The Heir Conditioner

The LARB Quarterly, issue no. 44, “Pressure,” presents an excerpt from Hannah Zeavin’s “Mother Media.”

By Hannah ZeavinApril 9, 2025

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This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 44: Pressure. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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IN 1944, B. F. Skinner sought to address the universal problem of early child-rearing—that it is labor-intensive. He turned to furniture to remediate not just the figure of the nanny, or the domestic tasks associated with child-rearing such as laundry, but also mothering itself. Crucially, he set up all care as following from the space of sleep. He called his invention simply the “air crib” (frequently mistermed the “Skinner box,” which was for performing operant conditioning on rats and pigeons), tellingly equating the remediation of maternal labor with a nonhuman lab experiment. Skinner’s crib was the first attempt to render a total system for infant care. It was ostensibly made for his second daughter, Deborah, but was, more accurately, for his wife Yvonne, who collaborated on the design—even though in the press, the device was considered largely Skinner’s alone.

As B. F. and Yvonne Skinner approached having a second child, Yvonne, “knowing what she was in for,” dreaded “the drudgery of the first year.” Skinner himself purportedly rose to the challenge. In 1945, he reported in Ladies’ Home Journal about the experience of designing the air crib, in an article appropriately titled “Baby in a Box,” again an implicit denaturing of maternal care (a subsequent profile appeared in LIFE magazine in 1947). Skinner wrote, “In that brave new world which science is preparing for the housewife of the future, the young mother has apparently been forgotten. Almost nothing has been done to ease her lot by simplifying and improving the care of babies.” The Skinners attempted to do just that, mapping out the daily schedule of this young mother—following behaviorist principles—and attending to what was deemed to be developmentally important. In response to what remained, they began “gadgeteering,” addressing several problems of child-rearing such as frequent laundry, self-amusement, and cleanliness (for example, the sheet was replaced with a roll of material that, when soiled, could be advanced, keeping the crib fresh and clean with just the turn of a crank). These jobs all fell to the mother. The Skinners reported astounding success with the invention: the baby was never sick and never cried, but remained communicative in other ways. These detailed benefits flowed from the crucial part: she was safe from smothering in her sleep.

Skinner sought to make an atmospheric medium for childcare in an era when “mother” was being increasingly termed a “holding environment” or simply an “environment” herself. The air crib, which was also sometimes jokingly called the “heir conditioner,” also emerged at a moment when time-saving devices were domesticated to save the work of housewifery. The dishwasher, for instance, saved the time spent doing dishes so that the housewife was liberated to do her other work: mothering. The air crib was in part received as either miracle or abomination precisely because it was rather singular: it was a time-saving device addressed to mother as parent rather than as housewife. And in attempting to save time from parenting, it marked parenting as labor rather than as unmediated love.

As Skinner understood it, the result for infants was nearly miraculous: “It takes about one and one-half hours each day to feed, change, and otherwise care for the baby. […] And after all, when unnecessary chores have been eliminated, taking care of a baby is fun.” The Skinners’ personal pediatrician thought the device was wonderful—and Ladies’ Home Journal had a number of unnamed psychologists and doctors evaluate Deborah Skinner, all of whom concluded that she was very healthy. (Although her role in the air crib may have given rise to pernicious rumors that she had gone mad, as Deborah Skinner wrote in the 2004 essay “I Was Not a Lab Rat,” published in The Guardian, “The early rumours were simple, unembellished: I had gone crazy, sued my father, committed suicide.”) Pediatricians and their patients began to want the device for themselves, writing to Skinner at Harvard to ask for its specifications. At the same time, some people were scandalized, including a few of the Skinners’ intimates. These two reactions—joy at the automation of the maternal function and subsequent partial liberation from the drudgery and sleeplessness of child-rearing, and the indignant upset that anyone could abide that same liberation—help identify the conflicted feelings around automating mothering that emerged at midcentury. These feelings were articulated in telling contrast to the pervasive and self-evident welcome given “time-saving” devices that automated the labor of domestic chores. One form of devicing was acceptable, the other contested.

Some worried about the impact on the baby’s temperament. This was similar to responses to earlier devices, which were thought to erode character, the idea being that catering to a baby would make it temperamentally “soft” or else too rigid. Most of the critiques centered on two interrelated fears: that any form of artificial care was essentially against nature, and that going against nature had consequences—something would go wrong with the mother and her child. Skinner retorted that what was artificial in his crib occurred naturally elsewhere, and as historian Karin Calvert shows in her 1992 book Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900, the very turn toward cribs and away from the cradle in the first place was initially a response to removing the human nanny and replacing her functions with furniture. Skinner wrote that “some of the friends and acquaintances who had heard about what we proposed to do were rather shocked. Mechanical dish-washers, garbage disposers, air cleaners, and other laborsaving devices were all very fine, but a mechanical baby tender—that was carrying science too far!” As historian David Snyder writes of this moment, “A burgeoning middle class grew out of a cultural context that privileged leisure time over work. […] Soon, nearly every consumer product was ‘quick & easy’ or ‘timesaving.’” Time-saving was not intended to mix with mothering but to allow for more of it. Where it did, the mother would be shamed: mothering was not to be limited to make room for leisure.

The last critique centered on deprivation: any automation of maternal care would leave the baby, as Skinner put it, “robbed of affection and mother love.” This was cast as a matter of nature that evades innovation tautologically. To reject the disciplining of the baby via device, there must first be a fantasy that a baby is not yet disciplined by the comings and goings of the family, by familial labor and its resources, by parental need in response to these other demands. Skinner wanted his baby to sleep through the night, sleep longer, and sleep better so that he could too, and so could his wife.

As in previous moments of infant sleep innovation, shifts in both productive and reproductive labor produced the contours of technological imagination. This was, after all, a moment when white women of Skinner’s class were increasingly entering the workforce. The air crib put babies on the schedule of waged labor long before they were productive, disciplining them to productive time rather than that of reproduction. Deborah’s parents were able to control her schedule by warming the crib before she would wake, so that she would keep sleeping until they were ready for her to rise. The baby slept while mother was sleeping, rather than the other way around. Skinner saw this as a victory. As he told a number of “law wives” at Harvard, children are masters of operant conditioning; when they cry, parents pick them up. Skinner saw this as a way, more or less gently, to turn the tables, for the apparent benefit of the whole family.

Although Skinner makes the sound point that a mother who can manage a baby well will be more loving than a resentful and exhausted mother, management is an ambivalent aspiration that represses and elides other concerns. After all, conceptions of “nature” and “natural” attach themselves to mothering, especially under essentialist conceptions; automation maps to the 20th-century story surrounding masculinized labor. Skinner’s reception redounds to the popular axiom that you can’t automate love or its tokens—the triad of attention, presence, and environment that are central to the mother medium—without provoking shame and revealing reproductive labor as labor. You can smuggle all the work of mothering back in, and all the fear of the artificial, under this collapse of love and labor: intensive mothering then becomes the most loving. On the other hand, many parents now do discipline their children in the paradigm of neo-scientific care—conforming them to micro-markers of development, whether via sleep training, introducing foods in particular sequences, or restricting feeding to particular times. The difference is that the Skinners had a machine to do it, taking over for mother.

If Skinner’s reputation as a “behavioral modifier” or a “zapper” damned the reception of the air crib, it was partially because the assumption was that the infant was being modified, reduced to a little experiment. In reality, Skinner argued that the crib was for the baby, a better solution than the standard crib in its own room—or as Skinner had it, a “little jail.” For Skinner, the entire family could undergo operant conditioning, and its schedule and its gestures of care were all on notice for revision. The machine became a mediating instrument between parental labor and child; mothers modified the machines (see figure 2.4) rather than only directly attending to their babies. Air cribs were also movable rather than necessarily isolated and static. Although babies slept independently, the air crib was also their place of play, and accordingly could be pushed by a parent to any room.

Nonetheless, the Skinners were able to market their own device; a few companies produced air cribs, and hundreds of children were raised in them between 1957 and 1967 (including Skinner’s own granddaughter, Justine). Skinner’s correspondence reveals, in the late 1940s, a dogged attempt to collaborate with pediatricians, the main interface for parents, to get the “baby tender” produced. Parents wrote to Skinner directly, hoping to build a crib themselves after seeing it in LIFE, the Indianapolis News, and The Boston Globe. By February 1948, Skinner estimated that over 100 of his correspondents had made air cribs at home using his mailed-out specifications; Robert Topper, a psychologist at Emory University, was helping manufacture them for parents in the South; and one company had produced several for the wealthy in Los Angeles. Skinner happily reported that one could be purchased for a “reasonable price” of about $150 (nearly $2,000 today). Yet to Skinner’s chagrin, he could not reconcile those who wanted the air crib with a mass market for automated mothering. These “Skinner children” (the inventor of the device displacing their patronymics) were treated as suspicious, wrong, off, or freakish, despite being healthy, or alive at all.

In the mind of the American public, Dr. Spock Skinner was not. Despite the positive reception of the Air Crib in some medical circles, in 1976 Skinner was dismayed to watch a documentary with him as titular subject (Laurence Olivier narrated). This same fate befell earlier pediatricians who attempted to bring mechanics into pediatrics: to combine the mother of flesh with a machine was to redouble mother as medium, and it was met with panic (as Janet Golden details in her 2018 book Babies Made Us Modern: How Infants Brought America into the Twentieth Century). Those who remained interested in the air crib were often other child development researchers who hoped to use it to measure child activity. The clinic, that is, remained the dominant location for the development of mother media and the only place where the perceived coldness of its technology was understood as proper to its artificial environment.

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Skinner’s model of mothering was one that desired regulation, automating care itself. By midcentury, there was robust literature on the rise of such regulation and its corollary, “feedback.” This was a hallmark of cybernetic thinking. When actual parenting met theories of conditioning, or regulation and feedback, the dangers of being misattuned were still high and occasionally resulted in child death. Air cribs have a theory of smothering built in; this was not the only theory, and it accounts for the change in home use by those who adopted the device. The fear that was used to affirm the practicality and scientificity of the machine—smothering—was not just a fear in 1944 when Skinner got to work on the air crib but also one that increased across the 20 years of the air crib’s reception. We might think of the manufacturing date of 1944 as just before a revolution in mind for American parents: the release of Dr. Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946). The volume—and Spock parenting generally—is often remarked upon as ushering in a new era with its opening sentences: “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” As we have seen, midcentury visions of mothering understood the mother as all impulse, no instinct, and where instincts were credited, they were suspect. These sentences, and the rest of Spock’s manual that followed, ostensibly conveyed the polite but assured end of scientific motherhood. It might seem, then, that Skinner’s machine was accidentally but quickly and woefully out of step with mainstream American parenting practices.

Another, quieter change was taking place in pediatric medicine. Spock’s rejection of scientific motherhood even as he continued to produce manuals for parenting is an instance of legerdemain: he told his mother-students to trust themselves while also telling them how to do so—the same paradigm with different sentiments expounded by scientific mothering. With Spock, the affects surrounding parenting manuals changed (if not their intent), as well as some of the guidelines. About infant sleep, there was one single change: a new, widespread (and in practice calamitous) commandment to place infants in the prone position so that they’d sleep better and longer. This echoed the idea of mothers trusting themselves and what they witnessed: babies, the manual argued, sleep better on their stomachs. Rather than turning them over, leaving them be became, in Spock’s hands, an instance of common sense. Spock argued simply that pronated sleep would bring relief and rest to the exhausted parent.

At the tail end of Skinner’s production of the air crib, smothering—or what we now mostly call sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)—had become reidentified as a signal worry of parenting in the 1960s. Air cribs in their actual usage—in the homes where they wound up—revealed yet another change in infant sleep. Skinner collected surveys and testimonies of the children who were in his air cribs; many families sent back photographs. Arranged chronologically, they show that, over time, families began to use the crib as Skinner intended: to keep a baby warm and thus free from needing anything that might harm it. They tell a story of subtraction. Even though the air crib was always, at its heart, a form of atmospheric media, one that was designed to keep a baby completely healthy, safe, and comfortable, parents must initially have wanted to add something soft to the crib, to make what they perceived as a sterile environment more cozy, more appealing. But across the dozens of photos Skinner received of these happy, healthy-seeming children, we see fewer and fewer toys, clothes, swaddles, and pillows dotting the cribs’ interiors. Eventually, babies are, as Skinner intended, stripped down to their diapers, kept warm by the air crib, and left to suck at their bottles.

What accounted for the change? Parents had always had the opportunity to use the machine as Skinner intended, but they only started to do so fully in this period. As smothering worries became more precise in attributing suffocation to pillows and the like, the air crib functioned as the atmospheric and environmental medium that Skinner had wanted it to be. It turned out that Skinner’s insistence on fans and heaters within the crib, and the abandonment of all loose cloth, was deeply prescient of contemporary understandings of safe sleep (which would not become widespread in the United States for two decades). This is not merely a story about medical progress, wherein pediatricians learned more and more about what caused SIDS and thus made new infant sleep recommendations based on empirical data. Instead, the rise in attention to infant smothering correlated to new sleep guidelines—those that supported letting infants sleep in the prone position—and they were deadly. Some public health scholars have gone so far as to argue that Spock’s manual, which popularized prone sleep, alone contributed to rising infant mortality rates during this period—and is estimated to have led to 60,000 infant deaths worldwide. Yet Skinner never got credit for creating a crib-as-container that might protect families from this tragedy while addressing the double bind of productive and reproductive time. His operant conditioning of the family was too cold—too much blatant mediation for mediated mothering. Common sense was warm, and maternal warmth had passed from bad impulse to good instinct.

There is a simple reason why Skinner first made the specifications of the air crib for his own family: it is incredibly difficult to engage in medical research on children, let alone infants. To turn to one’s own family as a laboratory is very much in keeping with the history of child development research throughout this period. At the same time, other pediatric researchers turned to groups that were likely to be available research subjects: children brought into clinics by anxious parents, babies in prisons, and orphans. These children had departed the total institution of their families for other closed systems and, once there, were contrasted with the control group, somewhere far away, at home, in the first total institution of the nuclear family.

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This is an excerpt from Hannah Zeavin’s Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century, which will be published on April 29 by the MIT Press.