Child Guidance and the Democratization of Mother-Blaming

Kathleen W. Jones. Taming the Troublesome Child: American Families, Child Guidance, and the Limits of Psychiatric Authority. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. x + 310 pp. Notes and index. $47.50.

How could normal adolescents become the "monsters next door?" What did 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 misbehavior--and 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 standard periodization, arguing that both the theoretical framework and institutional model for child guidance were in place well before 1922, when the Commonwealth Fund started its delinquency prevention program and the child guidance movement officially began.

Jones begins her analysis in the nineteenth century, for in many respects the troublesome child was the logical outcome of the presumption of childhood innocence that pervaded American popular culture during that time. If children were naturally good, it followed that their bad behavior needed explaining. While alienists were generally uninterested in the problems of youth, the medical practitioners who worked most with children--pediatricians and the superintendents of state institutions for the "feebleminded"--shared the prevailing view of the inherent goodness of the child. They associated most "bad" children with the "other," especially urban immigrants, and attributed their petty delinquencies to a range of causes, including malnourishment, ignorant mothers, poverty, and bad heredity, that were commonly identified with class. Like the mostly female reformers who founded the first juvenile court in 1899, late-nineteenth-century doctors thought that most youth could become reasonably productive members of society with individualized treatment and proper supervision (and advised institutionalization for the rest). They also emphasized the corollary: if bad behavior was left unchecked, children would grow up to lives of pauperism or crime.

Building on recent feminist histories of maternalism as well as the earlier scholarship on child saving and psychiatry, Jones sets the origins of child guidance in the ideas and activities of women reformers as well as doctors, and in child welfare and the juvenile court as well as the mental hygiene movement. This leads to a new creation story, in which Chicago feminist philanthropist Ethel Sturges Dummer plays nearly as important a role as William Healy, the head of Chicago's Juvenile Psychopathic Institute (and later director of the...