It is 15 years since I first became interested in the problem of the deprived child. I was treating a boy who had been referred to the Child Guidance Clinic where I was working, because he stole, and it seemed to me that his hardboiled, couldn’t-care-less attitude to life had been caused by his long separation from his mother in very early childhood, when he had been in hospital. Afterwards I noticed a steady trickle of children coming to the clinic for the same trouble – theft – and having the same sort of character. These children had all been repeatedly punished, but that had had no effect on them. Praise and kindness were equally water off a duck’s back.
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