Overview

When our children act up - whether they're just moody and rebellious or taking drugs and committing crimes - our solution, so often now, is to send them to a psychiatrist or developmental psychologist for help. What makes us think this will work? how did we come to rely on psychological explanations - and corrections - for juvenile misconduct? In this book, these questions lead to the complex history of ""child guidance"", a specialized psychological service developed early in the 20th century. Kathleen Jones puts this professional history into context of the larger culture of age, class, and gender conflict. using the records of Boston's Judge Baker Guidance Centre from 1920 to 1945, she looks at the relationships among the social activists, doctors, psychologists, social workers, parents and young people who met in the child guidance clinic, then follows the clinicians as they adapt delinquency work to the problem of nondelinquent children - an adaptation that often entailed a harsh critique of American mothers, Her book reveals the uses to which professionals and patients have put this interpretation of juvenile misbehaviour, and the conditions that mother-blaming has imposed on social policy and private child rearing to this day.

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9780674868113

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Reviews

Taming the Troublesome Child resonates with issues relevant for sociologists...Much of the book reads, moreover, like a constructionist treatise in social problem development, as claimsmakers endeavored to typify their particular versions of the problem child. Processes of popularization involved in extending the child guidance message, cultural acceptance of that message, and the related legitimating of the emerging profession and rhetoric of child psychiatry are also sociological nuggets embedded in the larger historical text. Taming the Troublesome Child is well written, minutely detailed, and scholarly in execution.--Michele A. Adams Contemporary Sociology

In Taming the Troublesome Child , Kathleen W. Jones provides an eloquent, erudite account of how, during the first half of this century, psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers banded together as a child guidance team to claim sole authority in understanding the causes of and cures for problematic behavior...Her account is well written, informative, interesting, and intelligent. -- Daniel J. Kindlon New England Journal of Medicine

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