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At the beginning of June last I started to visit for an hour each afternoon a nursery school for poor children in my neighborhood in London, having several purposes in view:
To study numbers of small children together at the age when neuroses or neurotic character-traits are often found to have started, when investigated in later years, and to discover, if possible, what was happening amongst these children then.
Whether repression was so active, at this early age, in a class of society, which one might believe subject to repressions?
To study the part played by the parents in these cases in the etiology of neurosis when it appeared; the influence of the only child families, and that of children upon their teachers and teachers upon their children.
To help with advice the parents and teachers, and to be of whatever practical assistance possible to the children themselves, who seemed most in need of it.
There were on an average twenty-two children between two and five attending the school daily from 9 to 4 o'clock. More or less set occupations fill the morning hours, out of doors in a large garden, whenever the weather makes this possible. After 12 o'clock dinner-time is over, the children sleep until 2:30 or 3, and then play with toys of their own choosing until 3:30, when songs are sung and milk drunk before they are dressed ready to be fetched by their parents, at 4.
One of the first necessities seems to be to learn the exact standard of behavior customary in the different homes. Some of the children come from very poor streets and otherwise play in the gutter, while others are the children of policemen, waiters, artisans, taxi drivers or unemployed, supported by wives who go out to work. The mothers of these different grades are inclined to regard with contempt others not so well off as themselves and are only too ready to complain of “bad words,” or “rudeness,” picked up from another child by their own. Snobbishness is rife.