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The Hampstead Child-Therapy Clinic runs a very small nursery school for blind toddlers, which was set up by Mrs Dorothy Burlingham in 1959. There are never more than six children and as there are always two nursery school teachers and sometimes students attending regularly, the children are given a great deal of individual attention. There has also been contact with some of them after they have left us, some attending a club arranged for them; and others have been seen by one of our staff members, Alice Goldberger, who now makes regular visits to a blind school where some of our children have gone. For a number of years another of our staff members, Doris Wills, has been visiting blind babies and their mothers at home in the earliest months of their lives.
These are the sources of information that follows. The central theme of this presentation is to show how, and if possible why, the young blind person's development differs from and lags behind that of the sighted. Suggestions will be made about what may be done to help them; and some of the abnormalities that may characterise the blind infant and child will be described.
Quite a lot is known about blindness in adults; about the problems this sets them and some of the methods that have been devised to help them. One has only to walk around the room with a bandage over one's eyes, to get some idea of the enormous difficulties people without sight have. With appropriate teaching and experience, blind people learn to cope quite impressively, becoming more and more skilled as time passes. This sometimes gives rise to the erroneous idea that people who are born blind find it easier to learn than those who become blind later. The born blind start from scratch; they have longer to learn in; they grow up with it; they do not have to unlearn sighted habits. But, in fact, babies born blind are deprived of a major asset, not only for learning about the world, but also for the whole of their personality development.
The first and