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This book by Dr. Pringle, Director of the National Bureau for Co-operation in Child Care, fulfils the timely function of helping local authorities to plan preventive services, as they have been envisaged in the Children and Young Persons Act of 1963. By this Act local authorities are given new and wide powers to work towards a decrease in the number of children taken into and kept in “Care” and towards a decrease in the number of children appearing before Juvenile Courts. Local authorities are encouraged to investigate the means by which disintegration of families could be avoided and by which the effective functioning of family units could be improved, thus making the separation of children from their families unnecessary in many cases and, by preventing the establishment of anti-social behaviour patterns, reducing the number of children who come into conflict with the law.
Dr. Pringle's recommendations are firmly based on her own experiences in her work with children in institutions, foster-homes and schools for mal-adjusted children and on the researches she herself and some of her research students have carried out in these settings. Her research findings point clearly to the differences in language development and emotional development between children reared in a family and those reared in an institution. Children separated from their families at an early age will—even in the best of institutions—lag behind the family children as regards language development and emotional development. This will make it difficult for them to establish satisfactory relationships appropriate to their age, and to make full use of a learning situation. In her intensive studies of institutionalised children who are also backward readers, Dr. Pringle has pinpointed the link between a child's readiness for school and his level of language and emotional development. In one of the chapters of her book Dr. Pringle gives a fascinating account of the work done in centres of remedial educati