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Although most childhood phobias and other mild nervous symptoms are considered transitory, others, including compulsiveness, sociopathic personality, habitual headache, fear of thunder, and tendency to become sleepless over worries, have been found to show persistence from childhood into adult life.
The natural history of twenty-two childhood symptoms was studied in 1,000 fathers and mothers of children who visited a municipal clinic for a routine physical and psychological examination. The childhood data of these parents had been obtained from their respective mothers and were compared to the current status of the parents.
Through a welfare program started in 1959, all children born in Abeno area (population 141,000) are invited to come to the clinic within ten days of their third birthday for a routine physical and psychological examination. A family history of each child is obtained from his paternal and maternal grandmother in the following manner. Two months prior to the third birthday of the child an invitation is issued in which two sets of questionnaire forms are enclosed, one of the father's childhood, to be answered by the paternal grandmother, and the other on the mother's childhood, to be answered by the maternal grandmother. The mother of the child is asked to send the forms to the grandmothers if the latter are alive and well. The questionnaire includes items on speech development, febrile convulsion, asthma, eczema, and the like, and Items 1-22 of Table I. The grandmothers are asked whether or not their son or daughter (the parent of the three-year-old child) has any of the symptoms or traits for at least a few years during childhood (under fifteen years of age for items 1-8, and between six to fifteen years of age for Items 9-22). They are asked to post the completed questionnaire in an envelope that is attached to the form and addressed to the clinic.
During previous research by the present writer, it was found that some of the forms had been filled in