Claim:   Psychologist B. F. Skinner raised his own daughter in a "Skinner box"; as a result, she grew up psychologically damaged and sued her father when she became an adult.

Status:   False.

Origins:   B. F. Skinner was a renowned behavioral psychologist who began his career in the 1930s and is best known for his development of the Skinner box, a laboratory apparatus used to conduct and record the results of operant conditioning experiments with animals. (These are typically experiments in which an animal must manipulate an object, such as a lever, to obtain a reward.)

When Skinner's second daughter, Deborah, was born in 1944, Skinner (who then lived in Minnesota) constructed what was essentially a large version of a hospital incubator for her, a tall box with a door at its base and a glass window in front. This "baby tender," as Skinner called it, provided Deborah with a place to sleep and remain comfortably warm throughout the severe Minnesota winters without having to be wrapped in numerous layers of clothing and blankets (and developing the attendant rashes). Deborah slept in her novel crib until she was two and a half years old, and by all accounts grew up a happy, healthy, thriving child.

The trouble began in October 1945, when the magazine Ladies' Home Journal ran an article about Skinner's baby tender. The article featured a picture of Deborah in a portable (and therefore smaller) version of the box, her hands pressed against the glass, under the headline "Baby in a Box." People who didn't read the article carefully, merely glanced at the picture, or heard about the article from someone else but didn't see it themselves confused the baby tender with a Skinner box and jumped to the conclusion that Skinner was raising his daughter in a box for the purpose of conducting psychological experiments on her. Outraged letter-writers protested that a child should not be "kept in a box" and "subjected to experiments like an animal."

Over the years the details about Skinner's baby tender (which he unsuccessfully tried to market under the names "Heir Conditioner" and "Aircrib") became more fuzzily remembered, and by the mid-1960s (when Deborah turned twenty-one), the rumor had started that Skinner's now psychotic and suicidal daughter had sued him for traumatizing her by raising her in a box and conducting psychological experiments upon her. In fact, she grew up about as normally as can be, remained close to her father, and quipped years later that "I'm pretty sure I'm not crazy. And I don't seem to have committed suicide."

Last updated:   9 August 2000