Introduction

For exponents of child guidance, children's behavioural problems were to be dealt with not on the basis of moral judgement but rather through the application of science, and in particular medical science. Earlier work on delinquency and developments in the psychology of individual difference, meanwhile, had drawn attention to the behaviour of the whole child population. To address the perceived problems required the employment of professional expertise. As a Child Guidance Council publication of the late 1920s put it, a child guidance clinic was ‘not primarily a “place”, though, of course, it must have a location; it is primarily a specially trained staff’ (emphasis in original). The same pamphlet also noted that at present to ‘see these clinics in full working order, we must turn to America, the home of the Child Guidance Clinic’ and that it was the Commonwealth Fund which was crucial in advancing child guidance, both in the US and in Britain. Similarly admiring of the American example was an article in the journal of the Froebel Society, Child Life, which remarked that the possibility of the ‘readjustment’ of the ‘problem child’ had been ‘amply proved’ by American clinics. Hence ‘a study of their methods’, which had passed beyond ‘the first experimental stage’, should ‘help [child guidance practitioners] to forward such work in England’.

We therefore examine the emergence of child guidance in America after the First World War and its spread thereafter.