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It is said by many pediatricians that half of the cases coming to their attention present behavior and emotional problems. Psychological disturbances in the adult are largely verbalized, a mode of expression not available, or available only to a slight degree in the infant or young. In children, they are largely manifested in socially inacceptable or obnoxious behavior patterns with emotional expressions that are socially useless and
impossible of integration into a congenial human setting. What makes their correction important is that they are the initial points of those habit series that may be potent throughout later life. Through ignorance or neglect, pediatricians have been wont to overlook the psychological phases of infant life, not, perhaps, altogether because of their training and tradition, but to no small degree because of the bewildering literature that exists on the subject. Psychoanalytic material dealing with child—life, especially, suffers from lack of formulation into clear and coherent attitudes. Pediatricians can hardly be blamed for shying away from sources where the very language employed is so forbidding. That is why they find it simpler to account for behavior anomalies on some mysterious “constitutional” basis.
Dr. Watson sets for himself the laudable task of writing a book on the psychological care of the child free of such facile and scientifically unfounded concepts as “constitutional” and “hereditary” determinism. He proposes to limit himself in explaining child development to those experimental facts that are the fruit of controlled researches in nursery and laboratory. The experiments were conducted largely by himself or under his supervision. Fortunately enough, the experiments performed were relatively few and the book is not encumbered with them. Most of the observations are based on child—life under uncontrolled (in the experimental sense) home conditions. That this need not vitiate the validity of the facts would seem evident, but,