John Stewart - Child Guidance in Britain, 1918–1955

CHILD GUIDANCE IN BRITAIN, 19181955: THE DANGEROUS AGE OF CHILDHOOD

Series Editors : David Cantor
Keir Waddington

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4 A Modern History of the Stomach: Gastric Illness, Medicine and British Society, 18001950
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5 War and the Militarization of British Army Medicine, 17931830
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6 Nervous Disease in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Reality of a Fashionable Disorder
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7 Desperate Housewives, Neuroses and the Domestic Environment, 19451970
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8 Disabled Children: Contested Caring, 18501979
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9 Toxicants, Health and Regulation since 1945
Soraya Boudia and Nathalie Jas (eds)

10 A Medical History of Skin: Scratching the Surface
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11 The Care of Older People: England and Japan, A Comparative Study
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Modern German Midwifery, 18851960
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Western Maternity and Medicine, 18801990
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Biologics, A History of Agents Made From Living Organisms in the Twentieth Century
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Human Heredity in the Twentieth Century
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Institutionalizing the Insane in Nineteenth-Century England
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The Politics of Hospital Provision in Early Twentieth-Century Britain
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Psychiatry and Chinese History
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The Dangerous Age of Childhood

By
John Stewart

First published 2013

by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited

Published 2016

by Routledge
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Taylor & Francis 2013

John Stewart 2013

To the best of the Publisher's knowledge every effort has been made to contact relevant copyright holders and to clear any relevant copyright issues. Any omissions that come to their attention will be remedied in future editions.

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BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Stewart, John, author.
Child guidance in Britain, 1918-1955: the dangerous age of childhood.
(Studies for the Society for the Social History of Medicine)
1. Child welfare Great Britain History 20th century. 2. Child develop
ment Great Britain History 20th century.
I. Title II. Series
362.7'0941'09041-dc23

ISBN-13: 978-1-84893-429-0 (hbk)

Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited

This book has been a long time in the making and I have incurred many debts. I would like to thank the Rockefeller Archive Center, New York, the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society of Edinburgh for awards which allowed me to visit key archives and libraries and to have time away from teaching and administrative duties to research and write. Visiting Fellowships at the University of Bergen, the University of Trier, the University of Southern Denmark and the University of Auckland likewise afforded me time and space as well as intellectual stimulation. I am also grateful for the support of colleagues at the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare, Glasgow, which I was lucky enough to lead between 2007 and 2012. Among those who have helped my understanding of child guidance, either through discussions, comments on papers or through reading and critiquing drafts are Astri Andresen, Linda Bryder, Hera Cook, Janet Greenlees, John Hall, Sarah Hayes, Harry Hendrick, Kathleen Jones, Alysa Levene, Vicky Long, Kari Ludvigsen, Linda McKie, Mary-Clare Martin, Jim Mills, Chris Nottingham, Heather Munro Prescott, Matthew Smith, Sister Gail Taylor, Mathew Thomson and John Welshman. Two anonymous referees provided constructive feedback. Finally, I would like to thank the series editor, Keir Waddington, and Pickering & Chatto staff for their help and support.

In 1929 two psychiatrists associated with the Jewish Child Guidance Clinic in the East End of London, Noel Burke and Emanuel Miller, published an article in the professional outlet British Journal of Medical Psychology . Their topic was child mental hygiene, an issue which, they claimed, had only recently been subject to a more scientific attitude coupled to philanthropy.

Around a year later, in autumn 1931, the Notre Dame Child Guidance Clinic opened in Glasgow, an event described by the local Catholic newspaper. Central to the composition of the clinic, it was suggested, was a team consisting of a psychiatrist, a psychologist and a psychiatric social worker (PSW). The clinics aim was not to deal with children who had definite organic disease, mental defect, or epilepsy. Rather, its object was the study and treatment of children who, though given average home and school conditions, remain an enigma to their parents.

This book addresses the issues raised by these extracts. It does so by analysing and describing the origins and development of child guidance and what it sought to achieve. In so doing it engages with concepts such as maladjustment and normalcy in children, why the former was seen as a threat to the child, its family and the wider society and the ways in which normalcy could be regained. Child guidance was, though, highly contested. There were, for instance, disagreements between psychiatrists and psychologists over the causes of maladjustment and, thereby, over how to deal with emotional and psychological problems in childhood. More broadly, this book places child guidance in its wider context, asking why, for example, it saw itself as scientific and what precisely were the problems deriving from modernity or, as Miller put it in The Difficult Child, civilization in the complex form that it has assumed today.