James and Joyce Robertson: Young Children in Brief Separation. No. 1: Kate, aged 2 years, 5 months, in foster-care for 27 days. Guide booklet. No. 2: Jane, aged 17 months, in foster-care for 10 days. Guide booklet.  Tavistock Child Development Research Unit, London. 1968. New York University Film Library, New York.

These films show intimate and sensitive studies of the responses of two young children who were, at different times, fostered with the Robertson family while their mothers stayed in hospital for the birth of a second child. Two further films about children in foster-care and one about a child placed in a residential nursery are planned for the coming year. The films are byproducts of a long established research project concerning the mother-child relationship with particular reference to the effects of separation from mother in the first years of life. Films previously arising from this project (“A two-year-old goes to hospital” and “Going to hospital with mother”) are by now well-known and have made a considerable contribution to the modification of the previous hospital practice of strictly limiting the visits of a mother to her child. The present series of films could likewise make an immensely valuable contribution to the practice of foster-care and could also be very fruitfully used in discussion groups with parents concerned to help their young children to meet the inevitable minor stresses of daily life.

Great care was taken over the preparation of the young child for the period of separation. The foster-mother visited the child in its own home a number of times and the child then made short visits to the foster-home, at first accompanied by the mother and later without her. These visits enabled the child and foster-mother to become acquainted with one another and also enabled the foster-mother to become familiar with the mother's ways of caring for the child and with the details of daily routine to which the child was accustomed. To know that one mother allowed the child to have a bottle occasionally, that another mother wished the child to retain the custom of using the play-pen for a daily period, to know that hair-washing was usually a stormy time and to know minutia such as which was the “right” way round to sit in the bath, were of great importance in as