Kathryn Barnard, a professor of nursing whose expertise in the social and emotional development of very young children led her to develop innovative techniques for better parenting of infants, died on Saturday at her home in Seattle. She was 77.
Her death was announced by the University of Washington School of Nursing, where Dr. Barnard was a professor emeritus. A school spokeswoman, Elizabeth L. Hunter-Keller, said in an email that Dr. Barnard died after a series of chronic illnesses.
Dr. Barnard, who believed that the proper treatment of children from their earliest moments was instrumental in their development, conducted studies of infants and their parents that helped illustrate the connection between early stimulation of the senses and social, emotional and behavioral growth.
In the early 1970s, she urged a change in the treatment of premature newborns, who were often placed in isolated incubators out of fear that agitating the infants might be dangerous. To that end, she helped invent the Isolette, which rocks and soothes an isolated infant. Studies proved that gentle rocking led to faster weight gain and improved motor and sensory functions.
She spent much of her career developing programs to improve the mental health of babies, creating methods of sensory stimulation during infancy and training nurses and parents in infancy care, both in the hospital and at home. Physical contact with an infant — gentle touching — she taught, was crucial to nudging children toward understanding the world and making themselves understood.
Babies cry when their needs are urgent, she said, but when they move their arms and legs, they are expressing subtler feelings; a primary reason mothers should rock their young children, she said, is that touching opens lines of communication between them.
“It’s the first way an infant learns about the environment,” Dr. Barnard said in a 1988 interview in The New York Times. “About 80 percent of a baby’s communication is through its body movement. It’s easier to read a baby’s communication with skin-to-skin contact.”
Kathryn Elaine Barnard was born in Omaha on April 16, 1938. Her father, Paul Barnard, was a railroad worker; her mother, the former Elsa Anderson, was a homemaker.
She worked in a hospital as a teenager and graduated with a degree in nursing from the University of Nebraska. She earned a master’s degree in nursing education at Boston University and began working at the University of Washington in 1963. There, she earned a Ph.D. in ecology of early childhood. She leaves no immediate survivors.
Dr. Barnard’s work included designing research to help identify children whose early environments placed them at risk of problems, and creating programs to support women whose personal tribulations — drug use, poverty and mental illness, among others — complicated their pregnancies and parenting.
She was a board member of Zero to Three, a national nonprofit organization founded in 1977 that supports early childhood development.
In 2001, she founded the Center on Infant Mental Health and Development at the University of Washington to promote research, education and practice and to advance policy related to the social and emotional development of all children during the first five years. The center was renamed in her honor in 2012.
“What was extraordinary about her was her sustained commitment to infants’ health,” Dr. Nancy Woods, dean emeritus of the University of Washington School of Nursing, said in an interview. “Her mantra was ‘Infants can’t wait.’ ”