The Child Guidance Movement
It was Freud who introduced the idea that psychological disorders were the result of unsolved problems of childhood. Alfred Adler was the first of Freud’s followers to pursue the implication that treating the growing child might be the most effective way to prevent adult neuroses. To that end, Adler organized child guidance clinics in Vienna, where not only children but also families and teachers were counseled. Adler offered support and encouragement to help alleviate children’s feelings of inferiority, so they could work out a healthy lifestyle, achieving confidence and success through social usefulness.
Although child guidance clinics remained few in number until after World War II, they now exist in every city in the United States, providing treatment of childhood problems and the complex forces contributing to them. Gradually, child guidance workers concluded that the real problem wasn’t a child’s symptoms, but rather the tensions in families that were the source of those symptoms. At first there was a tendency to blame the parents, especially the mother.
