Shows how therapeutic culture led experts and parents to see babies as highly interactive and communicative beings.

Watching Babies tells the history of how babies became psychiatric and psychotherapeutic patients in modern medicine and healthcare. In the early twentieth century, it was virtually inconceivable that young children could suffer from psychiatric conditions such as depression, anorexia, or psychosis. Yet by the twenty-first century, infant mental health had become a thriving professional field.

Covering the 1920s to the 2020s, the book uses cases from the United States and Western Europe to follow in the footsteps of the psychologists, physicians, philologists, teachers, and parents who pioneered and contributed to the scientific observation of children. Grappling with early questions and gendered debates over who could best “observe the child,” the narrative reconstructs the halting steps that lead toward professionalization. Throughout, historian-physician Felix E. Rietmann discusses the introduction of novel technological tools (such as cameras and video recordings) for the study of children, changing perceptions over maternal care and caregiving relationships, the field’s irruption into popular culture, and the newfound role of the “baby specialist” in family life. He ends with ethnographic observations of an outpatient clinic, making use of his medical training to discuss the implications of our knowledge—and its limits—for both clinical practice and the legal and juridical frameworks of child protection.