Children: How to Cure Them

Children live in a world peopled by large, self-confident beings who seem to do what they please but will not let children do what they please. If children brood on this situation too much, or if the situation gets them down, they can develop obsessions, phobias, complexes, neuroses as black-fledged as any grownup's. In general, the symptoms are abnormal behavior--tantrums, lethargy, refusal to eat, overeating, wetting their beds "when they are old enough to know better."

In Manhattan last week nearly 1,000 members and guests of the American Orthopsychiatric Association gathered to discuss the grim problems of childhood. "Orthopsychiatry," the scientific study of abnormal behavior, concentrates largely on children. Since it is impossible to explain such polysyllabic notions as therapy or its need to moppets, and since they themselves have difficulty communicating with grownups, the orthopsychiatrist must be wily, has to resort to ruses and symbols, not only to communicate with children but to gain their confidence.

Play. One way for the doctor to get in right with his unsuspecting little patients, and at the same time get the dope on them, is to play with them. Dr. Joseph C. Solomon of Baltimore is a great hand with small dolls, toy furniture, vehicles, etc., which he uses to set up family situations. If the patient is a little girl, the therapist provides her with a doll with which she unconsciously identifies herself. She makes the doll perform actions which she would not admit any notion of doing herself. One little girl made a toy streetcar run over the sister and mother images --to the doctor, a dead giveaway. Drs. Frank Ford Tallman and Leon Nathaniel Goldensohn find a "Betsy Wetsy" doll (one which can be given water, and wets its diapers) useful because it "allows the child to discuss all sorts of intimate situations that have interested and worried him."

Comic Strips. Many grownups have an idea that comic strips of the lurid adventure type are bad for children (TIME, Feb. 24). Dr. Lauretta Bender of New York, who has three children of her own, and Dr. Reginald Spencer Lourie declared that, on the contrary, these wild yarns are often good for unhappy children--"an inexpensive form of therapy." Dr. Bender told of a little girl whose father was a bootlegger, gambler and eventual suicide, whose mother was a paranoid cancer sufferer. Obsessed by the need of escape, the girl identified herself with one of the Hawk Man's constantly rescued women. A boy who had been ignored all his life by an unstable mother and an alcoholic father believed that he was in constant danger, that he would die in five years. He found relief by identifying himself with the invulnerable Superman. For normal children: "Desire for blood and thunder is not depraved, and satisfying it by reading the comic books is a relatively innocuous and socially acceptable form of its release. It would seem to offer the same type of mental catharsis to its readers that Aristotle claimed was an attribute of the drama."

Eating. Everybody knows the timid, sluggish, clumsy, socially maladjusted type of fat child. Usually glandular disturbances have taken the blame. But Dr. Hilde Bruch of New York thinks that mollycoddling mothers are often the answer--mothers who forbid their children normal exercise and play for fear they will get hurt, who baby them beyond their needs and age. Such children do little, eat a lot because they have little else to do--a double promoter of obesity.

Children who won't eat are often victims of parental maladjustment. They know they can get attention by making a nuisance of themselves at table.

Runaways. Huckleberry Finn was one of the classic child runaways of literature, but he was not typical; in fact, he was a wholly fantastic creation. But he was no subject for a psychiatrist. Cheerful, resourceful and self-reliant beyond his years, he ran away to escape his drunken father, from whom he wanted nothing. Ortho-psychiatrists say that real runaways make off because they want something they don't get--attention, reassurance, or peace between parents--or as a heroic adventure to compensate for feeling inferior.

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