaret Kuenne, who saw the parallels with human children,
and so they decided to just look at touch.
Does the baby get something out of being able to cuddle?
- [Narrator] They came up with a plan
to raise newborn monkeys in isolation
and gave them fake surrogate mothers.
- [Harlow] These are the only mothers these babies ever had.
- One of them was a cloth mom, and she was very cuddly,
and one was a wire mom who wasn't cuddly at all,
she was made of metal.
They would put both the moms in the same cage.
The cloth mom was just there,
but the wire mom had the good stuff, the milk.
- [Harlow] Watch.
- [Deborah] And what they found was every single one of them
would go over a wire mom to feed.
- [Man] He's got to eat to live.
- [Deborah] Then go back to cloth mom.
- [Narrator] That alone went against
all of those early theories.
- [Deborah] The only important part
is that the mother feeds the baby.
(buzzer blares)
- [Narrator] Here's where things start to get scarier.
(suspenseful orchestral music)
- [Man] It looks diabolical.
- They would put them in a strange situation room
with a weird toy,
and they would see how the baby monkey would respond.
- [Narrator] And the difference in reactions was huge.
(monkey screeches)
- [Man] He's scared, all right.
- With cloth mom in the room,
these babies would run to their mom, hold on,
and then they'd get really brave.
They'd go challenge the evil monster and yell at it.
But if they had been raised by wire mom,
it didn't even matter if she was in the room;
they just collapsed.
And they started realizing that touch is comfort
and that comfort is confidence,
the exact opposite of what John Watson said.
- [Narrator] In 1958, Harlow shared his findings
in a speech called The Nature of Love.
- And then he doesn't mess around.
He says, this is love.
This is not some weird drive response thing.
These babies love their mothers, and they need that.
- And you can imagine the response, right?
(audience cheering)
Well, not exactly.
- The psychology community was horrified.
(woman shrieks)
What have you done? You used the word "love".
(bangs table)
You know that's not in a single textbook.
- [Narrator] Okay, so some of them
still weren't quite ready to hear it,
but they would come around eventually.
- Publicly the response was much more
people recognizing that this was real.
Science is trying to cling desperately
that love is meaningless,
and the rest of us are starting to say you're wrong.
- [Narrator] Harlow's experiments
helped inspire a big paradigm shift,
but it would be remiss to ignore the backlash
that also followed.
- We see ourselves in these experiments.
You cannot look at a baby monkey and not see a human.
And I think it's why the work is so condemned.
- [Narrator] There's no doubt that Harlow's work
traumatized monkeys, and with that came public outrage.
- He didn't mean to, but he forced the setting
of some ethical standards and lines
that people just said we can't cross these lines.
It made him a poster child for the animal rights movement,
and you can't argue that there's not some reason for that.
(bright electronic music)
- Harry Harlow wasn't afraid to say
that love and touch matter.
And by fighting for science to recognize that,
he also changed the futures of kids growing up today.
- And I say that growing up in the post-Harlow generation,
love is an essential part of who we are.
It defines many of our most important relationships.
That's what a secure attachment is:
the fearlessness to face the world,
because if you do fall, someone has your back.