Taming the Troublesome Child: American Families, Child Guidance, and the Limits of Psychiatric Authority (review)

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. $47.50.

In 1927, the psychiatrist Douglas Thom aptly summed up the central premise of the increasingly popular field of child guidance: "'Most children are normal,' Thom observed. 'Few if any are perfect'" (p. 94). Child-guiders like Thom sought to explain the imperfections of the normal child in the language of the new psychology. They also sought to facilitate the management of the child's emotional vulnerabilities by individual parents availing themselves of expert knowledge in the private home. The complex intersections of intellectual theory, clinical practice, professional development, personal motive, and social context that gave rise to child guidance during the first decades of the twentieth century form the subject of Kathleen Jones's enlightening and provocative new book. "The story of child guidance," she explains, "is a labyrinthine tale of combinations and confrontations--professional and professional, medicine and social reform, expert and family, parent and child--and the age, class, and gender tensions of the early twentieth century that gave meaning to these connections" (p. 9). This carefully nuanced analysis of the collaborative and conflicting contributions of professionals, parents, and children in the creation of child guidance significantly enhances our understanding of the predominance of the therapeutic ethos in the twentieth century. By raising questions about the limits of psychiatric authority, Jones also reminds us that this predominance has been neither inevitable nor absolute.

To examine this problem of authority--to outline its contours, calculate its limits, and assess its consequences--Jones has gone inside the Judge Baker Foundation of Boston and read more than a thousand detailed case records from selected years between 1920 and 1946. Founded in 1917, the Judge Baker Guidance Center (as it was initially known) pioneered in reinterpreting the problem of juvenile delinquency in psychological terms, and in extending the purview of the child guidance clinic to the minor troublesome behaviors of the normal child. In approaching the problem of authority "from the inside out" (p. 207), Jones innovatively integrates the intellectual history of the child sciences with a focus on the daily procedures of professionals at the child guidance clinic. What she finds from her examination of the white, pink, and green interpretive reports of the clinic's psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers, respectively, are "rituals of diagnosis and recommendation" (p. 63) that functioned at once to determine the terms of professional cooperation, to enforce professional hierarchies, and to advance a unified voice of child guidance to the wider community more powerful than that of any one profession alone.

Jones's reading of case records also enables her to consider the response to the clinic's authority by the child patients themselves. Ascertaining the role that children have played in the creation of their own history is, arguably, the most difficult task facing the historian of childhood. Without downplaying the formidable restrictions on children's power in the clinic, Jones convincingly shows the ways in which these "juvenile negotiators" (p. 156) actively limited the child psychiatrist's authority by withholding cooperation, being less than candid in their responses, and trivializing the therapeutic process. Similarly, she reveals the ways in which mothers negotiated the power of child guidance--in particular, the view held by theorists and clinicians that pathological motherhood was the root cause of all child misbehavior and maladjustment.

Jones's emphasis on the category of class--on the ways in which child guidance moved from a Progressive concern with economically disadvantaged delinquents to a focus on the everyday problems of middle-class children and their parents--reiterates the conclusions of historian Margo Horn's Before It's Too Late (1989). Where Jones breaks new ground is in her centering of the category of gender as well...