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After working for a number of years with the middle-class children of the Clinic's neighbourhood, our Nursery School changed its orientation in 1967. From then onwards it became our avowed purpose to serve the children of underprivileged and disadvantaged families and to inquire into the reasons for their frequent failure to adapt first to school, and later to the wider social community.
We assume that the developmental progress of any child depends on a number of favourable influences such as sufficient bodily care, membership in an intact and loving family, affection and support on a continuing basis, ongoing stimulation of his intellectual potentialities, and opportunity for identification with parents who themselves are healthy members of a community. Whenever in a child's upbringing one or more of these conditions are missing, the result is shown in arrests or deviations of development and/or failures in reaching the aims prescribed by the first social groups entered by the child.
Knowing full well that the above enumeration of the child's developmental needs is an ideal, rarely fulfilled in any class of society, we nevertheless feel convinced that social, financial and racial pressures make it almost impossible for parents to meet their children's justified expectations.
We turned accordingly to the Social and Health Services of our Borough Council and informed them of the vacancies in our Nursery School. They offered us for our final selection children in several categories whom they considered to be severely at risk.
Category A: Children of immigrant families where either both parents, or especially the mother, had not made adequate contact with their new cultural surroundings, and where either one or both