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This is perhaps the most important book of the year bearing upon the problems of childhood and youth. Eleven years ago the authors planned a careful study of the possibilities and methods of the reconstructing of children and youth whose behavior had differed markedly from the accepted standards of our society. To quote the preface, the study was to be one “of accomplishment or failure in the modification of behavior tendencies during a period of years. It would be based on what actually happened with young people when there was, first, an attempt scientifically to understand the basis of their personality or conduct deviations from the accepted norm, and second, when, in the light of such understanding, remolding their behavior trends was aimed at in a changed situation—during placement of the young individual in a foster family.” The book is a record of facts, and as such is at once the most helpful and most stimulating reading that the worker concerned with young people, be he psychiatrist, psychologist, social worker or even plain teacher or parent, can find in a day's journey.
A short introductory section reviews the growth of foster home care and discusses the necessity of thorough study both of the child and the home, using all our modern facilities, before a child is placed. The second section discusses the treatment of special problems. Here we have a discussion first of delinquency, then of habit problems and lastly of problems of mentality and personality; the section concludes with a chapter on psychiatric principles in foster home care, in which the theories of Freud, Jung, Adler and Watson, are reviewed together with W. I. Thomas's views on delinquency as the result of the frustration of fundamental desires. Here we see the advantage of not being committed to any one school of psychiatry in dealing with children, and being able to apply the principle that best fits the individual case. The third section deals with the technique of child placing and is p