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Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years.
A generation has now passed since Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud recorded their experiences of caring for infants and young children in the setting of a residential nursery. In two modest booklets published during the second world war (Burlingham & Freud 1942; 1944) they describe the immense problem of providing for young children who are out of mother's care. In particular they emphasize how impossible it is in a nursery setting to provide a child with a substitute figure who can mother him as well as his own mother can. When the Hampstead Nurseries were reorganized so that each nurse could care for her own little group of children they tell how the children became strongly possessive of their nurse and acutely jealous whenever she gave attention to another child: ‘Tony (3 1/2) … would not allow Sister Mary to use “his” hand for handling other children. Jim (2-3) would burst into tears whenever his “own” nurse left the room. Shirley (4) would become intensely depressed and disturbed when “her” Marion was absent for some reason.’
Why, it may be asked, should these children have become so strongly possessive of their nurse and so deeply distressed whenever she was missing? Was it, as some traditionalists might suppose, that they had been spoiled by having been given too much attention and allowed too much their own way? Or