The Uncompromising Demand of a Three-Year-Old for her Own Mother

Betty came to the Children's Center at the age of three-and-a-half, referred by a children's agency because she had been declared unmanageable in a series of foster homes. The complaints were destructiveness, aggressive behavior toward other children and adults, poor toilet habits, temper tantrums and running away. Only one foster mother had made some kind of contact with the child during the two years that she had been moving about. It seemed as though she had clung to her feelings for her own "Peggy-Mummy" from the time when, at eighteen months, she was first separated from her mother, and that she had resented everyone who tried to take her mother's place.

The mother had herself been an orphan from the age of eight. Infantile paralysis then caused her to spend the next eight years in a home for crippled children. From there she went to a wage home where she remained another eight years. She had an illegitimate son while there, whom she immediately gave up to her brother for adoption. Betty had the same father as this first child. The mother was sure he would marry her. He was intellectually and culturally superior to her and her family. It was a terrible blow when he married someone else during her second pregnancy. Several weeks before the delivery, the mother entered a maternity home where both before and after Betty's birth she worked in the kitchen. She had been well during pregnancy; labor lasted only six to seven hours; the delivery was uneventful. The mother had wanted a girl so much she was "sure it would be one'. In the family where she had worked she had had almost sole care of another little Betty, the baby of her employer