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Child Guidance

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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 Austria and England, though not to Scotland.[1] 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.[2][3][4][5][6]

History

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The London Child Guidance Clinic (1929) was originally at "Tudor Lodge" 1, Canonbury Place N1, London. It is now integrated in the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in Swiss Cottage

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.[7] 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.[7][8]

In 1919, Alfred Adler started the first child guidance clinic in Vienna. With the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,the Social Democratic Party of Austria came to power in the newly-formed Austrian Republic. The Social Democrats supported welfare programs with a particular focus on childhood educational reform. The resulting climate enabled Adler and his associates to establish 28 child guidance clinics, and Vienna became the first city in the world to provide schoolchildren with free educational therapy. [9]

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.[10] 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.[11] 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.[12] The first child guidance clinic to open in a voluntary hospital was at Guy's Hospital, London in 1930.[13]

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.[14] Referrals would come in the main from schools, nurseries, (juvenile) magistrates, police, general practitioners and parents.[1] 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.[13][1]

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.[1][15] [16] In 1944 there were 95 child guidance clinics across England. With the passing of the Education Act 1944, which recognised child guidance clinics as part of the support to mainstream education, that number rose to 300 clinics in 1955.[17]

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.[1] 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.[1]

Eclipse of the child guidance movement

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In 1979, Robina Addis founded the Child Guidance Trust in order to pass on her social work knowledge.[18] 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, (CAMHS), a battle it ultimately lost largely for economic and ideological reasons, arguably to the detriment of children, their families and their communities.[3][1][19] 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.[20]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b c d e f g John Stewart (2012). "The dangerous age of childhood': child guidance in Britain c.1918-1955". Retrieved 9 January 2020.
  2. ^ Michael Fordham (1969). Children as Individuals (revised from The Life of Childhood, Routledge ed.). London: Hodder & Stoughton.
  3. ^ a b Black, Dora (1983). "Are child guidance clinics an anachronism?". Archives of Disease in Childhood. 58 (8): 644–5. doi:10.1136/adc.58.8.644. PMC 1628318. PMID 6614983.
  4. ^ Rustin, Margaret. (2009) 'Esther Bick's legacy of infant observation at the Tavistock – some reflections 60 years on', Infant Observation, 12(1), p. 32
  5. ^ Bowlby, J. (1999) [1969]. Attachment. Attachment and Loss (vol. 1) (2nd ed.). New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-00543-8. LCCN 00266879. OCLC 232370549. NLM 8412414.
  6. ^ Graham, Philip (2002). "Obituary: Professor Israel Kolvin". The Independent. Retrieved 12 January 2020.
  7. ^ a b Levy, D. M. (1968). "Beginnings of the child guidance movement". American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. 38 (5): 799–804. doi:10.1111/j.1939-0025.1968.tb00597.x. PMID 4879358.
  8. ^ Beuttler, Fred and Bell, Carl (2010). For the Welfare of Every Child – A Brief History of the Institute for Juvenile Research, 1909 – 2010. University of Illinois: Chicago
  9. ^ McCluskey, Mary C. (5 March 2021). "Revitalizing Alfred Adler: An Echo for Equality". Clinical Social Work Journal. 50: 387–399.
  10. ^ Thom, Deborah. "Emanuel Miller". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/61403. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  11. ^ "The East London Child Guidance Clinic". Lost Hospitals of London. Retrieved 10 January 2020.
  12. ^ "The London Child Guidance Clinic". Lost Hospitals of London. Retrieved 10 January 2020.
  13. ^ a b "Psychologists in Education Services", The Summerfield Report (1968) (Report). London: Department of Education and Science. 1968.
  14. ^ "the London Child Guidance Clinic information leaflet". Wellcome Library. Retrieved 11 January 2020.
  15. ^ C. Britton and D. W. Winnicott, "The problem of homeless children". The New Era in Home and School 25, 1944, 155-161
  16. ^ C. Britton, 'Remarks' in "The Oxfordshire Hostels Scheme". Report of Child Guidance Inter Clinic Conference. 1946, 29-35, 42-43
  17. ^ Wardle, Christopher J. (1991). "Twentieth-Century Influences on the Development in Britain of Services for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry". British Journal of Psychiatry. 159: 56. doi:10.1192/bjp.159.1.53. PMID 1888980. S2CID 30680407.
  18. ^ "Robina Addis". wellcomelibrary.org. Retrieved 15 November 2016.
  19. ^ Renee Cohen (31 October 1996). "Letter: Where is the Child Guidance Clinic?". The Independent. Retrieved 10 January 2020.
  20. ^ 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. XXIV (3). doi:10.4000/rfcb.4138.

Further reading

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