Preliminary Programme

During the post-war years in the Netherlands, as elsewhere in the West, Freudianism reigned supreme in mental health care. The treatment of mentally ill or abnormal children was no exception. At the same time mental health had become a key societal focus. Expectations as to the effect of psychotherapy were high. As a consequence, child guidance clinics, which had been established on a limited scale from 1928, grew at an unprecedented rate in terms of both numbers and prestige. Without an exception the first generation of academic child psychiatrists trained at these clinics and all of them were Freudians. Their hegemony in child care and protection and child mental health lasted until the 1980s, when biomedicine started to replace psychoanalysis as leading theory.
It is generally assumed that Freudianism has contributed significantly to the development of the permissive society of the 1960s and 1970s. But how? This paper explores the way psychoanalysis has changed the conceptualization of childhood behavioral problems. How did experts shift their interpretations of unruly or difficult behavior toward mental illness? Which elements of Freudianism were chosen and which were ignored? Which behaviors were particularly chosen to be interpreted along analytical lines and which were not? And how did Freudian interpretations of problem behavior find their way outside child psychiatry, in the world of childrearing and development? To answer these questions textbooks and journals for professionals in child care and protection, child guidance, and education will be analyzed as to the labels that were used for particular behaviors, their meaning, ascribed etiology and parental responsibility, as well as their preferred treatment. (Show less)

Today's global society differs from the past. But that does not mean that global phenomena and interactions has been absent in the past. From the second half of the 19th century there are many examples of transnational circulation of ideas and knowledge. Comparisons with other countries has been an essential social and political practice in the construction of welfare states as demonstrated by Pauli Kettunen in his article The power of international comparison: A perspective on the making and challenging of the nordic welfare state. As Pirjo Markkola has shown the social and political elite engaged in child welfare issues travelled between different countries and exchanged ideas and experiences through personal meetings, study tours, conferences and congresses – exchanges that often were reported in national journals.
This paper addresses international influences on Swedish child welfare during the first decades of the twentieth century when the Swedish welfare state was beginning to develop. By a study of Swedish journals aimed for professionals on child welfare during the period 1901-1932, this paper seeks to identify how international comparisons were narrated as models or warning examples in the professional discourse on child welfare. (Show less)

The rise of dental provision for schoolchildren in Edwardian London developed in response to the problem of poor dental health in late Victorian Britain, a subject which has seen little academic attention within the fields of the history of medicine and child welfare. The few studies which have addressed health provision for school children focus on the ‘national efficiency crisis’ at the turn of the twentieth century, and the growth of school medical services, within the narrative of the origins of the welfare state. Such studies fail to recognise the impact of increased medical knowledge, practice and professionalization of dentists. This presentation discusses the causes and extent of poor dental health in schoolchildren and how the problem was perceived and addressed. This research explores the establishment of the school dental service in Edwardian London and pioneers analysis of the first dental clinics. In conclusion, this paper argues that the rise of the school dental service, from a philanthropic venture to a municipal service, marked a philosophical shift from parental and philanthropic responsibility for working class children, through the rise of the dental profession, to an acceptance and new-found political value of children by the state. This finding is significant to the theoretical medicalization of childhood and the social reconstruction of children in the Edwardian period. (Show less)

Although pioneering work has been done on children’s hospitals via the HHARP project, for the United Kingdom, and for Canada from 1900-1940 by Mona Gleason, relatively little is known about how these were experienced. This paper will draw together research on children’s hospitals in Norwich, London, San Francisco , Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, Melbourne, Montreal, Toronto and Lyon. It will show how facilities for play and education were often developed on an ad hoc basis by volunteers, as a means to occupy the children, and only later became formalised. Indeed, as Sloane (2008) has shown, by the early 1900s, some American hospital buildings were designed to accommodate these needs, introducing kindergartens and playrooms. Activities in convalescent homes, which were developed in connexion with almost every children’s hospital, will also be examined. Here, the young could engage with a wider range of activities including swimming and boating. Issues of class, gender and ethnicity will be integral to the analysis.

Throughout, the paper will explore contrasting arguments about the place of education, play and recreation in these institutions. Did they serve as a form of “acculturation”, and means of inducting or influencing working class children into “middle class” values? Sloane (2008, p. 55), for example, argued that by the 1920s, “the moral playground was becoming a medical therapeutic space”. Drawing on oral histories and a recent Mass-Observation directive, the paper will also explore whether hospital facilities for play and education provided welcome new opportunities , regardless of children’s social background. Alternatively, was it an imposition to expect sick children to engage in structured activities which they might not have chosen ?
In conclusion, the paper will evaluate whether education and play provision in hospitals and convalescent homes was experienced as part of a healing process, an aspect of class indoctrination, or an unwelcome imposition, and whether it was considered to have had lasting value.

D.C.Sloane, “A better home away from home: the Emergence of Children’s Hospitals in an Age of Women’s Reform”, M. Gutman and N. de Coninck Smith, eds, Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space and the Material Culture of Children (Rutgers University Press, 2008) , pp. 42-60.
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