Parent Guidance in the Nursery School: By Margarete Ruben, et al. Foreword by Anna Freud. New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1960. 72 pp.

Knowledge of the causes of human behavior helps us to guide parents and thus to promote healthy psychological growth in the young child. Margarete Ruben presents this knowledge in a series of essays on the meaning of child behavior. Each essay describes a common

crisis in the psychological development of the child. It reveals the parents' initial confusion concerning the cause and manifestations of the crisis and, in some instances, their understandable but unwise responses to the child's behavior. It then illustrates how the counselor, in simple, nontechnical language, helps the parents to understand the reason for the child's behavior and gives them suggestions on helping the child through this crisis. The counseling is done by nursery school teachers who have evidently been well prepared for their work.

This little book is so clearly and nontechnically written that the sophisticated reader might easily pass it over as an old story. But how many of those sophisticated readers could convey so clearly to unsophisticated people such familiar material? Perhaps one of the most important values of the book is to teach those who 'know' how to approach those who 'do not know'.

In her foreword Anna Freud reminds the reader of another consideration: that work with people has indicated that 'the successful upbringing of a child does not depend on his mother's objective knowledge but on her subjective, emotional attitude'. However, she goes on to say that she does not doubt that 'a woman's capacity for mothering is subject to a multitude of complex disturbances'. She adds, 'I see mothering not only as an instinctive attitude but also as a skilled task and an increasingly difficult one under present conditions when the actions of mothers are no longer guided by tradition'. On this basis she endorses Margarete Ruben's program.

Anna Freud discusses another important point illustrated by this book. We must strengthen the potential positives in mothers rather than be de