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The ability to adjust to life as an adult is based on successful physical, intellectual and emotional adjustment throughout childhood. This necessitates fostering satisfactory ego development in the child at each age level, and such development proceeds satisfactorily when he experiences achievement with maximum pleasure and minimum anxiety (9-1).
It is difficult to determine whether the child is functioning satisfactorily year by year, for constant observation is practically impossible. Therefore, in the study of children at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children (9a—1) it became necessary to utilize certain life situations which would elicit responses most revealing of the individual's growth. Psychoanalytic treatment of neurotic children and adults, plus data on growing children, has shown that responses to new situations — pleasurable or otherwise — and responses to obstacles are especially revealing of adjustment, regardless of age and sex. However, sample observation of children's behavior do not always yield these desired situational responses; likewise, from sample observations there can be no valid comparison of different children's behavior, nor of the same child's behavior at different age levels.