The ages of the children to be studied spanned from 18 months to 5½ years, with the placement of children into the experimental or control group decided by the psychologists and Davenport’s superintendent. The median chronological age for the preschool group was 39 months, and for the control group, 41.9 months. Each group had a median IQ score of 80. No child with an IQ under 60 was included. The preschool children had lived at Davenport for a mean of 21.8 months, and the control group children for 18.4 months.10
As they readied the preschool for the children’s arrival, the Iowa station psychologists believed that they had anticipated every aspect of what children in the experimental group would require, including furnishing its two classrooms in ways that young children would find stimulating and appealing. Based on Wellman’s laboratory preschool experience, they provided high-quality supplies, books, toys, and equipment that any preschooler in the nation might envy. But according to historian of child institutions Bernadine Barr, in 1934, life for children in institutions was “an unknown world [that] had never been subject to systematic investigation.”11 Further, the psychologists found that institutional considerations limited their preparations, and they were unable to introduce the children into the school gradually, as they would have preferred.
On a mild October morning in 1934, twenty-one Davenport children were awakened well before dawn, dressed by their matrons, given early breakfasts, and, as the sun began to rise, were walked to a corner of Davenport’s property they had never before seen. Excited, they pushed open the gate of a picket fence and found themselves in a play yard just outside the small stone cottage that was their new preschool. In the cottage’s open doorway three smiling teachers greeted these young students who had rarely been welcomed anywhere. Neither the children nor the teachers could have predicted what happened next.
As the first children entered the schoolroom, those behind pushed forward, and in seconds an agitated mass of twenty-one children exploded toward open shelves, cupboards, bins on the floor, all stocked with painted toys, colored papers, building blocks, crayon boxes, children’s books, dolls of all sizes, brightly hued metal trucks, toy cars and trains, each a strange object never before seen or even imagined. In the classroom, too, were child-height tables, small personal lockers with the children’s names, and off to one side a bathroom with child-sized fixtures. Perhaps most perplexing were the three soft-spoken teachers offering to gently guide the children into this universe of new experiences.
Freed from Davenport’s institutional bondage but inexperienced in childhood’s universal language of play, the children erupted, pulling open drawers, reaching onto shelves, grabbing objects, and with no thought about what would happen, throwing and breaking toys, ripping books and paper, then feverishly searching for more objects. If one child held something that another wanted, they tore it from the other’s hands. They rejected all instructions and fought teachers’ efforts to calm them. One of the teachers wrote:
The first weeks of school the equipment mortality rate was extremely high . . . their favorite thing was to throw [toys] over the railing down the cellar entrance because they made such a good crash. . . . The children weren’t used to playing . . . they carried the toys clutched in their arms to have something to say “Mine” about.12
Overwhelmed by their desire for possessions, the children removed papers from wastebaskets, especially if they were brightly colored, and clutched those, too. They urgently clung to these riches, distrusting assurances they would be there the next day. Reassuring words would cause a child to nearly detonate,
to lose control of himself completely . . . throw himself on the floor, scream and kick his heels on . . . anything in reach (including another child or adult), take off his shoes . . . throw or break anything he got hold of. If not stopped, a child would overturn every object in the room.13
Skeels observed that while liberated for much of each day from the rough discipline of their cottage matrons, even after several weeks the children showed
a strange mixture of defiance, wish for affection, desire for attention . . . [yet] there was little desire for the teacher’s approval . . . a promise or consequence . . . seemed not so much to be disbelieved as to be ignored . . . Strangers and visitors were objects . . . the children’s reaction would probably have been the same to wax figures . . . yet the young child’s need for affection, understanding and security loomed large . . . for all too little of these . . . had been the lot of most of these children.14
As the preschool’s first year unfolded, the teachers also had to remedy a further mark of institutional deprivation—Davenport’s failure to provide reasonable hygiene and toilet training. Even after seven decades, the adult-sized bathroom fixtures in the children’s cottages had not been replaced: small children used pots, and boys were required to sit while urinating.
Skeels also found that the children did not recognize that in toilet training, as in all other aspects of the program, teachers wanted to help them, and their kind interventions were met with resistance and sometimes attack. Worse still, children who had almost never been comforted didn’t recognize that adults might understand or care about them, and because they lacked experience listening to another person, “they didn’t acquire ideas,”15 not even the idea of listening.
It became obvious that Davenport’s strict institutional control had left the children unmotivated and disconnected—nothing seemed to anchor or calm them. The psychologists even wondered if children who had done everything in regimented groups and were guided by fear of punishment “had any consciousness of themselves as individuals with distinctive likes, powers, and accomplishments.”16 Instead of the playful explorations that Skeels and his colleagues anticipated, the children’s responses to the preschool environment unleashed suspicion, moodiness and blindness about the consequences of their actions. Just as troubling, their ignorance of the world left a void where curiosity about the world around them might have been.
With meager vocabularies and poor enunciation, even basic communication seemed out of the question. The children did not have conversations, they mumbled, and small events caused them to yell. They had almost no experience of verbal exchange with another child or an adult. Communication came only in situations when the child felt extreme discomfort. “The favorite last resort,” Skeels said, “was crying.”17 From time to time a child who somehow had adjusted to the preschool would be adopted. When that child left, another orphanage child, similar in age, sex, and IQ score, would be added, requiring the teachers to stabilize the group anew. Under these extreme conditions, the nursery school staff of one half-time and two full-time teachers for twenty-one children was inadequate, but to the overburdened cottage matrons, even that number seemed indulgent, and to preserve institutional comity it could not be altered.
Through the teachers’ tremendous consistency, limited goals, and almost heroic patience, very gradually the children were able to establish new behaviors based on hard-won but tentative, trust. As an example, to promote the children’s sense that they could exercise some control over themselves, teachers focused on skills that the children had learned to enjoy: washing up, combing their hair, and toileting. Step by small step, and with much backsliding, the staff extended these successes to other activities. The teachers found, too, that one activity engaged every child—music—and they used singing to scaffold efforts in other areas.
By the second year of the study, from 1935 to 1936, the children’s responses became more organized, and some routines became possible. Children came to trust that materials would be available later and to respect the use of books. Rather than aimlessly turn pages, they learned to focus on a book’s pictures. Eventually, some asked questions about stories, such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Millions of Cats and even shared a book with another child. Although at first the children had little interest in dramatic play, they began to engage in the world of pretending typical of most preschool children, acting out the roles of doctors and n
urses or scenes from their cottage lives. Temper tantrums calmed, and during rest time children began to rest.
During that year, anything that triggered interest—a character in a book, leaves fallen from trees, insects flying into the classroom, a thunder and lightning storm, stones on the ground, a robin’s nest or a cocoon found in the yard—initiated a discussion. These exchanges signaled to the children that their interests mattered. Based on their increasing curiosity, teachers organized excursions to the airport, fire station, grocery store, even the orphanage laundry, and one day to a farm to see a thousand newly hatched chicks. Constructive and dramatic play invariably followed each excursion:
Older children were taken to the office to see the mail truck arrive and having watched the sorting process, brought the teachers’ letters back . . . to deliver them . . . [and] since the trip, some . . . watch for the mail truck each day and eagerly report its arrival.18
The children asked more questions, and with the answers came the message that what they said was important. The second year saw reasonable progress and they began to trust their teachers. In the third year, with the gains of the second year established, teachers concentrated on a specific disability common among the orphans: infantile speech and language. Teachers took every opportunity to repeat words correctly, to read stories and also articles from magazines, and they focused for much of the day on communication.
Even before the study concluded in the fall of 1937, George Stoddard wrote, “Untrained observers could see the differences . . . which were accumulating.”19 The Davenport preschool children had learned self-control, were kinder to other children, spoke with greater clarity, asked questions, and seemed more mature, qualities that led to adoptions for nearly half of the group. As the study continued, the improved development in those who remained at Davenport became evidence that the children needed more attention from adults, and the orphanage administration reduced the numbers in each cottage by one-third.20
But had preschool attendance influenced the children’s cognitive development? And what had happened in the development of the control group children who continued to live in Davenport’s deprived environment? “When we began,” Wellman recalled, “our expectation was that the preschool children would probably increase considerably in IQ while the non-preschool children would probably maintain about the same IQ. That was not what we found.”21 The researchers had tested the intelligence of both the experimental and control group children at six-month intervals. In those who had lived at Davenport the longest, over 400 days, the differences between the preschool children and the control group children were stark. Unexpectedly, the preschool children made only small IQ gains, though none lost intelligence, but every control group child—even those who began with IQ test scores of 90, had scores that declined to between 70 and 79, making them unadoptable.22 This drove home to the Iowans that Davenport’s orphanage environment relentlessly undermined children’s development. It is plausible, even likely, that had there been no study, such declines would have been the fate of many of the preschool children as well. Because Davenport was not a home for those with low intelligence, almost all of those children would eventually have spent the rest of their lives as inmates at Woodward or Glenwood.
In his report of these findings, Skeels noted the very different outcomes of the two groups. Fourteen preschool group children who began the study with IQ test scores between 60 and 69 gained a mean of 12.0 points. Control group children with those same IQ test scores gained 4.4 points. Two preschool children who began the study with IQ scores of 100 or more lost 4.5 points, while two control group children with those initial IQ test scores lost 28.5 points.23 The study’s most striking finding was that environmental stimulation favored the preschool children because it prevented the declines suffered by those in the control group. The researchers discovered, too, that stimulation protected the children in another way: although the preschool children spent a few hours each day and two days per week in the same environment as the control group, their intelligence did not decline. From the Iowans’ nearly 200-page analysis of the children’s intelligence, language use, vocabulary, social competence, and motor achievement, it is clear that in every area except motor development, where the groups were equal, the preschool children had higher attainment than the control group. But Skeels also found that language achievement in both groups was well below that of children growing up in families.24 Convinced that they had proved their hypothesis, Beth Wellman summarized the study’s conclusions: “Intellectual development,” she said, “is directly and seriously affected by educational experiences inside and outside of preschool.”25
Overlapping the period of the preschool study, from 1935 to 1937 Marie Skodak had been researching the effects of adoption on Davenport infants placed into middle-class families. As Wellman noted dryly, Skodak’s findings resulted from Davenport’s unique adoption practices in which no attention was paid to the infant’s family history. “Probably nowhere in the country,” she said, “[could] that condition be duplicated.”26 As Skodak discovered that the children were thriving, she recognized what earlier she had not fully accepted: their home environments had to be the factor that accounted for their good intelligence; their heredity seemed hardly to count.
Driving every numbered Iowa highway and most of the unnumbered ones, Skodak’s research took her to established farms and small towns, where she found Davenport children in homes that provided stability and financial security and supported their educations. They were flourishing. From the children’s records Skodak knew that when their families had given them up or the courts had removed them, it was because social inadequacy, extreme financial instability, mental and physical illness, incest, abandonment, and criminality marked the homes of their birth.27 To see firsthand the circumstances of the children’s birth families, Skodak also traveled to distressed backwaters, shabby schools, and ramshackle homes lacking indoor plumbing and adequate heating. She now understood that the adoptive families provided enriched lives that the children would not have known if they had spent their early years in these impoverished circumstances or in the Davenport orphanage. Skodak also recognized that Davenport’s very early placements of babies, which earlier she had scorned, might have handed her the rare opportunity to answer a question about the effect of the timing of adoptions on development. Was it possible, she wondered, that the age at which a child entered a secure, stimulative environment influenced their development?
To examine that question, Skodak tracked sixteen children whose birth parents had especially low intelligence and who were adopted at 2.8 months. Almost none of the mothers graduated from high school, and many had not completed grammar school. Their IQ test scores ranged from 54 to 74. In school, both parents had been passed from grade to grade because they appeared physically mature. The fathers’ occupations fell into the unskilled and slightly skilled categories. Almost all of these families relied on government assistance and were well known to state and local penal institutions, mental institutions, and local charities.28 But in the adopted group, 40 percent of the adopting fathers and mothers had educations beyond high school, and half of the adoptive fathers’ occupations were at the professional level.
Skodak found that these adopted Davenport orphans had a mean IQ of 111.5.29 When Skodak divided the children into the half whose adoptive fathers had the two highest occupational levels and the half in the midrange, she found another factor that influenced the children’s outcomes: the IQ mean of the first group was 5 IQ points higher than the mean of the other. In 1938, Skodak published these findings as The Mental Development of Adopted Children Whose True Mothers are Feeble-Minded.
In 1939, Skodak extended this study in her PhD dissertation, Children in Foster Homes: A Study of Mental Development. Here she reported on two groups of Davenport children: 154 adopted at about 2.8 months and 65 adopted when they were between 2 and about 5 years of age. She found that every early-adopted child had good to superior intelligence
and that the occupational levels of the adopting fathers also appeared to influence the children’s IQ scores. Children adopted when they were older made gains too, but their IQ test scores were not as high. In what might have been the first such discovery, Skodak suggested that the earlier children received environmental stimulation from responsive families, the higher their intelligence. She also confirmed the effect on the older children’s intelligence of the father’s professional level. Further, she confirmed what Wellman had found in nursery school children: those who began at the lowest intelligence levels gained the most.30
Sensitive to the life stories of those she studied, in her 1939 paper Skodak included brief reports of the birth parents of the under-6-month-old babies. One read, “This girl [the mother] was herself an illegitimate child. Her two sisters have had illegitimate children.” Another read, “The girl’s father is poor, hardworking, but unable to get ahead. An additional child would be more than this already too large family can bear.” And, again, “When the husband died Mrs. K. became very promiscuous. The father of this child could be any one of a number of men who frequent a certain low-grade tavern.”31 But more than sensitivity prompted Skodak to detail these histories: she wanted to clear the air. In that period, and perhaps later, if the child of a prostitute seemed bright, it might be whispered that they inherited their intelligence from one of their mother’s well-to-do clients. Skodak warned, “The popular belief that the fathers of illegitimate children are markedly superior to the mothers cannot be substantiated on the basis of any available evidence.”32
The Orphans of Davenport Page 16