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These are the first three publications of the National Bureau for Co-operation in Child Care, which was formed four years ago to co-ordinate the work of the various agencies working for children and also to promote interdisciplinary research into child development.
These books are intended primarily for research workers and contain a wealth of facts, suggestions and hypotheses for further research. They are not easy reading for the lay-person but as they are concerned with a number of aspects of child care they should be of interest to child psychotherapists and workers in allied fields. One aim of the Bureau is to make available, as quickly as possible, known facts about child development, which may be taken into account in shaping national policies on education and medical and social facilities for children. The emphasis on speed is so that the results of research shall not be out of date by the time they are published, as has happened before with long-term projects.
Nevertheless, admiration for the vast amount of work carried out by Dr. Kellmer Pringle and her co-workers in so short a time must be tempered by a certain amount of caution when one realises the possibility of administrators acting on the findings, which as the author herself points out, are necessarily very tentative and intended mainly as pointers for future research. It is possible that these books tend to “fall between two stools”—the one of providing indications and material for further research and the other of providing facts for interested lay people. While any serious research student will find these publications invaluable and will be able to sift out the wealth of information contained in them, I wonder if would-be adopters, teachers,