John B. Watson, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Most children are ruined not by neglect but by too much mothering. The sentimental handling of infants — the constant petting, kissing, rocking, the child snatched up at every whimper and held on the lap — is not love in any sense useful to the child; it is the conditioning of invalidism, of dependence, of a creature who cannot meet the world because he has been taught to summon a cuddling adult in place of meeting it.12
I counsel the opposite: treat the child with objective kindness, as you would a young person whose character you are building. Establish habits — of sleep, of feeding, of elimination, of occupation — by the patient conditioning that builds all habits. Do not hug and kiss them, do not let them sit on your lap; if you must, kiss them once on the forehead at night, shake hands with them in the morning.3
Give them a hard problem and let them struggle at it; let them be alone; let them meet difficulty. This is not coldness; it is the manufacture of a self-reliant, competent, unfrightened adult, and it follows directly from the science of how emotions and habits are built. I would rather turn out a child who can stand than one who has been loved into helplessness.45
In other words loves are conditioned. You have everything at hand all day long for setting up conditioned love responses. The touch of the skin takes the place of the steel bar, the sight of the mother's face takes the place of the rabbit in the experiments with fear. The child sees the mother's face when she pets it. Soon, the mere sight of the mother's face calls out the love response.Psychological Care of Infant and Child, pp. 75–76
A great many parents who have much too much sentiment in their makeup, feel that when the behaviorist announces this he is robbing them of all the sacredness and sweetness in the child-parent relationship. Parents feel that it is just natural that they should love their children in this tangible way and that they should be similarly loved by the child in return.Psychological Care of Infant and Child, pp. 73–74
Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinarily good job of a difficult task. Try it out. In a week's time you will find how easy it is to be perfectly objective with your child and at the same time kindly.Psychological Care of Infant and Child, pp. 82–83
They do not fight many battles for the child. They do not help it to conquer the difficulties it must meet in its environment.Psychological Care of Infant and Child, pp. 80–82
And above all, we have, by reporting them, got the tender solicitude of our parents and the kisses and coddling of our mothers. Mother fights our battles for us and stands between us and the things we try to avoid doing. But society doesn't do this. We have to stick to our jobs in commercial and professional life regardless of headaches, toothaches, indigestion and other tiny ailments.Psychological Care of Infant and Child, pp. 78–79
The most notorious application of behaviorism and the text that, more than any other, fixed its reputation for coldness. A bestseller in its day and taken seriously as scientific parenting advice, it became, in the light of later work, the cautionary opposite of everything developmental psychology came to establish: John Bowlby's attachment theory, Harry Harlow's surrogate-mother monkeys who chose comfort over food, and the whole demonstration that the infant's need for affection and secure attachment is real and formative. Watson's counsel against affection is now taught as the classic error. Behavioral methods in childrearing survive — parent- training programs for child behavior problems apply conditioning principles constructively — but stripped of the anti-affection doctrine and set within, rather than against, the child's need for warmth.