From ABC News, around the world and into your home, the stories that touch your life.
This is Twenty-Twenty. With Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters.
Tonight, a special edition of Twenty-Twenty.
Whether you're a parent or not, what you're about to see may change your life.
Imagine suffering through this. A temper tantrum in the checkout line.
Lori's son is in the terrible tubes. Every day is a power struggle.
What can she do? What would you do? Tonight, advice from the experts.
Rockabye Baby. By six months, most babies can sleep through the night.
Try telling Lynn and Russell, they're up all night listening to this.
But they were doing something wrong. What was it?
Did we make the same mistake?
And a baby deprived of love and affection can be scarred forever.
How do you make sure that your baby is emotionally healthy like this one?
That's such a nice baby.
Join John Stossel and a host of parents, toddlers, babies, experts and research cameras that will make you laugh
and help you cope with some of baby care's biggest challenges.
What's a parent to do?
Good evening. I'm John Stossel.
Hugh and Barbara turned the program over to me tonight because of the special focus of our broadcast.
Over the years on Twenty-Twenty, we've done several reports on the trauma of raising kids.
And we're surprised at the response we got.
Thousands of you wrote. Some said hearing what the experts said made raising your kids easier.
Others said, if only my parents had gotten this advice when they raised me.
With this in mind, we're revisiting some of those pieces.
So if you're a parent or even if you dislike kids, tonight we offer you a combination of advice, humor and candid camera.
Humor because watching how kids torture us is pretty funny, but serious too because researchers now say that
whether we become emotionally healthy adults, whether we feel secure, can hold a job, have friends, love someone,
depends largely on what happens to us when we're little.
So we start at the beginning.
I love my girl. I love my girl. I love my girl.
Her name is Tracy and she's off to a good start in life because she has two parents eager to help her.
Their ability to tune into the needs of this little person will have great bearing on whether she becomes emotionally healthy or not.
Nothing like a baby.
Ten minutes after birth, Tracy opens her eyes and sees mom and dad for the first time.
Hi, bright eye.
As recently as the 1950s, mothers would say to their doctors, she sees me. I know my baby sees me.
The doctor would say, no, babies can't see until they're a few weeks old.
Newborns were considered blobs, just a bundle of reflexes.
Today, the researchers say the doctors were wrong. The baby can see.
We don't need to convince Tracy's father.
You're looking all around. What you looking for?
Got me wrapped around your little finger already, don't you?
Experts say that infants, even at this age, can hear as well as see.
In fact, even before they're born, babies hear and react to the outside world.
We know this because of new technology which allows researchers to look inside the womb.
These pictures show the fetus at two to four months.
No one knows for sure if the fetus is responding to the outside world at this stage.
But by seven months, the fetus will move if someone touches the mother's stomach or makes a loud noise.
So when a new baby is born, her parents' voices don't sound entirely new to her.
What do you think? Ready to go home?
Tracy is more interested in sucking her fist, but child psychologists say her father's talking to her is important
because when they look each other in the eye, they start forming a connection,
a connection which helps Tracy feel special and secure.
Do you like Mama's voice? Huh? Yeah, you're looking for me.
What does the world look like to the infant?
Vision tests done on babies as young as two-day-old Kathy Lord estimate that they have 20 over 700 vision.
That means I look something like this.
Hi, Tracy.
And here's Mom and Dad.
Huh? You wide awake, though, huh?
Babies see like this for about two weeks. Then vision gradually improves.
We adults seem to sense the poor vision because if you talk to the baby like this,
the baby sees a lot less than if you exaggerate and talk like this.
And that's what people do.
Open those beautiful eyes. I want to see all of those eyes.
At Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, pediatrician Barry Brazelton teaches patients that even at this age,
babies are individuals with likes and dislikes.
Two-day-old Chrissy is Bruce and Catherine Long's first child.
Over here, honey.
Dr. Brazelton has Catherine compete with him for Chrissy's attention.
Come on, Mommy. Start talking, Mommy.
Christina, honey.
They both call her. Will Chrissy prefer one voice and turn toward that person?
Yeah. Oh, you see her?
Yes, she chooses Mom.
Dr. Brazelton says Chrissy turns to Mom probably because in the womb,
it was Mom's higher-pitched voice she heard best.
As a result, babies usually respond better to high-pitched voices.
Over here. Come on, Chrissy.
It needn't be Mom's voice. When Dad raises his voice pitch, Chrissy turns to him rather than Dr. Brazelton.
Yeah, there I am. Come on, there I am. Oh, there I am.
Well, I would consider them just to be little ragdolls right from birth,
and it is amazing that she can turn her head.
It seems like a miracle that they know so much, I mean, right the day that they're born.
Sensing what the baby wants, trying to understand and follow its cue,
is essential if your baby is to feel understood and pleased about life.
I'm the Emily Carol Day.
All the touching and talking and singing parents do with their babies is far more important than was once thought.
Babies are hungry for the sight, sound, and touch of other humans,
and without it, their emotional health is jeopardized.
The baby who doesn't get the appropriate stimulation, appropriate for him or her,
is going to suffer a kind of deprivation.
Psychologist Harry Harlow studied the effects of deprivation on monkeys.
In one experiment, Harlow separated monkeys from their mothers at birth.
The monkeys were fed and otherwise well taken care of,
but they were allowed no contact with other monkeys.
They became emotional wrecks.
They huddled in the corners of their cages, often biting and abusing themselves.
When released into a cage with other monkeys, they were unable to play or mate or do things normal monkeys do together.
Do people have similar reactions? Yes.
In the 1940s, psychiatrist Rene Spitz studied orphaned babies in New York State and in South America.
All the babies were well fed and clothed and all their medical needs were taken care of.
Despite this, many of the babies became withdrawn and didn't grow or develop properly.
Why? Well, there was little involvement with other people.
There were not enough staff members for each of the babies to develop a special attachment to another human being.
In the orphanage where this baby lived, the staff was especially small.
The babies had no one to sing to them or hold them.
At one year, he could not sit up and didn't respond to other people.
Not long after the film was made, he died.
Say the psychiatrist, he died from lack of love.
More than a third of the children in that orphanage died before they were two.
And babies need more than just human contact.
Infant psychiatrist Stanley Greenspan says a bond must form between parent and child.
One basic idea motivates his research.
Every child is entitled to be as emotionally as healthy as he or she can be, just like they're entitled to be physically healthy.
Behind this one-way glass, Dr. Greenspan's observed babies and their parents for 14 years.
The results of his research are helping experts treat emotionally troubled babies.
Dr. Greenspan says with the help of the parents, healthy babies will go through four stages of development in their first year.
Stage one.
In the first couple months, we looked at the baby being able to take an interest in the world.
You look for increasing moments in the first couple months of life of those night-com alert periods.
Little Elizabeth sat very calmly in her mother's lap, looked clearly at her mother, and also took in the surroundings.
What are you looking at over there? Huh?
Oh! Hi, Elizabeth. How you doing? How you doing, Elizabeth?
At two to four months, the second stage begins.
We call the second stage falling in love, or forming an attachment.
Oh! Fine! That's fun!
Four-month-old Brian has fallen head over heels in love with his mother.
And she's helping Brian to find the human world satisfying and pleasurable.
Of course, babies can fall in love with their daddies, too.
For all those daddies who often don't think daddies are great wooers,
Brian's daddy is now demonstrating how wooing a daddy can be and how satisfying this can be to a baby.
No baby is this happy all the time, but your baby at this stage should start to smile and look at you and be this involved with you at least sometimes.
Stage three comes at four to eight months.
As though the baby says, love alone is not enough. I want love, and I want security, and I also want an emotional dialogue.
Where's Lily?
Most babies are able to now have impact on the world before they get results for the first time.
Very good!
At about 12 months, a healthy baby moves to stage four, which involves more complex behaviors like imitating.
Mommy starts drinking from the cup, and we see Elizabeth look at Mommy, and all of a sudden she starts drinking from the cup.
They're having a little tea party together.
Of course, not every baby hits these stages at exactly the same time.
The key thing is not to walk a baby into any one month period of time, but to see a general progression from interest in the world to falling in love with the world to an emotional dialogue with the world.
And if you don't?
We should take the same concern as when a baby is not sitting up or not crawling or not walking or not talking.
In other words, we have to find out the reasons why it's not happening.
It wasn't happening with Jenny. Jenny was a perfectly healthy baby physically, but she was emotionally deprived.
Here we see Jenny and her mom, and we can see that mom is feeling very, very depressed and somewhat preoccupied, and consequently Jenny was not taking an interest in the world.
Jenny and her mother Joan were part of Dr. Greenspan's research program, and later came in for treatment.
Jenny was much more subdued and sober than we like to see babies even in the first month.
The bond that usually develops between mother and child wasn't developing between Jenny and Joan.
By eight months, Jenny was a depressed little girl.
At this age, Jenny took no joy in any human being and didn't distinguish mom from a stranger and had this kind of interested but somewhat sober expression all the time.
All babies will show this some of the time, but Jenny had it all of the time.
Jenny had not gotten enough of what all babies need from their parents, touching, eye contact, that type of tender loving care.
At 18 months, we see a clear example of how Joan was not tuned in to Jenny.
Mother, instead of using soothing talk or soothing eye contact, begins raving Jenny up, trying to help Jenny calm down by stimulating her rather than soothing her.
Now another baby might like to be bounced around.
The idea is to take the clue from the baby, with the baby who's getting crankier as Jenny is now, then you switch postures.
But Jenny's mother doesn't.
Right.
Although Jenny was above average intellectually, she was 10 months behind emotionally.
She rarely smiled or took pleasure in another human being.
Now at this point, mother was willing for the first time to come in three to four times a week to our infant center with Jenny.
And we started individual therapy with Jenny to see if we could help Jenny learn to find relationships satisfying, learn to trust.
Psychotherapy on an 18-month-old child.
Right.
Don't these things just take care of themselves?
Some do and some don't.
And the question is, do we want to take the chance?
How do you do psychotherapy with a baby?
Dr. Greenspan demonstrates one technique on Brian, an emotionally healthy little boy.
He loves that birdie.
Suppose Brian couldn't get involved with people, say he rarely looked at his mother.
Dr. Greenspan uses a toy the baby does like to draw him into the human world.
Very good.
Now, mommy, if you take the birdie, nice and gentle, and you put it in front of your face.
Okay, see if we can get Brian, look at that, look at that, look at mommy now.
Therapy like that finally helped Jenny and Joan.
Here, Jenny is two and a half, and for the first time, they are emotionally close.
Can you see how good?
Mmm.
You did good.
At three, Jenny is, in most respects, like other children her age.
So amazing.
And when Jenny was four, her mother had another baby, Bob, and what a difference.
Look at how he looks at mother, how he, look at that, he even talks to mother.
He's so enraptured and so caught up with her.
She's warm, she's engaging.
Joan had learned how to be a better parent.
Just like some adults have to be wooed into a loving relationship, some babies have to.
Special tickets.
You can find the special thing that gets that baby interested in the world.
Now, listening to all that advice about wooing the baby made me wonder, aren't these kids going to be spoiled
if we devote so much energy to giving them what they want?
Well, Greenspan and other experts all said the opposite is true.
The more attention a baby gets, the less demanding they'll be when they're two or three.
Just love them, they said.
You cannot spoil a baby.
However, when your baby gets to be about six months old, there is one issue about which you may want to get tough.
Sleep.
In fact, the experts' advice on how to get a child to sleep through the night sounds so harsh that some parents say,
no way, I won't do that to my child.
The experts do have evidence to back them up.
Cameras recorded a baby who wouldn't sleep through the night.
A doctor discovered mom and dad were making a common mistake.
What's a parent to do?
Find out right after this.
A special edition of 2020.
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I've got a headache.
I've got a really bad headache.
A lot of pain relievers say they're strong for headaches,
but remember, just one Motrin IB gives you as much pain relief as two of those.
End of headache.
Non-prescription Motrin IB.
I think I'll make fresh dressing.
Good seasons?
Mm-hmm.
Which oil?
Pick a light one.
Mm.
Dressing's great.
Good seasons.
You make it fresh, you make it best.
Here I am, a pillar of the community,
and I love Kellogg's Frosted Flakes.
Brave adults challenge the notion that Frosted Flakes is just a kid's cereal.
In business meetings, I look around and wonder,
am I the only one?
Those sweet crunchy flakes and a splash of cold milk,
what could an adult like better for breakfast?
I'm crazy about the taste.
Hey, I've got nothing to hide.
It's easy to see.
Frosted Flakes have the taste adults have grown to love.
They are great.
Wednesday, on American Detectives,
see the girl next door get a makeover.
I think she's gonna look like a real uptown young woman.
But she's not looking for love.
I use the 50s to buy the dope.
She wants heroin dealers on American Detective Wednesday.
What are the four most exciting words in sports?
Gentlemen, start your answers.
What's the Indianapolis 500 Live Sunday on ABC Sports?
There's nothing like a good night's sleep.
And there's little more infuriating than a child who won't let you sleep,
who cries all night, enough to make you cry.
I'm not talking about babies here.
Newborns don't know night from day.
We expect to get up at night with newborns.
But at some point this just has to end, right?
They say that when children are about six months old,
they should be able to sleep through the night.
They should.
If they don't, there is something you can do about it.
Peacefully Sleeping Children.
That's a sight to warm any parent's heart.
But what happens if you can't get them to stay asleep?
The child wakes up at 2 o'clock and sometimes stays up to 3.34.
We keep musicians hours.
Maybe I get five hours sleep, but it's totally interrupted maybe every hour.
Wake up in the morning and...
Exhausted parents have all kinds of ways of getting their children to sleep.
Little bourbon, drugs.
Makes friends about taking away a privilege.
What do you do to get her to sleep?
We go through a little routine that involves standing at the window
and saying good night to the cars and good night to the trees
and good night to the wolfies and good night to the cats.
What I do is I try to give them a bottle and rock them back to sleep.
Good night to the people and good night to the curtains and...
If that doesn't work, I just try to lay him down and pat his back.
I mean, what can you do?
This woman takes her son for a daily ride in the family car to get him to take a nap.
Are you going to sleep, honey?
See the cars?
Do you see the bus?
The steady hum of the motor is one of the few things that will put him to sleep.
What else do you see?
But today, doctors who study sleep say if you want your children to sleep through the night,
patting them or rocking them or driving around in the car are not the best things you can do
because then your children will get used to having you help them go to sleep.
They won't learn how to fall asleep on their own.
Let me explain.
Research shows that almost all children wake up several times during the night.
It becomes a problem for parents only when the children cannot go back to sleep on their own.
These time-lapse video recordings were made by Dr. Tom Anders of Brown University.
They're jerky because they're 18 times normal speed.
Anders found that many children need their parents to help them get to sleep.
Six-month-old Derek, for example, needs a pacifier and a back rub before he'll go to sleep.
Then at four in the morning, he wakes and immediately starts crying.
See the pacifier? It's fallen out of his mouth.
That's one of the problems with pacifiers at night.
Mom comes in, puts the pacifier back in, and rubs his back some more until he falls asleep again.
But seven-month-old Evan is different.
When he's put to bed, he cries for a moment, but then he plays with his blanket and thumb and teddy bear,
and he's asleep in just five minutes.
When he wakes again in the middle of the night, he seems perfectly happy to look around in his crib,
chew on his blanket for a while, and then go back to sleep on his own, never disturbing mom and dad.
Dr. Anders calls Evan a self-soother.
He found more than half the kids that age fall in that category.
Anders says that only when a child can soothe himself to sleep will his parents get a full night's sleep.
Meet the Lutkovich family of Medford, Massachusetts.
My nights were completely disastrous.
Michael would wake up and we'd wake up three to six times during the night, every night, crying for a bottle, crying to go in our bed.
I kept making excuses for him, you know, always cutting teeth, and you know, we had two other kids.
I couldn't give them time during the day. I was just so nervous going at them for no reason.
We really had to do something about it.
What Lynn and Russ did was to go to see this man, Dr. Richard Ferber.
He's the head of the sleep disorders clinic at Boston's Children's Hospital and author of this book on sleep problems.
When we were researching this story, nearly everyone we spoke to said, children's sleep problems? Talk to Ferber.
So we did.
Parents are getting a lot of misinformation.
That's right.
Parents are told you just have to wait until the child outgrows the problem, and this is totally false.
By identifying the causes that the child isn't sleeping and making a few corrections,
you can almost always help your child to sleep better, and usually within a week or two.
Even Michael?
Well, Dr. Ferber felt his night wakings were being caused by the way his parents were getting him to go to sleep.
Russ and Lynn had a routine.
Every night they'd play Lionel Richie music and take turns rocking Michael.
It works like a charm.
Many songs later, Michael would be sound asleep and they'd put him in his crib.
However, a few hours later, he'd be awake and screaming.
They'd have to take him out of the crib and comfort him until he fell asleep again.
The Lutkiewicz's allowed us to stay with them in their house all night long for several nights,
so we could record whether Dr. Ferber's treatment would work.
Why don't we go over our plan for tonight to make sure everybody understands?
Dr. Ferber came to the Lutkiewicz's house to teach them how to get Michael to fall asleep without help from them or Lionel Richie.
The only way he knows how to fall asleep is being held like that with a bottle.
To change that, Dr. Ferber says next time Michael cries at night, don't rush in to comfort him.
When he wakes up, you're not going to be there and he's not going to have the bottle.
Instead, wait.
We'll start off by keeping it a real short time, like three minutes.
Then they can comfort him, but they can't pick him up.
And if he's still crying...
Then why don't we have you wait five minutes and then have you go in every ten minutes until one of the times that you're out of the room,
he'll start to settle and go back to sleep.
On his own.
Dr. Ferber set up a research camera to record Michael's progress.
On this first night, Michael's mom and dad get him to sleep the usual way.
...
After Russ and Lynn went to bed, all was quiet until two in the morning.
...
As Dr. Ferber had instructed, Lynn waited three minutes before coming in.
It's a long three minutes.
...
Normally in this situation, Lynn would have picked Michael up, given him a bottle, and taken him to bed with them.
Bad moves, says Dr. Ferber.
When your child wakes at night and seems hungry, and takes a bottle eagerly and goes back to sleep,
and then you say, well, therefore, he was hungry, so I did the right thing.
Seems right.
And, well, you're right, but you're wrong.
By giving him the feedings during the night, you're teaching him to become hungry in the night.
So you just reinforce this.
Tonight, Michael gets no bottle, and after reassuring him, Lynn leaves him again.
He's not used to this.
...
A reminder, Dr. Ferber says the point is not to just let him cry all night.
The way we do it is not to simply abandon the child at night.
We would have the parents go back in to reassure the child and to reassure themselves.
...
So far, none of this seems to be helping.
...
This is tough on Mom, and on Michael.
...
Now she has to wait five minutes.
You'd think he'd get tired of doing this, but he doesn't.
He never lies down. It's just unrelenting screaming.
...
He tries calling for Dad.
...
Five minutes is up.
Russ and Lynn had agreed that only one parent would handle Michael each night.
That way at least one of them would be fresh in the morning.
That was the idea.
...
This time, Lynn waited ten minutes, watching the clock.
...
After about an hour of this, Michael finally does fall asleep.
...
Now I can't sleep.
...
Three hours later, it's 6.20 in the morning.
Michael's up for the day. Tired, but apparently none the worse for wear.
I'm not sure I can say the same thing about Mom.
...
The second night...
...
This night, Dad does the tucking in.
This is the first time Michael gets put to bed while awake.
...
No improvement so far.
...
This time, Dad watches the clock.
Michael's older sisters give their opinions.
Give him two.
Me.
When Russ does go in, he succeeds in getting Michael to calm down.
But as soon as he walks out...
...
Michael's sisters get a kick out of this. They watch Michael in Dr. Ferber's TV set.
...
This time, when Russ goes in, he gets Michael to hug his blanket and settle down again.
...