It is my sad duty to report that our beloved colleague, Lauren Bernstein Adamson, died December 31, 2021.  Lauren was a life-long member of the International Congress for Infant Studies, having attended its inaugural meeting in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1978.  A Berkley PhD, early in her career she worked with T. Barry Brazelton, Ed Tronick, and Heidi Als as they were developing the still-face paradigm.  She joined Georgia State University’s Psychology department in 1980 and began the series of studies of dyadic joint engagement and infant joint attention for which she is best known.  Throughout her career she was supported first by the National Science Foundation and then by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, among other granting agencies.  She began studying typically developing infants with their mothers and peers and, later, to comparing the development of infants with Autism and Down syndrome with typically developing infants.  At first she focused on the sharing of objects and events seen jointly by mothers and their infants, and more recently on objects and events jointly heard as well. Throughout her career she was an active reviewer for journals and for granting agencies, a generous mentor to students and junior colleagues, and a conscientious collaborator with colleagues.  She will be remembered for the high intellectual standards to which she held herself and others and for her intellectual and personal warmth and generosity. 

Contributed by

by Nancy Aaron Jones, Jillian Hardin, and Joy Longo 

Parturition as well as the days and weeks that follow are transitional experiences for families. The interactive “dance” between mothers and infants as well as shared encounters with other family members sets the stage for socio-emotional success and neurodevelopmental progress. Newborns need care and affection! Collectively research has shown that lack or reduced socio-emotional interchanges (e.g. in groups that have illness, depression or other risks) has been shown to negatively affect the infant’s development (Feldman & Eidelman 2009; Hardin et al., 2021; Jones et al. 2004) while opportunities for optimal early socio-interactive experiences can benefit responsiveness as well as stimulate infant brain and behavioral function of mother-infant dyads (Hardin et al., 2020).

The onset of the COVID-19 world-wide pandemic has not only increased levels of maternal stress, depression, and anxiety (Cameron et al., 2020; Fernandes, Canavarro, & Moreira, 2021 ) but has also reduced opportunities for socio-emotional interactions with others. Further, interactive contact and care between mothers and the healthcare professionals who support mothers and their newborns has been impacted and changed by the pandemic (Sweet et al., 2021). So, over the last two years as COVID obstructed the normal delivery of care in health systems, we asked: What is the experience of mothers who delivered an infant in a healthcare setting during COVID-19?  Specifically our research questions were:

1. how has the pandemic changed social interaction opportunities of families surrounding childbirth and postnatal care? and
2. how has the pandemic changed the care and perceived care, delivered by health care professionals in maternity settings?

Collecting and Listening to the Stories of New Mothers and Professionals that Support Birth and Newborn Care during COVID-19

In today’s world, new parents often turn to chat rooms, blogs, and Facebook/Instagram posts, to express parenting joys, distress, and concerns. Parents also may consult websites to fulfill the need for current and cohort-normative social information about infant care practices.  In this qualitative analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005) we collected public posts and searched sites online to learn what new parents and maternal-child healthcare professionals were experiencing, what they were concerned about, and what they wanted to convey to others as pivotal in their stories of childbirth and infant care during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our examination of the narratives focused on topics such as breastfeeding, hospital practices, and other online sites that provided information about care and support practices. Content analysis was performed to arrive at themes.

What DO parents and maternity services practitioners have to say about COVID-era births and babies?

The topics uncovered from the experiences of mothers and maternity services professionals suggest the pandemic influenced this group in a dynamic and novel way. In the early months of the pandemic, the narratives of the birth and postnatal hospital care were negative and included haphazard reactions to the contagious nature of the virus as well as the concern surrounding the serious consequences from the virus. As a consequence there were many procedural changes during birth and postpartum hospital stays, including: the complete or partial barring of father’s attendance at the birth, the family’s reduced or dissuaded ability to visit when bringing the baby home and/or when having to remain in the hospital, the accelerated timing of discharge after delivery, the inability to utilize additional experts in childbirth  or infant care (e.g., doulas, midwives, and lactation consultants) and the inability to elicit help of the extended family from childbirth and across the postpartum period.

Upon review of the public posts, four consistent themes emerged in our analysis. The first common theme noted was the alteration of care by professionals to accommodate families. In one instance, a mother indicated “It was very much uncharted waters for everyone. Everyone is walking this line of trying to protect you and the baby, and the protocols are being written in the moment.”  

A second theme noted from the narratives was that the main focus was to ensure the safety of mothers and infants during the pandemic, with a healthcare professional stating: ““The recommendation is to limit visitors at this time. . . parents need to screen their visitors and limit them to one or two people at a time…”.

The third, and not unexpected, theme documented across many of the posts was that having a baby during the pandemic produced a significant amount of emotional upheaval..  As one mother noted “Everyone is so sad. Everyone tries to say, ‘Oh, she’s so cute,’ but the conversation turns to coronavirus concerns in two seconds. I feel like I’ve been robbed of the joy that comes with having a baby.'”

Finally, the fourth and final theme we noted was that families were able to successfully adapt to the circumstances and some mothers even reported a potential benefit to the closeness of the family. For example, a healthcare professional stated: “There may also be some good things including more time to be at home to rest and less pressure to be dressed up and doing it all. Your partner may be around more to help.”

Ultimately from this analysis of the narratives, a spectrum of experiences emerged among parents and maternal-child healthcare professionals, including negative as well as some—surprisingly–positive effects on family interactive and psychosocial experiences.

Conclusions: How Does this Inform Families and Professionals for Understanding Development?

Collecting, examining and absorbing the information available in the online comments made by families and maternity services professionals made us acutely aware that there were various responses to COVID-19 across the world and across the spectrum of individual settings (Sweet et al., 2021).  The themes uncovered by our analysis did inform and bring attention to the important role of professionals to support mothers during childbirth and during infant postnatal care. The narratives show that both families and healthcare personnel experienced significant emotional and psychosocial effects due to the pandemic but both groups also adjusted their practices to support the mother-infant dyad to keep them safe. There were circumstances where policies were being developed and modified based on new evidence but ultimately, families adapted and were supported as needed (Foye et al., 2021).

Finally, the narratives that were reviewed may have implications for the development of hospital, health care, or social policies. It may be necessary to prepare ourselves and the institutions we’ve established to respond to the needs of mothers and infants by making sure the policies are in place to deal with future pandemics. Our institutions should be prepared to attenuate the negative effects of these crises in families as neurodevelopmental foundations and affiliative bonds leading to attachment are influenced and established at early developmental periods (Diamond et al., 2020: Hardin et al., 2021).

References

Cameron, E. E., Joyce, K. M., Delaquis, C. P., Reynolds, K., Protudjer, J. L. P., & Roos, L. E. (2020). Maternal psychological distress & mental health service use during the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Affective Disorders, 276, 765–774. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2020.07.081

Diamond, R. M., Brown, K. S., & Miranda, J. (2020). Impact of covid-19 on the perinatal period through a biopsychosocial systemic framework. Contemporary Family Therapy, 42(3), 205–216. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10591-020-09544-8 

Feldman, R., & Eidelman, A. I. (2009). Biological and environmental initial conditions shape the trajectories of cognitive and social-emotional development across the first years of life. Developmental Science, 12(1), 194–200. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00761.x

Fernandes, D. V., Canavarro, M. C., & Moreira, H. (2021). Postpartum during COVID‐19 pandemic: Portuguese mothers’ mental health, mindful parenting, and mother–infant bonding. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 77(9), 1997–2010. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.23130

Foye, U., Dalton‐Locke, C., Harju‐Seppänen, J., Lane, R., Beames, L., Vera San Juan, N., Johnson, S., & Simpson, A. (2021). How has Covid‐19 affected mental health nurses and the delivery of Mental Health Nursing Care in the UK? results of a mixed‐methods study. Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, 28(2), 126–137. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpm.12745

Hardin, J., Jones, N.A., Mize, K.D., & Platt, M. (2020). Parent-training with Kangaroo Care impacts mother-infant neuroendocrine activity & infant neurophysiological development. Infant Behavior and Development, 58, 101416, https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.infbeh.2019.101416

Hardin, J., Jones, N.A., Mize, K.D., & Platt, M. (2021). Affectionate touch in the context of breastfeeding and maternal depression influences infant neuro-developmental and temperamental substrates. Neuropsychobiology, 80:158–175. http://dx.doi.org/10.1159/000511604

Jones, N.A., McFall, B.A., & Diego, M.A. (2004). Patterns of brain electrical activity in infants of depressed mothers who breastfeed and bottle feed: the mediating role of infant temperament. Biological Psychology, 67, 103-124. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2004.03.010

Sweet, L., Bradfield, Z., Vasilevski, V., Wynter, K., Hauck, Y., Kuliukas, L., Homer, C. S. E., Szabo, R. A., & Wilson, A. N. (2021). Becoming a mother in the ‘new’ social world in Australia during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Midwifery, 98, 102996. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.midw.2021.102996

About the Author

by Audun Dahl

When I started graduate school, I knew little about the everyday life of infants. I had only the vaguest ideas about the daily joys and woes of a 12-month-old—even one who lived a block from our infant research lab in Berkeley, CA. The laboratory experiments I read about in journal articles didn’t teach me about the lives of infants; they brought infants to researchers’ labs, not researchers to infants’ homes. With the encouragement of my advisor, this predicament led me to do naturalistic research: videotaping infants in their home environments. We wanted to study infants doing whatever they would have been doing if we weren’t there.

To see the need for naturalistic research, let’s imagine that we discovered a new species of sociable aliens on Mars. As scientists, we wanted to understand the new species, but we faced a dilemma. The aliens were perfectly willing to come along back to Earth and participate in laboratory research here. Yet, by bringing the Martians to our planet, we would learn nothing about how they developed under the unique conditions on Mars. How did they learn to walk on their red planet, where surface gravity is less than half of gravity on Earth? How did they learn to communicate with others in their Martian households?

The solution to this methodological dilemma seems clear: Do both. We would do laboratory research on Earth and field research on Mars. This is the approach animal researchers take when they combine field and laboratory research to understand earthly species. The laboratory studies would examine causal processes of perceptions, emotions, and actions using carefully designed experiments; the naturalistic observations would document everyday experiences and activities. Together, these two methodologies would build a science of how Martians developed.

But the need for naturalistic research has not been as widely recognized in psychological research on infants and children—nor adults, for that matter. By reading textbooks and taking classes on research methods, psychology students can come away believing that experiments, not naturalistic observations, are the “gold standard” of research. Laboratory experiments with random assignment control the environments of research participants, rule out confounds, and—it is implied—offer the safest road to knowledge about infants.

Several factors tempt us to skip naturalistic methods in research on human infants. First, it’s easy to think that we already know enough about what infants do and experience. After all, we, too, were infants once. Many of us have observed infants in our homes, either infant siblings, infant nieces and nephews, the infants of our friends, or our own infants. A second reason is practical. Naturalistic research is time-consuming and typically generates hundreds or thousands of hours of unstructured recordings. In some of our naturalistic studies, we are looking for behaviors—such as hitting others—that only happen once or twice per hour of normal interactions. We wouldn’t want to do naturalistic research unless we had to.

The problem with skipping naturalistic methods is that our intuitions about everyday life are often wrong, or at least idiosyncratic. When we use our own experiences to generate intuitions about everyday life, we are essentially doing unsystematic case studies. This is a sensible way to

start a research program, but usually not a good way to complete it. Case studies have a venerable history in developmental psychology—carried out by founding figures like Darwin, Freud, and Piaget—yet every psychology major has heard of their shortcomings. One infant differs from the next. One person’s recollection differs from another’s, and both may differ from what actually happened. I have seen the same claim about infants’ everyday experiences be described as obviously true by one reviewer and obviously false by another. Intuitions about everyday experiences are about as disparate as human life is diverse; insofar as researchers come from privileged backgrounds, their intuitions will likely reflect the biases and inequities associated with those backgrounds. To separate the right intuitions about everyday lives from the wrong ones, we need data. Naturalistic methods offer a way of getting those data.

Consider research on infant helping. In the past two decades, developmental scientists have debated why infants begin to help others. In 2006, Science published a groundbreaking paper by Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello. They found that most 18-month-olds helped an unfamiliar adult, for instance by handing back a dropped pen or paperclip to the adult. One key question was whether infants developed the ability to help others without any encouragement, praise, or other kinds of support from caregivers. One possibility was that infants began to help before their caregivers encouraged helping. Another possibility was that caregivers actively encouraged helping from around the age when infants began to help. This fundamental question about the origins of human prosociality cannot be settled by laboratory experiments as it concerns what happens in children’s daily lives. These lives—needless to say—do not take place in laboratories. To know whether or how caregivers encourage infants to help, we conducted naturalistic observations and parent interviews with families around the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California. It turned out that, already by the first birthday, the parents in our studies frequently encouraged their infants to help by putting toys away after a play session, cleaning a surface, or even watering plants. In most of the situations in which infants helped, they received encouragement, praise, thanking, or some combination thereof from their caregivers. (Note that neither naturalistic nor experimental methods are sufficient by themselves: In addition to the naturalistic evidence on caregiver encouragement, we needed experimental evidence to know that adult encouragement actually had a causal effect, increasing infants’ helping.) Scholarly debates about the origins of infants’ helping offer just one illustration of how key questions about infant development call for naturalistic data about infants’ everyday lives. Calls for naturalistic methods have a history. Decades ago, Urie Bronfenbrenner, Alfred Baldwin, and others argued for the importance of studying children’s everyday social contexts. Around 1980, perhaps reflecting the influence of these scholars, 2-3 percent of articles in major developmental psychology articles contained the word “naturalistic” in their title, abstract, keywords, or other descriptors. Any effects of these admonitions seem to have waned, however. In the period from 2007 to 2017, the percentage of “naturalistic” articles had dropped below one percent.

Today, the future looks brighter for naturalistic methods. Technological advances have made naturalistic research both richer and less time-consuming. Automated recording devices for

speech, portable head-mounted cameras, and automated video processing all make it more manageable to collect and analyze large amounts of unstructured audio and video data. Thanks to more portable recording technology, such as the LENA devices for recording language input and children’s vocalizations, researchers collect naturalistic data from infants’ homes without even being there. By leveraging technological advances to record and analyze rich observational data, developmental scientists have made major contributions to our understanding of infants’ visual attention, word learning, and movement patterns.

Early in the 20th century, many countries used a gold standard to regulate their money. In the United States, the gold standard meant that a dollar could be converted into a fixed amount of gold. The gold standard was eventually abandoned, but not until it had hamstrung the central banks, exacerbating the Great Depression. Despite the demise of the actual gold standard, the metaphorical gold standard has remained a term of praise for experimental methods. But the field of developmental science may no longer need a methodological gold standard—if it ever did. Instead, a developmental science that judiciously combines experimental, naturalistic, and other tools can capitalize on the strengths of each.

Still, naturalistic methods hold a unique position in our toolbox, whether we study infants or Martians. Developmental research questions are nearly always about what happens in children’s everyday lives. How do infants learn language? How does locomotion affect cognitive development? Why do infants begin to hit and help others more from the first to the second year? Infants do not typically acquire language, begin to crawl, or change their tendencies to hit or help others inside the confines of a laboratory. Rather, these processes mainly occur in the homes, playgrounds, daycare centers, and other places where infants spend their days. When we bring infants into the lab, we wish to shed light on developmental processes that typically occur outside the laboratory. When we study infants’ everyday lives in their homes, we directly observe the very phenomena we ultimately seek to understand.

About the Author

by Michaela DeBolt and Aaron Beckner

Like many other infant researchers, the pandemic presented us with a dilemma: discontinue data collection or find a w ay to administer studies without increasing exposure risk for families. We decided to conduct studies online so that we could continue our research and as a result, we set up four different studies using Lookit. This allowed us to collect data in a cost- and time-efficient manner. To date, we have collected data from over 500 infants and counting. Currently, we are in the process of analyzing the data from these various studies, but as we look back, there are things that we would have done differently, things that we’re glad we did from the outset, and some general lessons we learned about online testing.

Capturing the in-lab experience
The idea of collecting data completely asynchronously can be anxiety inducing. Many of us wondered whether parents would know how to position their infant or how they would know what to do (or what not to do) if their infant became fussy or disinterested in the screen. These and other concerns led many to pursue synchronous data collection using other platforms such as Zoom. We addressed this problem by creating clear and concise instructional videos for parents. Our goal in making these videos was to capture the “in-person” experience as much as possible, including the rapport building that happens through interactions with research staff as well as the clear instructions that come from those interactions.

The first video parents see in our studies provides a general overview of the study including the purpose and what the parent should expect throughout their “visit”— much like the conversations we would typically have with parents when they arrive in the lab for an in-person visit. The second video parents watch explains the nitty gritty details of what the parent should actually do during the study (e.g., whether and when to close their eyes and a reminder to try not to engage with their infant during the study).

Parents generally reported that participating in our studies was a positive experience so we think that the effort we invested to create these videos was totally worth it.

Coding video data from online studies can be difficult, though not always
The behavioral coding scheme we used for our Lookit data was straightforward. Each infants’ data was coded by two coders — a primary and a secondary coder. The secondary coder only coded a portion of the trials and agreement between the two coders was assessed. Overall, agreement between coders was generally great and when it wasn’t, we included a third coder to resolve any disagreements. A third coder helped resolve disagreements for the vast majority of our data, but periodically all three coders would disagree on a single trial. Surprisingly, these disagreements would occur even for infants whose data was otherwise highly reliable. After ruling out the obvious culprits (i.e., typos), a pattern started to emerge. Despite our best efforts to provide clear instructions, things didn’t always go as planned. Maybe the doorbell rang, a curious sibling pulled at the laptop to see the screen, or a sibling dance party broke out in the background (yes, this actually did happen!). These hiccups are par for the course when collecting data online, but they also made it so that the data from some infants or individual trials were easier to code than others. This was an issue that we expected, but it occurred more frequently than we had hoped. As a result, for some studies we decided to double code all of the data so we could preserve the trials in which agreement was high and exclude single trials in which coders could not reliably agree on the infant’s looking for various reasons (e.g., distractions, momentary loss of interest).

Timing, timing, timing
One issue that several other Lookit researchers discovered, and we helped to confirm, was that there was less precision in the timing parameters than we had initially thought. One advantage of Lookit is that the platform provides extensive information about the timing of specific events, such as when the stimuli become visible on the screen, when the webcam starts recording the infant, or when pauses occur during the experimental sequence. For our studies, we found that
these timestamps often differed from the events observed in the video recording by several hundred milliseconds and that the duration of these timing differences varied across trials and across infants. Lookit has provided a summary of this issue here, but the key takeaway from this discovery is to design studies that will not be adversely affected when timing precision is off by 200 to 500 ms.

Speaking of time, it took a lot of time to train our undergraduate research assistants to code for these projects. Much longer, in fact, than we would typically spend training coders for in-person studies. This was generally due to the fact that we had less control over the quality of video recordings, the distance of the parent from the computer screen, and the potential opportunities for distractions in infants’ environment. This issue was further compounded by the fact that our coders were working remotely and had to use a virtual private network to connect to computers in the laboratory. Despite these limitations, we were able to get a team of coders trained to reliably code for various studies with multiple stimulus sets and study designs. Once we got the ball rolling, things moved relatively quickly and ultimately online testing saved us time in the long-run, as it allowed us to continue testing during the pandemic while requiring minimal effort to administer our studies.

Helping our coders and our babies
Another thing that we generally found helpful was including frequent calibration checks. For all of our studies, we included at least one calibration sequence. This consisted of short, engaging animated video clips that we presented in the locations where our experimental stimuli would subsequently be presented. These calibration animations served two purposes. First, they were included to help disambiguate looking behavior. Our coders reported that calibration checks were incredibly helpful and that they often referred back to them when they were uncertain about the location of a look. Specifically, our coders used the infants’ behavior during calibration to disambiguate (1) looks to the center verses to one side of the screen and (2) looks to one side of the screen from looks away from the screen. Second, these calibration animations were designed to encourage infants to maintain their interest towards the screen. Due to the increased opportunities for distractions, we tried to make our calibration animations as engaging and interesting as possible. Lastly, because babies often shifted positions throughout the study, we recommend including multiple calibration events throughout the study to help capture some of the within-infant looking variability.

Thus, including more calibration animations not only helped our coders, but also helped our babies stay engaged!

Having a plan for data exclusion
As we described earlier, a lot of not-so-surprising distractions occurred in the home while babies participated in our online studies. This meant that we were faced with excluding more individual trials or infants because of unique interference events than we would typically experience in the lab. As one can imagine, the “garden of forking paths” with respect to data exclusion was plentiful. After piloting our online studies, we came up with a list of all the different kinds of things we would consider worthy of data exclusion, and we preregistered these criteria to help streamline the data exclusion decision making process in the future. For example, we reasoned that it was perfectly fine for parents to periodically “peek” at the stimuli during the study, but we would exclude an infant’s data if their parent watched the entire study. We recommend defining exclusion criteria as a lab before analyzing your data because different perspectives, experiences, and ideas can help generate a broader or more practical set of data exclusion criteria to use when it comes time to analyze your data.

A “new frontier” for infant research
In conclusion, we believe that there are many challenges as well as unique advantages to collecting data online. We hope that our reflections are informative, whether you are currently deciding to collect data online, already collecting data online, analyzing results from an online study, or writing up your results for publication. Online testing has provided us with another tool in our methodological “toolbox” and is an exciting new frontier for the field of infant research that will continue to evolve as online testing platforms grow.

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About the Authors

It is with great sorrow I inform you of the death of Dr. Lewis P. Lipsitt, a founding member of the International Congress for Infant Studies and a pioneer in the field of Infancy. Lewis Lipsitt died at on Thursday, September 30, 2021.
In the field of Infancy, Lewis (or “Lew” as he was widely known) authored seminal papers on infant sensation, perception, and learning, as well as on perinatal risk and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. He also conducted important longitudinal studies examining how early life experiences influenced later outcomes. Across his lifetime, he conducted a longitudinal research project, originally involving 4,000 births in Providence. The participants are now over 60 years old. The work was groundbreaking for the field examining effects of parental smoking on fetal and infant development and also tracking the progress of children with learning disabilities.

A developmental psychologist, Dr. Lipsitt received his B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1950, his M.S. in clinical and social psychology from the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) in 1952, and his Ph.D. in child psychology from the University of Iowa (Iowa City) in 1957. He spent his career at Brown University starting in 1957 in the Department of Psychology. In 1967 he was the founding director of Brown University’s Child Study Center.

He received many accolades during his long and illustrious career. He was a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of London’s Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, and a Cattell Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He received the Nicholas Hobbs Award for “science in the service of children” in 1990 from the American Psychological Association (APA), and won the 1994 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Lifetime Achievement Mentor Award for his work with minority persons and women in the pursuit of scientific careers. He was honored by New England Psychological Association, with the Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award, and received the Musiker-Merenda award for mental health services to Rhode Island. He was a Fellow of the American Psychological Society (APS), for which he was a founding executive board member. In 1995 Dr. Lipsitt received a Professional Achievement Award from his undergraduate alma mater, the University of Chicago.

Later in his career, after his groundbreaking work on infant studies, he turned his attention to adolescent risk behaviors. Lipsitt was a visiting scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health in 1986-87, studying psychopathological risk-taking. With Alvin Poussaint, M.D., Dr. Lipsitt co-directed the Lee Salk Center of KIDSPEACE, a national center for young people overcoming crises.

Dr. Lipsitt was a passionate science communicator. He pioneered ways of disseminating scientific findings about infants and children. As editor of the Brown University Child and Adolescent Behavior Letter for 15 years, his Newsbriefs appeared in the Sesame Street Parents Guide. He was a consultant to a WNET documentary TV series, and has served on advisory boards of BabyTalk and Child magazines.

Dr. Lipsitt also contributed to the field through his service to professional societies. Over his long career, he served as president of the Eastern Psychological Association, president of APA’s Division of Developmental Psychology, and also president of the Division of General Psychology, and was elected to the APA Council of Representatives for four terms. He also chaired APA’s board of scientific affairs, and was the APA executive director for science.

For those of us in the International Congress of Infant Studies (ICIS) society it is his role as a member of the founding generation of ICIS that must be highlighted as a major and enduring achievement. The founding generation of ICIS implemented the vision to advance science and support colleagueship in the interdisciplinary field of infant development. ICIS was the outgrowth of a small group of scientists studying infant learning and development who met monthly to share their work, and eventually organized an off-SRCD-year meeting attended by a larger group of researchers. Lipsitt organized the first formal meeting of the ICIS (as it was named), which was held in Providence Rhode Island in 1978. There Lew did a yoyo demonstration and provided a souvenir yoyos to conference goers. He was a yoyo expert and enjoyed sharing stunning tricks. Dr. Lipsitt also founded the society’s flagship journal Infant Behavior and Development (currently Infancy), and founded the Advances in Child Development and Behavior in 1963. He was passionate about the important role that scientists play in understanding Infancy in order to support long-term positive outcomes for children and families.

Dr. Lipsitt was exuberant and joyful about the privilege that it was to be an Infancy Researcher. All Infancy Scientists were touched by his leadership, commitment, and enthusiasm for the field. His joy, wonder, and curiosity about infants was contagious. He will truly be missed.