In 1929 two psychiatrists associated with the Jewish Child Guidance Clinic in the East End of London, Noel Burke and Emanuel Miller, published an article in the professional outlet British Journal of Medical Psychology. Their topic was ‘child mental hygiene’, an issue which, they claimed, had only recently been subject to a ‘more scientific attitude … coupled to philanthropy’. The following year Miller was again in print, this time in the recently founded popular journal Mother and Child. This article was entitled ‘The Difficult Child’ and in his opening remarks Miller commented that ‘with the growth of civilization to the complex form that it has assumed today’ children could no longer pass easily from childhood to adolescence to maturity as had previously been the case in ‘primitive societies’. Indeed it had to be recognized that the pressures of contemporary life had ‘brought about strains and tensions and disruptive tendencies which probably did not exist before’.

Around a year later, in autumn 1931, the Notre Dame Child Guidance Clinic opened in Glasgow, an event described by the local Catholic newspaper. Central to the composition of the clinic, it was suggested, was a team consisting of a psychiatrist, a psychologist and a psychiatric social worker (PSW). The clinic's aim was not to deal with children who had ‘definite organic disease, mental defect, or epilepsy’. Rather, its object was the ‘study and treatment of children who, though given average home and school conditions, remain an enigma to their parents’.