the other, by a psychologically incestuous relationship of a girl with her mother's paramour. The author concludes with a renown social worker's remark that: "The child welfare field has a warm heart. What is more in need of is a really tough mind...".
01 The Evolution of Residential Care for Children in the U.S.A.
In most of history and until a little over half a century ago in Western Civilization, millions of children were considered as mere economic commodities, as chattel. They were sold, hired out, or otherwise exploited as were domesticated animals. It is no surprise that the more alert youngsters escaped from bondage into criminality. Nor should it be surprising that a good many of these abused children eventually developed emotional disturbances or other pathological conditions of personality.
In the 1930s, August Aichhorn (1935) resorted to recent Freudian psychoanalytical theories to explicate the motivations behind the criminal behavior of Viennese delinquent youths. In 1935, Leo Kanner wrote the first textbook on child psychiatry published in the United States. In the late 1940s, Bruno Bettelheim founded Chicago's Orthogenic School, and in 1950 he wrote his seminal Love is not Enough: The Treatment of Emotionally Disturbed Children. By then, he and Emmy Sylvester (1948) had already developed the concept of therapeutic milieu.
Interestingly, Aichhorn, Freud, Kanner, and Bettelheim were all Austrians, even though the latter two did most of their mature work in America, where they found a fertile terrain for their study of children's asocial behavior. Indeed, our massive immigration had brought about much social dislocation. Children were the first victims of the breakdown of the nuclear family and of the hardships of acculturation. They had, moreover, a severe handicap in securing their moral right to safety, good nutrition, health, and education: they did not vote. Nor do they today - which may expla...