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Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact that they are feeling the loss of the person they love.
Chapter 1 presented data concerning the behaviour of young children when they are away from home and placed for days or weeks either in a residential nursery or in a foster home. Here, by contrast, we are concerned with separation situations of much shorter duration. We begin with separations lasting from a day to a few hours, all requiring a child to be in a strange place with strange people and without substitute mothering.
A number of psychologists have made records of the behaviour of young children when they first enter nursery school or go to a research centre for examination. In so doing the psychologists have, usually without intending it, amassed evidence that to start nursery school much before the third birthday is for most children an undesirably stressful experience. The records, indeed, make it apparent that ignorance of the natural history of attachment behaviour, coupled with a misguided enthusiasm that small children should quickly become independent and ‘mature’, has resulted in practices that expose children, and their parents, to a great deal of unnecessary anxiety and distress. Nevertheless, for scientific purposes the resulting records have the great advantage that there is no danger that the degree of upset has been exaggerated; indeed the reverse is probably the case.
The first and largest study of this kind seems to have been undertaken by Shirley at the Harvard School of Public Health (Shirley & Poyntz 1941; Shirley 1942). In this study, 199 children (101 boys and 98 girls) between the ages of two and eight years were observed in the course of an all-day visit to a research centre, during they which were subjected to a variety of