The Child Guidance Movement

The state addresses the "Dangerous Age of Childhood"

Feb 11, 2024

Introduction

There is a theme in the work of the state that goes back over a century and it is this:

Children won’t do as they are, and parents are to blame. The state will save the little ones from the subversive influences of their families and make of them new creatures, better than before, and heading towards perfection.

Psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and play therapists in the 1930s

This core belief is visible today in policy initiatives such as Scotgov’s “Early Child Development Transformational Change Programme”. This was applauded in the Scottish parliament by a motion from Jenni Minto, Argyll and Bute, Scottish National Party, on Tuesday, 31 October 2023. She asked:

That the Parliament recognises the need for an Early Child Development Transformational Change programme to build on the excellent and world-leading practice already delivered in Scotland, and to further act on the unique and critical period of child development from pre-pregnancy to age three, when experiences and the environment shape the foundations for life and population health, including physical and mental health and wellbeing, life expectancy, educational attainment and participation in the economy and community; is committed to focussing collective efforts on giving all babies and children in Scotland the best possible start by making sure that the Scottish Government applies the latest evidence and continues to invest in and improve its existing policies, to ensure that it is “getting it right for every child”…

The impetus for this programme comes not from Scotland but from Washington DC. To be specific, it comes from the World Bank:

Investing in the early years is one of the smartest investments a country can make to break the cycle of poverty, address inequality, and boost productivity later in life. Today, millions of young children are not reaching their full potential because of inadequate nutrition, lack of early stimulation and learning, and exposure to stress. Investments in the physical, mental, and emotional development of children - from before birth until they enter primary school are critical for the future productivity of individuals and for the economic competitiveness of nations.

The underlying assumptions here are legion. Every state competes with every other. The usefulness in terms of productive work of the population will define success and failure in this great game and it is the failure of societies to raise their children in the correct manner that is undermining their collective success. Intervention must start before birth (including, it would seem, killing the future undesirables with abortion procedures) and it is in the early years that efforts should be concentrated. This would appear to be a re-emergence of Aristotle’s:

Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.

And this is not new. In 1945, The Director of Education for The Corporation of Glasgow reported on the City’s Scheme for Short-Term Residential Schools as follows:

Much is heard these days of the importance of character training and education in citizenship, and here undoubtedly the residential school has a valuable contribution to make. Education in a self-contained community makes it possible for precept to be supported by example and, still more important, for children to have an opportunity of living and acting as good citizens should”

Again, the assumption is that state professionals, not the parents, are best placed to shape the characters of children and impart guiding principles that will govern their behaviour as adults.

This approach by the state goes back further, to 1918 and the origin of the multi-decade Child Guidance Movement.

Genesis of the Child Guidance Movement

The child guidance movement originated in the United States after The Great War. Key to its success was funding from the New-York-based philanthropic organisation The Commonwealth Fund, which was founded in 1918 by Anna Harkness, a widow who had inherited $50 million from her late husband’s estate, equivalent to over $1 billion today according to the Federal Reserve Bank and closer to $5 billion if the gold price is used as the reference point. She used one-fifth of this fortune to endow the fund, mandating it to “do something for the welfare of mankind”.

With such resources, The Commonwealth Fund could operate internationally and it set up the English Mental Hygiene Programme which effectively bankrolled the child guidance movement in the United Kingdom in the inter-war period. In 1926, it established the Child Guidance Council at the prestigious central London location of 24 Buckingham Palace Road. In 1929, the fund also founded the London Child Guidance Clinic in Canonbury Place, Islington. It then began a training course at the London School of Economics for psychiatric social workers.

Evelyn Fox, Acting- Honourary - Secretary of the Child Guidance Council, proudly stated that:

…much may be done in the early stages of maladjustment to prevent a child slipping into the ways of the delinquent.

This concept — the maladjusted child — is at the heart of the child guidance movement.

1 Canonbury Place, Islington, location of the London Child Guidance Clinic

The Maladjusted Child

The policy paper “The Dangerous Age of Childhood: Child Guidance in Britain circa 1918-1955” by John Stewart, Emeritus Professor of Health History at Glasgow Caledonian University, sets out the concept of the maladjusted child broadly as follows:

The concept concerned so-called ‘normal’ children, as distinct from the delinquent child or, in the terminology of the time, the ‘mentally defective’. Thus, it was the overwhelming majority of children that were the concern of the child guidance movement.
The most apparently normal child could, in the course of his or her emotional and psychological development experience maladjustment.
A child is not either maladjusted or normal, it is a spectrum of normalcy and the point at which any child might be located can change with time and circumstances.
Symptoms of maladjustment ran from bed-wetting to aggression, timidity, shyness, truancy, backwardness, stealing, nervousness, being difficult and unmanageable, lying, having a temper, stammering, spitefulness, night terrors, depression, eating disorders, over-activity and a host of other behaviours deemed unacceptable.
The symptoms were taken to represent deeper-rooted problems, emotional instability or psychological disturbance, believed to derive primarily from the malfunctioning of the child’s environment and, in particular, of the parent-child relationship.
Maladjustment in childhood posed a threat to the stability of the family and wider society and therefore maladjustment was a threat to social order.
Child guidance saw itself as a form of preventative medicine, aimed at countering a threat to familial and social instability.
It medicalised and pathologised childhood and moved the focus of child welfare matters from the child to the parent and wider family.
It viewed both childhood and the family as inherently problematic.

The title of this paper came from the work of Ronald Grey Gordon MD, F.R.C.P.Ed. ‘Address to Mothers: the Dangerous Age of Childhood’, which was published in “Mother and Child” in 1938. R.G. Gordon was a Perthshire-born consultant neurologist who was based in Bath in South-West England.

Child Guidance Clinics

Treatment of the maladjusted child was via the child guidance clinics, where the child would encounter members of three professions; psychiatry, psychology and psychiatric social work. The psychiatrist was the lead professional and was in charge despite much talk of teamwork being core to the clinics’ operations.

Play was an important diagnostic tool and also a form of treatment in British child guidance clinics, a feature that stood out from their American cousins.

Stewart in “The Dangerous Age of Childhood” summarises the psychiatric approach as follows:

First, the child’s mind was deemed to be, again in contemporary terminology, ‘plastic’ in a way that was not the case for adults. It could be relatively easily influenced and adjusted and the sooner appropriate interventions took place, the better for the child, the child’s family, and the wider society. Second, since the child’s mind was still in the process of formation, it was not advisable to use techniques such as psychoanalysis and this was especially true for younger children. Rather, for the most part all that was required was, as one psychiatrist put it, a common sense chat, although what he did not explain was why this required the services of someone trained in psychiatric medicine.

Child guidance became embedded in the welfare state via statute: The Education Act 1944 and the Education (Scotland) Act 1945. This replaced philanthropic economic support with tax-funded provision and thus led to a huge increase in the number of Child Guidance Clinics across Britain. By 1955 there were over 300 clinics in England and Wales.

Child Guidance Clinics in Glasgow

As the child guidance movement spread from the United States across Europe, Glasgow, the second city of the Empire, was at the forefront. The leaders of the movement in Glasgow were Dr Robert Rust and Sister Marie Hilda.

Dr Robert Rusk, born in Ayrshire, started as a pupil-teacher and then attended Glasgow Free Church Training College from 1898 to 1901. At the same time, he also took a course at Glasgow University where he graduated with 1^st class honours in mental philosophy in 1903. He graduated again in 1906 from the University of Jena in Germany with a PhD in philosophy. Germany was seen as the forerunner in psychology and psychiatry at the time. Risk also got a BA at Cambridge in 1910. He began at Jordanhill College in 1923 and stayed there until 1946 ending as Principal Lecturer in Education. At the same time, he taught at Glasgow University doing the EdB course and was the first director of the Scottish Council for Research in Education (SCRE) from 1928 to 1958. Rusk’s approach to education was focused on intelligence and mental testing.

Sister Marie Hilda has a considerable reputation in the world of child guidance, being an early pioneer of the work in Britain. S. J. McKinney’s 2020 article in The Pastoral Review, “Notre Dame Training College Glasgow and the Liverpool connection” describes her background thus:

Sister Marie Hilda was a leading figure in the early development of Child Guidance and was a driving force in the establishment of the Notre Dame Child Guidance Clinic. Sister Marie Hilda was born as in Bishop Auckland, Co. Durham in 1876. She studied at Mount Pleasant, Liverpool and entered the Mother House of Notre Dame in Namur in 1898. She joined the staff in Dowanhill in 1904. She continued her studies and graduated with a first-class honours’ degree from the University of London. Initially she lectured in History, Logic, Latin, Mathematics and Psychology. As the College developed, she was appointed Principal Lecturer in Psychology. She was very noted for being focussed on her teaching but also for conducting research.

Sister Marie Hilda welcomes a boy to the Notre dame Child Guidance Clinic

In 1930, Dr Rusk approached Sister Marie Hilda concerning the founding of a child guidance clinic in Glasgow. Sister Marie Hilda gained financial support from the Commonwealth Fund and, supported by the Archbishop of Glasgow and the Director of Education, Glasgow’s Notre Dame Child Guidance Clinic was opened in September 1931; it was seen as part of the Catholic Teacher Training College.

Sister Marie Hilda’s philosophy of child guidance is summarised in this quote:

In childhood, to socialise the neurotic and aggressive, encourage the dull and retarded, and redeem the delinquent, and thus to decrease the number of mental breakdowns and to lessen the number of prison inmates in later life. By its constructive methods, the Clinic hopes to build up integrated personalities capable of talking their place as members of the family of the Church and of the State.

Her approach was informed by the London-based Child Guidance Council and by visits to the Islington clinic. It was thus heavily influenced by the Psychiatrist-led approach from the United States. Later in Scotland the educationalists and psychologists fought back to move the emphasis away from psychiatry and towards education.

This ongoing struggle was interrupted by the Second World War and the traumatic effects on children of evacuation and separation from their parents. This was then followed by the development of the Welfare state in the immediate post-war years which saw a huge diversion of taxation revenue into child guidance clinics.

In Glasgow, by 1961, there were four main clinics and eleven district clinics. The philosophy of child guidance and the problem of maladjustment was evangelised in public lectures and newspaper articles.

Extract from The Corporation of Glasgow Handbook for 1961-1962

The Location of the Main Child Guidance Clinic in Glasgow, 194 Renfrew Street

In addition, residential schools for maladjusted children were founded at Nerston near Glasgow in 1940, and at Balerno near Edinburgh in 1956.

It appears that the history of the period after the early 1960’s and of the demise of the language of child guidance and the maladjusted child is requiring study, and has not so far been explored. What is clear is that the concept of “The Dangerous Age of Childhood” did not go away. Rather it morphed and changed in professional practice, outwith the public gaze, only to re-emerge later in a new metastasised form. In Scotland this is called Getting It Right For Every Child (GIRFEC) and its flagship policy was called The Named Person Scheme.

Comparison with the 2013 Named-Person Scheme

The named person scheme was a plan to place a state official in a position where they are responsible for monitoring the progress and well-being (a slippery term meaning something like happiness) of every child. This “named person” would be a health visitor, a teacher, or some other trusted professional. They were instructed to gather information on the child and, should they choose, on the parents and wider family as well. Their instructions were to act before the well-being of the child had been damaged (remember we cannot define well-being). They were told to act on a gut feeling alone and to marshal all the forces of the state, without the parents’ knowledge if necessary, to act to secure the future well-being of the child.

In practice, this plan eliminated any form of confidentiality, parental rights and authority and enlisted every state official, and all of those contracted to any state organisation as spies looking for … well something. The Scottish Government stated that a well-being concern was “any matter…arising from any factor”. It helpfully gave a list of 304 outcome signifiers to help the Named-Persons decide when they should act. And, to assess the risk to well-being faced by the child, the government issued a National Risk Framework, where 222 “risk indicators” included: being under 5 years old, illness within the extended family, the experience of bereavement, parental resistance or limited engagement, or the parent having a different perception of the problem.

The entire scheme was based on vast information sharing but also on some principles that might seem oddly familiar:

Every child was of interest to the named person.
Childhood was viewed as a dangerous age where any child could experience a loss of well-being due to some event or merely due to the passage of time
The family in general, and especially the parents, were seen as highly problematic and in need of direction and correction by the state.
Everything was on a spectrum, careful professional assessment was needed to determine, at any given moment, where the child was in terms of well-being.
Symptoms of a lack of well-being could be almost anything and the attempt to list outcome signifiers and risk indicators produced almost endless options.
The assumption was that lack of well-being was due to deep-rooted problems, almost certainly within the family.
The effects of lack of well-being in childhood would be hugely negative both for the child, once an adult, and for the wider society and state.
Named person pathologised childhood
It saw both childhood and the family as inherently problematic.

In short, the Named Person Scheme was nothing more or less than a repackaging of child guidance and the maladjusted child for the 21st Century with less expensive and more numerous teachers and health visitors taking the place of Psychiatrists as lead professionals.

The Named Person proposal was opposed by a grass-roots campaign called No2NP led by the Christian Institute. As a result of their efforts, Named Person was determined to be unlawful by the UK Supreme Court on 28th July 2016. In their ruling, the Supreme Court judges observed that:

Individual differences are the product of the interplay between the individual person and his upbringing and environment. Different upbringings produce different people. The first thing that a totalitarian regime tries to do is to get at the children, to distance them from the subversive, varied influences of their families, and indoctrinate them in their rulers’ view of the world. Within limits, families must be left to bring up their children in their own way. As Justice McReynolds, delivering the Opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States famously put it in Pierce v Society of Sisters 268 US 510 (1925), 534-535:
“The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”

or in briefer form to quote G.K.Chesterton:

The act of founding the family, I repeat, was an individual adventure outside the frontiers of the State.

And the state has been pushing at those frontiers for more than a century, challenging the family, seeking power and authority, and claiming righteousness, even infallibility as justification for its actions.

This relentless encroachment by the state seems to be based on a strange dichotomy. The parents have real responsibilities; real obligations; real skin in the game. If they fail or things work out badly for any reason, they will have the duty to bear whatever pain and burden those events might place on them. The state, on the other hand, being a dead corporate entity and not a flesh and blood living man or woman, has no such burden. It uses taxation to take resources from others to suit its needs. All failures are put down to individual rotten apples or areas where lessons must be learned, or else to a previous administration’s errors. The state has all the power and none of the responsibility. It never suffers for its mistakes.

This imbalance breeds arrogance and folly. This was visible in the unreal description of childhood in the Child Guidance Movement and when Aileen Campbell, SNP minister responsible for the Named Person Scheme sought to reassure the public by saying that “parents would also have a role in bringing up their children”.

Rather than folly, we need wisdom and that must start with an honest examination of what it is to be a man or a woman and what is the nature of childhood. The correct answers to those questions will place parents at the centre of children’s lives in a position of honour, not of suspicion, it will view children as individuals and not merely plastic material to be shaped in the interests of society and it will be honest concerning both the challenges faced by children and their incredible potential. In short, a fundamental reversal of the arrogance visible during the past century of child guidance movements is needed rather than the acceptance of earlier errors and the repeating of previous mistakes.

Digging Deeper

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