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54
Results of treatment of mother and child:-
Of these 14 cases, 8 showed marked improvement and 2
were completely cured after a few attendance; 2 mothers
failed to co operate and stopped attendance, and 2 of
the patients are still under treatment.
Comments:-
During the course of my work in child guidance olinics
I have always been impressed by the fact that the school
children referred to me are generally found to have
presented problems of behaviour and emotional maladjustment
dating back from their pre school years, and indeed often
to infancy. This being the case, it seems natural to
suppose that some of these later manifestations of
maladjustment have to be regarded as end results of a longcontinuing
process of faulty adaptation, rather than a
simple reaction to current stresses. It is true that some
cases seen in the Child Guidance Clinic are of this simple
reactive type and are easily dealt with, and absorb little
of the Clinic's time. The more intractable cases are those
with a long history dating back to early childhood.
“It is with considerations of this sort in mind that I
have always stressed the need for early reference to the
clinic of children who present behaviour disturbance and
developmental difficulties in infancy. In my experience
the therapeutic results are strikingly superior in
treatment of the young child as compared with treatment
at a later age, for by that time the mutual interaction of
parent and child may have led to patterns of behaviour and
neurotic reaction in the child which are ingrained by
habit and form, so to speak, a defensive armour which the
child finds it very difficult to' be without.
“An examination which I made in Walthamstow in 1954, of
the histories of 100 school children selected at random at
this clinic, showed that all but 1C of them had shown
symptoms before the age of 5 years of the type
characteristic of the children referred in their pre
school years, and most of them had had two or three such
symptoms.
It is not unreasonable therefore, to suppose that
suitable treatment at an early age might have prevented at
least some of the later difficulties."