Child Guidance

Child Guidance was both an evolving 20th-century social construct, sometimes called the Child Guidance Movement, and an influential network of multidisciplinary clinics set up to address the problems of childhood and adolescence. It began in the United States and after World War I spread rapidly to Europe, especially to England, though not to Scotland. It was the first child-centred institutional response to meet perceived child and youth behavioural and mental disorders. It therefore predated the advent of child psychiatry as a medical specialism and of distinct child psychiatric departments as part of modern hospital settings.
Although people working in the child guidance movement were among the first to adopt child psychotherapy as a treatment method and generated a body of mainly psychoanalytic theory on child development based on observation and case studies, they were late in adopting the scientific method.
History
The movement can be dated to 1906 Chicago as a response to juvenile delinquency, when the city was at the forefront of progressive ideas about legislation and treatment. Striving towards civic advancement and supported by the city's interested professionals such as teachers, social workers, lawyers, academics, doctors, community leaders and politicians, the Juvenile Courts and correctional institutions ended the incarceration of children with adults. In 1921-22 using the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute and the Institute for Juvenile Research as models, the American Child Guidance Demonstration Clinics became established.
England's first child guidance clinic was "The East London Child Guidance Clinic" opened on 21 November 1927, under the direction of Dr Emanuel Miller, with assistance from Meyer Fortes. It was established by the Jewish Health Organisation, aided by the LCC, to help children deemed to have emotional, behavioural and educational difficulties. The Clinic was located in the former Jews Free School in Bell Lane, Spitalfields. A second clinic, the London Child Guidance Clinic, opened under Dr William Moodie in 1929 in Islington. It became the country's main centre for training in child guidance. The first child guidance clinic to open in a voluntary hospital was at Guy's Hospital, London in 1930.
The initial model adopted by child guidance clinics in England was to act as a child and adolescent assessment centre staffed by a lead physician, later a child psychiatrist, assisted by an educational psychologist, or sometimes a clinical psychologist and trained social workers. Referrals would come in the main from schools, nurseries, (juvenile) magistrates, police, general practitioners and parents. The process would be to despatch the social workers to find out the social circumstances of the family, diagnose the child, often predicated on maladjustment, prescribe either treatment in situ of the child by the psychologist or referral on to a specialist institution, such as a special school and advise parents (or a court) accordingly.
During World War II, the mass evacuation of children from cities and their families not only created a vast logistical challenge, but offered a unique opportunity to study the impacts on individuals.
In 1944 there were 95 child guidance clinics across England. With the passing of the 1944 Education Act, which recognised child guidance clinics as part of the support to mainstream education, that number rose to 300 clinics in 1955.
Just prior and after the war, there was a significant influx of refugee child care specialists to the UK from Europe, many of whom were psychoanalytically trained, and who in time exerted influence within child guidance clinics. Their accent on child development stages and new treatment methods put a strain on the Medical model and hierarchical structure of the clinics and led to inter-professional conflicts. With a changing social landscape in the country and new trends in sociology and culture as well as in criminology, followed by the introduction of Family therapy, the clinics struggled to adapt to new demands.
Eclipse of the child guidance movement
In 1979, Robina Addis founded the Child Guidance Trust in order to pass on her social work knowledge. However, in the second half of the century in the United Kingdom, the movement financed mainly from local government education budgets and limited to an out-patient service, was rivalled by NHS hospital-based departments of child and family psychiatry, a battle it ultimately lost largely for economic and ideological reasons, arguably to the detriment of children, their families and their communities. A recent commentator has stated that the lack of investment in contemporary youth mental health services, including in forensic psychiatry, in the UK has not filled the gap left by the absent child guidance clinics which, for all their shortcomings, were at least accessible and focused on children and their families.
See also
References
Further reading
Barrett, Susan. (2019) "From Adult Lunatic Asylums to CAMHS Community Care: the Evolution of Specialist Mental Health Care for Children and Adolescents 1948-2018". Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique. XXIV-3
Bowlby, J. (1999) [1969]. Attachment. Attachment and Loss (vol. 1) (2nd ed.). New York: Basic Books. . LCCN 00266879. OCLC 232370549. NLM 8412414.
Bowlby, J. (1973). Separation: Anxiety & Anger. Attachment and Loss (vol. 2); (International psycho-analytical library no.95). London: Hogarth Press. . OCLC 8353942.
Bowlby, J. (1980). Loss: Sadness & Depression. Attachment and Loss (vol. 3); (International psycho-analytical library no.109). London: Hogarth Press. . OCLC 59246032.
Britton, C. 'Children who cannot play' (London 1945)
Britton, C. (1947) "Residential management as treatment for difficult children". Human Relations 1 (1), 2-12
Davies, H.A. (2010) The Use of Psychoanalytic Concepts in Therapy with Families: For all Professionals Working with Families. London: Karnac.
Fox, E. (1927) "The Child Guidance Council and the Commonwealth Fund". Mental Welfare (8), 79–80.
Hendrick, H. (1994) Child Welfare: England 1872-1989. London: Routledge.
Horne, A. and Lanyado, M. (eds.) (2015) An Independent Mind. The Collected Papers of Juliet Hopkins. London: Routledge.
Midgen, Melissa Jane. (2016) The Child Analytic Tradition of the Society of Analytical Psychology – Birth, Death and Beyond. London: University of East London. (Doctoral thesis) p. 29
Stewart, John (2011) 'The dangerous age of childhood': child guidance in Britain, c.1918-1955. Presentation to the Department of Education on 6 October 2011. London. https://www.historyandpolicy.org/docs/john_stewart.pdf
Thom, Deborah (1992) (2013) "Wishes, Anxieties, Play, and Gestures: Child Guidance in Inter-War England" in Cooter, R. (ed.) In the Name of the Child. London: Routledge DOI https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203412237. eBook
External links
Association of Child Psychotherapists – the professional body for Psychoanalytic Child and Adolescent Psychotherapists in the UK and a core NHS profession
Lost Hospitals of London: The London Child Guidance Clinic in Islington
Child development
Transdisciplinarity
History of mental health
Child welfare
Children's rights