Are Parenting Experts Good Parents?

The Story of John Watson and His Kids

Jan 22, 2023

In 1928, John Watson and his wife Rosalie Rayner wrote “Psychological Care for the Infant and Child”. The book was a bestseller in its time. On the other hand, three of Watson’s four children went on to attempt suicide, with one dying by it.

One would think that people who claim to be parenting experts, who write books on it and those who tell others how to raise their children would have the happiest kids in the world.

The reality, in case of John Watson, was far from it.

But before we get into the story of Watson and his kids, we should understand what made Watson who he was, and why was he so influential to the world of psychology.

Watson - A Troubled Man

John Watson may have had one of the sharpest scientific minds in Psychology but his personal life had been full of pain and abandonment right from his childhood. His father had abandoned him and his mother when Watson was still a child and he never did too well in studies.

He once had a run-in with the law as well when he fired a gun in a public place but luckily escaped the jail. The shooting turned out to be a critical moment in his life. He started taking his studies seriously and ended up graduating with a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1903.

His PhD had focused on the behaviour of rats and it is safe to say that Watson was fascinated by the little rodents. He wanted to study humans just like he studied rats - a radical focus on overt behaviour with no attention paid to an unobservable inner psychological world.

His work with rats in 1903 foreshadowed his relationship with his children later in life.

Watson - The Strict Behaviourist

Watson first made his name for the “Little Albert Experiment” where he conditioned an 9-month-old infant to experience fear at the sight of harmless objects such as a toy bunny.

Little Albert ended up dying at the age of 6.

You might get an idea about the kind of parent Watson would go on to be given what he did with Little Albert. While the experiment is today abhorred as an unethical setup, at the time, there was very little to stop people from experimenting on humans.

And that is exactly what he did with his kids as well. All four of them. They were subjected to his experiments on human conditioning.

He had four kids from two marriages. Polly and John Jr from the first marriage to his student. Billy and Jimmy came from his second marriage to Rosalie Rayner, his assistant.

Much like any other behaviourist, Watson was detached from his kids and rarely showed them any form of affection. Behaviourists believe that every human emotion is a learned response.

In Watson’s mind, showering the child with too much love would spoil them and not prepare them for the realities of the world. In his book, Psychological Care of Child and Infant, Watson argued that

"Fathers had to restrain the appalling behaviour of mothers, mothers were too soft and kept on smothering the baby with hugs and kisses. Most mothers were guilty of ‘psychological murder”

Billy - The Experimental Kid

If withholding love from your children is not enough, Watson and Rosalie went a step further by conducting experiments on their own child Billy, to see if they could condition him into behaving how they wanted.

Here are some of the experiments they ran on him.

When they saw Billy would calm down on hearing soothing music, they restrained his head, arms and legs and played the music again. Naturally, Billy was angry and started crying. Science had now been conducted successfully.
When Billy cried about being left alone in a room, Watson expressed his displeasure at his “overdependent” son
They faked a fight in front of Billy to see how he would react. Billy started crying.

It should come as no surprise that Billy had an uneasy relationship with his father later on in life. The two seemed to be at odds on almost everything.

Billy becoming a Freudian psychoanalyst didn’t help the matters either. His father had championed a form of science which treated psychoanalysis with disdain. Billy became what his dad hated.

He blamed the behaviourist school for a lot of problems he faced in life and died by suicide later in his life.

Do Beliefs Precede Children

Thought the life of Watson as a parent, there is a theme of him keeping his ideas of behaviourism and scientism above the very clear distress that his children were going under.

The worst of the worst was probably when he shipped his children off to boarding school while their mother, Rosalie was sick. The children never met their mother again. Rosalie passed away due to an illness and Watson was again unable to fulfil his role as a father in those trying times.

This begs a question.

If a parenting expert were to see that their methods were putting their own children at harm, how far would they go ahead with it? Would they really accept their shortcomings or would they let their children suffer for the sake of their public image?

What would you do if you were in Watson’s position?

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