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The trend away from institutional care for children under five dates back in this country some thirty years and is based on excellent studies comparing equated groups of children brought up in institutions and in foster homes, as well as in conventional and progressive types of institutions. Infants Without Families is another valuable addition to, quoting the authors' subtitle, 'the case for and against residential nurseries' (i.e., institutions). The importance and timeliness of the study for war-torn lands, with its millions of homeless families and familyless children, need hardly be stressed.
The authors approach the problem by comparing the children's development in the residential nurseries under their direction with that in proletarian homes from which most of their children come. They find that children brought up in nurseries surpass those brought up in their own homes, in physical growth, muscular coördination, feeding habits and inter-child social relationships; but they are inferior to children brought up in their own homes, in speech, habit-training, and above all, in character development. Without the stimulus of maternal devotion, speech is delayed and may be impaired; without the wish to please the mother, sphincter control is established only with great difficulty; without a close emotional tie between mother and child, autoerotic character traits develop at the expense of social traits; intellectual and creative development are retarded through the blunting of curiosity, through lack of identifications, and through the frustration of the wish for admiration. Based on these comparisons, confirmed by their observations of artificially created families in the nurseries, the recommendation is made that residential nurseries be modeled as nearly as is institutionally feasible on the family-unit plan in order to safeguard the character formation of the child and protect it and society against antisocial behavior at a later age.
Apart from the social