adults do wrong? These questions dominated the news after the 1999 Columbine massacre, when two teenage boys opened fire in their suburban high school and killed fifteen people, including themselves.1 As mounting concerns about playground bullies, computer game junkies, and schoolyard shooters lead to frenzied discussions about why children go bad and how society can save them, Kathleen Jones's elegant study of child guidance is a cautionary tale. Taming the Troublesome Child weaves together a cultural analysis of ideas about children, an intellectual history of child psychiatry, and a penetrating discussion of the day-to-day workings of one of the nation's premier child guidance clinics, Boston's Judge Baker Guidance Center, from 1920 to 1945. It is a compelling analysis of the rise and eventual triumph of an exclusively psychological paradigm for explaining children's misbehaviorand a convincing argument for the limits of that paradigm as a solution to juvenile crime and family troubles, both today and in the past. The history of child guidance, as the psycho-dynamic framework for assessing children's problems and preventing delinquency was called, is conventionally studied as part of the professionalization of the child sciences and helping professions, and the philanthropic efforts of the Commonwealth and Rockefeller Funds. While scholars have illuminated many of the class and status issues that guided the founders of child guidance, they have been relatively uninterested in the dynamics of gender and age. By contrast, Taming the Troublesome Child, reflecting the influence of recent scholarship on welfare and women's history, emphasizes the gendered dimensions of expert authority and the client's role in its construction. Focusing on the Judge Baker clinic, Jones describes the creation of child guidance as a collaborative process involving multiple interactions between psychiatrists and social workers, therapists and patients, and parents and children. She also revises the