Why practice with a plastic doll when you can borrow a crying orphan?
As recently as the 1960s, home-ec infants and toddlers were fed, bathed, and changed by multiple “mothers” a month.
Imagine your life in a bland, virtually empty apartment with no books on the shelves or art on the walls. Like an IKEA display — a house but not a home. In this house, you have no real “mom,” just a series of women who spend a week at a time, maybe more, playing the role of mother before leaving to return to a realer, more permanent life on the outside. One woman puts you down for a nap. A different woman is there when you wake up. And perhaps another sticks a bottle in your mouth or changes your dirty diaper. This cycle carries on until, one day, after knowing virtually nothing but “pseudo-mothers” and a home devoid of personality, you’re carried back to an orphanage and placed up for adoption.
This isn’t the premise of a dystopian novel, but the very real early life of the hundreds of “practice babies” used in home economics and domestic economics courses at the university level in the mid-20th century. Between 1919 and 1969, at least 50 universities across the United States regularly borrowed young babies — the younger, the better — from orphanages. On rare occasions, a baby might be volunteered to the university by a young, unwed mother who lacked the means to properly raise her child but didn’t want to give it up. The babies would then be taken to university-run “practice homes” or “practice apartments,” where they would remain for one to two years under the care of a class of junior or senior home economics majors.
Though this would never happen today, the programs that utilized practice babies came under little scrutiny at the time. Children even seemed to flourish in these programs — many of the babies were malnourished when they were received, but quickly became plump and healthy.
Sinister and inhumane as it sounds, the practice baby movement was well-meaning. Without modern attachment theory to convince them otherwise, many people believed that having more qualified caregivers could only be good for a child. In fact, extensive waitlists would often form for the more popular programs as potential adoptive parents fought for the chance to get their hands on a baby who had received such structured, guided care during the first year of life.
In an era when academia was booming, parenthood — especially motherhood — was regarded as something that could be taught just like any other scholarly topic. Author Lisa Grunwald, who who wrote a deeply researched novel, The Irresistible Henry House, told NPR, “The practice houses really embraced the idea that you could learn mothering the same way you learned cooking or learned chemistry.”
And how did life turn out for the babies whose earliest developmental years were co-opted in the name of academia? Hard to say. As Eileen Keating, archivist of the Cornell College of Human Ecology, told ABC News, “The whole program never used real names because they were orphans.” At Cornell, for example, each baby was given the last name “Domecon,” a reference to the term “domestic economics,” and babies at the Eastern Illinois State Teachers’ College were given either the last name “North” or “South,” depending on which campus building served as their temporary home.
“They [administrators] didn’t want us ever to find out,” Keating explained. “They were adopted and there are no records. We have baby books that the students did, but other than that, we have nothing.”
But some practice babies — the ones who knew about their early childhoods — came forward. On January 5, 1999, the Eugene Register-Guard, in Oregon, ran a story about Shirley Kirkman, a former practice baby at Oregon State University under the care of 34 students. She claimed that the experience left her with lifelong angst and emotional duress. On raising four children of her own, she told the paper, “I didn’t know how to love anyone. I just felt dead inside.”
On September 12, 1993, The Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania, ran a very different story on the heartwarming reunion of Donald Aldinger with four of his practice mothers, 46 years after he’d left their care.
Aldinger had grown up in the foster system under the care of an Amish-Mennonite couple with dozens of other foster children on a dairy farm outside of Quakertown, Pennsylvania. He left at 17 years old, earned a Bachelor’s degree and then a Master’s, got married, had three children, and earned his living teaching high school students in Delaware. When his marriage failed, he returned to Quakertown, where he became consumed with filling in the gaps of his past.
Aldinger had spent thousands of hours researching, looking through court and newspaper documents, interviewing people, and writing letters to known relatives in Germany. He ultimately discovered that he was the youngest child of a homeless couple who had been repeatedly arrested around Allentown, Pennsylvania. They had been forced to give up their other six children, and when Donald was born inside Northampton County Prison, they were forced to give him up too. Declared abandoned, Donald was sent to be a boarder baby at Sacred Heart Hospital. But he only spent two weeks there before being selected as a practice baby at Allentown’s Cedar Crest College, where 17 home economics majors took turns working six-week shifts to care for him until he was placed in foster care at 13 months old.
Aldinger’s only disappointment in this discovery, it seems, was that it took him so long to find the first group of adults he’d become attached to. As he told The Morning Call, “For the first time in my life, I feel like everybody else who had a family.”
