Child Guidance in Britain, 1918–1955: The Dangerous Age of Childhood by John Stewart (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Child Guidance in Britain, 1918–1955: The Dangerous Age of Childhood by John Stewart Deborah Thom John Stewart. Child Guidance in Britain, 1918–1955: The Dangerous Age of Childhood. Studies for the Society for the Social History of Medicine 12. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013. ix + 234 pp. $99.00 (978-1-84893-429-0). This elegant, detailed, thoughtful study starts with poignant comments by founding fathers of child guidance—Emanuel Miller and Douglas MacCalman—who saw, respectively, a “more scientific attitude” and “a visionary dream” of a whole system of parenthood education (p. 1). Stewart maps the development of both the theory and the practice of child guidance, in the context, as its full title suggests, of a wider narrative of the place of ideas and ideals of childhood in twentieth-century Britain. Stewart has also nicely allowed for the politics between and within the different professional groups concerned in this new discourse and recognizes the continuing tension between medical and educational models of how to adjust children better. He builds upon three main theoretical frameworks: Harry Hendricks’s shift from bodies to minds, Nikolas Rose’s narrative of the new psychology’s pathology of childhood, David Armstrong and the rise of surveillance. Overall he sees the central functionalist narrative of health and stability as an essential part of the story. [End Page 758] This is a short history in some ways. His account ends with the highest point of psychodynamically informed thinking in the Underwood committee of 1955 and starts with the American 1920s stimulus that helps British clinicians exploit American funding to establish some of the first clinics and the training of professionals in psychiatry, psychology, and social work who were to spread the good work widely across major cities. The professionals increasingly trained through the work of the Child Guidance Council and the place of local authorities in funding this work, which was slow and patchy, is well described. The account really takes wing when using individual case studies carefully anonymized (as they should be), demonstrating the way in which social and medical discourses intersect with psychological narratives. It is indeed the case study that dominates here rather than the psychometric assessment. However to leave it there would be to make a false contrast, as Rose argued long ago. Psychometric assessment contributed to the development of the scientific case study here, and he adds an example, in an appendix, to show how the measurement of individuals to prepare an assessment was done. It is only here in the extensive literature about child guidance that the voice of the child client is heard at all and then only thoroughly mediated by the format of record keeping. A great strength of his account is the use of the local records of some clinics, especially those in Scotland, offering an invaluable basis for further local study. What has been shown is the establishment of a new profession, the psychiatric social worker, recognized by Underwood as central for the work of child guidance. A question raised by this narrative, worth further reflection, is about both class and gender. The majority of psychiatric social workers were women, largely of the educated middle class. The majority of the clients were working-class urban children. Social work was based firmly upon the idea of casework, coming out of the social investigation of the COS tradition. Some of the contests described here about professional autonomy are partly about the power of this new profession to which gender and class norms make an interestingly unstated contribution. The other area where more would have been welcome is disputes about psychoanalysis and its popular reception. Some practitioners like Kate Friedlander in Sussex were thoroughly influenced by European traditions coming out of the work of Adler and Eitingon as well as Anna Freud. To some extent the struggle over intellectual authority needs relating to criminology and delinquency, which remained as important to these discussions as medicine and psychology. Cyril Burt began his retreat from this model, which he had done so much to promote as part of psychology in the past, when he encouraged his protégée, Hans Eysenck, to argue against the scientificity of child...