In Harlem, Baby Talk And The Art Of Diplomacy

Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, successor to Dr. Spock and a precursor to the hordes of child care experts whose books now crowd stores’ shelves, entered a small classroom at an elementary school in Harlem one Saturday not long ago and smiled broadly. The parents in the room, mostly mothers, did not return the favor. They were seeking child care advice because they’d had it, and they were evidently tired, in no mood to charm.

The doctor assessed the situation and treated it. “Wow, would you look at all these beautiful ladies, up and down,” he said. “And there’s even one handsome man.” With the exception of the handsome man, a young father who slouched in his seat and glared, everyone in the room laughed, now part of an audience rather than a class.

For more than 30 years, Dr. Brazelton, the legendary pediatrician with the showman’s name, has been winning parents over with a shameless soft sell, a deft reconciling of their needs and worries with those of their children. Pore over the literature, and that kind of support and perfect pitch are harder to find than you’d think. Surprisingly often, the experts who write child-rearing books adopt a tart or patronizing tone, sounding less like guides than defenders of children from the ignorance or selfishness of their bumbling parents.

For a working mother, in particular, flipping through a child-rearing book in search of simple advice about diaper rash can easily tank an evening, if the rash hadn’t already accomplished that. Heaven forbid that she get sucked into that chapter on working and parenting in the ever-popular “Baby Book” by William and Martha Sears. (Work if you must, the authors say, but at least consider a job that will let you wear your child in a sling, like clerking in a baby shop.)

In “Touchpoints,” the classic parents’ guide that Dr. Brazelton published in the early ’90s, there’s prescription, but also extreme diplomacy. When he suggests that new mothers try to wait four months before returning to work, he does not ring alarms about missing priceless milestones; he expresses concern that “sharing those new steps with a caregiver” can be “awfully hard” on a mother. O.K., even that might sound a little patronizing, but implicit in his language is concern for the parent, all part of a theoretical construct that was revolutionary at the time he proposed it. It couldn’t sound more common-sensical now: that parents in every stratum of society need support as much as their newborns do.

And who better to provide some of that support, Dr. Brazelton apparently feels, than Dr. Brazelton himself? At least every other week or so, he leaves his home in Boston and flies somewhere (often New York) to speak at daylong training sessions on children’s developmental needs and milestones.

Dr. Brazelton, it’s worth mentioning, will be 90 in May.

Once they had relaxed, the mothers in that Harlem classroom, there for one of nine sessions in a program called the Baby College, let loose with their questions: What to do, for example, with a toddler who won’t brush his teeth unless his mother has him in a half nelson? “Is it so important that he brush his teeth?” asked Dr. Brazelton, his native Texas accent still strong. His legs crossed casually, he leaned in with interest. “I’d almost quit,” he said, suggesting she let the tooth-brushing go for a while. “You’re in a battle, and you’re not going to win it. The 2-year-old is stronger than we are.”

“So why can’t he get a job?” the mother muttered, although she looked a little relieved to have permission to sit out that particular struggle.

Occasionally, as he toured various classrooms, where parents had been organized by the age of their children, he would let someone take his arm to guide him down the hall or he would turn to someone else to interpret whatever question the hearing aid in his right ear had garbled. But he kept up a steady energy of encouragement. Every baby whose face he peered into was a marvel or a genius. Every mother could do no wrong, even the one who said she’d told her doctor she was going to meet her outside her office on 95th Street and give her a piece of herself if she didn’t get some straight answers about whether that first flu shot had triggered her baby’s pneumonia.

Dr. Brazelton — maybe he caught only part of the story, or maybe not — seemed to beam with delight in her initiative. “I know you’re used to getting shoved around by the medical system,” he said. “Just don’t take it. My God! You have a right to get all the information you need.”

At the start of the day’s events, he’d shown an auditorium full of mothers how to hold a newborn, crowing when the mother whose baby he had picked warned him not to drop her. “I’ve held around 50,000 babies,” he assured the crowd, “and I haven’t dropped one yet.” He cradled the baby gently as he showed the mothers how a newborn will turn to hear her mother’s voice, an obvious exercise in building maternal pride. He answered a few questions (to the mother whose baby wanted to eat soap, a gentle “I don’t like the idea”).

And then he joined the parents, mostly grateful mothers with their babies, in a rousing rendition of the hokeypokey, jumping his whole self in as best he still could.

E-mail: susan.dominus@nytimes.com

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