Child Guidance and Mental Health in the Netherlands

Bakker, Nelleke

doi:10.1080/00309230600929534

Cited by 12 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…32 Nevertheless, in post-war years Dutch experts -like their British counterparts -gave considerably more attention to the pressing problem, a development that may partly be explained by the rapid growth in the number of child guidance clinics and the remarkable mood of child-focused reform that inspired child protection professionals at the time. 33 One reason for this more frequent breaking of the silence may be the immediate popularity of the 1950 Dutch translation of the American paediatrician Benjamin Spock's best-selling The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, in which bedwetting of toddlers is discussed as a 'normal' problem that could happen to every child and in every family. Like many of his contemporaries Spock conceived of enuresis as an almost exclusively psychological, nurture-related problem of primarily 'nervous' children, that could in many cases be solved by simple parental measures such as limiting fluid intake in the evening hours or using a special alarm for a deep-sleeping child.…”

Section: Three New Child Sciences and Their Institutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

From defence mechanism to insufficient bladder control: Dutch experts on enuresis nocturna in an age of developing child sciences (c. 1950-1990)

Smit

Bakker

2021

History of Education

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This article discusses the conceptualisation of enuresis nocturna by Dutch experts between c.1950 and 1990, years in which across the West new child sciences rapidly developed. Today, bedwetting is conceived as a mental illness caused by a mixture of nature-and nurture-bound factors. Have organic and environmental causes always figured as twins, even in the post-war decades of predominant environmentalism in psychological theory and clinical practice? Or is only the more recent biological turn in psychiatry responsible for a revaluation of organicism in expert discourses on the aetiology and treatment of childhood mental illnesses such as enuresis nocturna? Using Ian Hacking's dynamic nominalism as interpretive framework, the article shows that, in the Dutch case, environmental factors continued to be referred to after the biologising of children's mental problems, alongside an increasingly important role for brain-related, physiological and genetic causes of enuresis nocturna.

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Section: Three New Child Sciences and Their Institutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

From defence mechanism to insufficient bladder control: Dutch experts on enuresis nocturna in an age of developing child sciences (c. 1950-1990)

Smit

Bakker

2021

History of Education

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“…An even more influential development in the late 1920s was the introduction of a new form of intervention concerning problem children and their families (Bakker, ; Jones, ; Lekkerkerker, ). As Thomson (, p. 116) has underlined for Britain, the new “practical psychology,” which was more aimed at the domain of education and child development than at psychopathology and clinical work, developed as “alternative strategy […] emerging alongside or as a part of the child guidance system.” Inspired by examples abroad, in particular in the United States, the concept of the child guidance clinic was introduced in the Netherlands in the late 1920s.…”

Section: Dutch Child Psychiatry and Child Guidance In The 1920s And 1mentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking the origins of autism: Ida Frye and the unraveling of children's inner world in the Netherlands in the late 1930s

Drenth¹

2017

J History Behavioral Science

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Historiographies on the phenomenon of "autism" display Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger as the great pioneers. The recent controversy on who was first in "discovering" autism urges research into the question of how scientific discoveries relate to processes of academic reflection and social intervention. The Netherlands provide an interesting case in pioneering work in autism, since Dutch experts described autism in children already in the late 1930s, preceding the first publications on autism in children by Kanner and Asperger. This paper examines the Dutch origins of autism by focusing on IdaFrye's contribution to the teamwork at the Paedological Institute in Nijmegen, which resulted in descriptions of children with autism.The theoretical aim of this paper is to underline the importance of the productive interplay between social interventions and scientific efforts concerning the complex inner world of special children. INTRODUCTIONHistoriographies of the phenomenon of "autism" point to two men as the pioneers of the medical practices that paved the way to the "discovery" of autism in the late 1930s. 1 In her Autism: A Very Short Introduction, Uta Frith (2008, p. 20) refers to "the story" that is told time and again. The most prominent pioneer is the Austro-Hungarian psychiatrist Leo Kanner (1894Kanner ( -1981, whose publication on children with "autistic disturbances of affective contact" was published in the U.S. journal Nervous Child in 1943. The other pioneer, whose medical work resulted in a publication describing autism in children in 1944, was the Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger . His observations of "autistischen Psychopathen" in their childhood were published in the journal Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten in 1944. What has puzzled various scholars, however, is whether and how there was any relationship between the two pioneers (Lyons & Fitzgerald, 2007;Sanders, 2009). This seems to be important because, as Sam Fellowes (2015, p. 2274) recently put it: "The issue at stake is simple: who first described autism?" Both the claim that Asperger himself used the term "autistic" in his work with special children already in 1934 (Feinstein, 2010, p. 7), and that he inspiredKanner directly in a lecture given Vienna in 1938 entitled "Das psychisch abnormale Kind" (Lyons & Fitzgerald, 2007), favor the conclusion that Asperger and not Kanner was the first to note and thus to discover autism as a new entity, (2015, p. 2247), Kanner could have been influenced by a different article altogether, namely one written by a woman, the New York based child psychiatrist Louise Despert, who published an article on "Schizophrenia in children" in 1938. She discussed children diagnosed with this mental disorder, some of them from birth onwards. Their characteristics showed a close resemblance to specific aspects that Kanner observed in his children with problems. According to Fellowes (2015Fellowes ( , pp. 2275Fellowes ( -2276 The aim of this paper is to add a new example of pioneering work in autism in...

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“…De naoorlogse instemming met Bowlby's en Anna Freuds toepassing van de psychoanalytische theorie op de gezondheid en de emotionele ontwikkeling van kinderen versterkte deze tendens. Tot slot hebben ook de oorlog zelf en haar nasleep van sociale ontwrichting bijgedragen aan de groei van de belangstelling van experts voor het licht afwijkende kind (Bakker, 2006). Professionals en politici werden in deze jaren geleid door angst voor de massa's, voor onaangepaste en dus potentieel subversieve en delinquente jongeren en voor de opkomende onafhankelijke jeugdcultuur met haar revolutionaire muziek en kledingstijl.…”

Section: Het 'Zwakbegaafde' Kindunclassified

“…Wel verschenen nieuwe series publicaties over allerhande Afwijkende kinderen of Probleemkinderen. Tegelijk groeide het aantal MOB's, waar die kinderen werden onderzocht, getest en behandeld, met sprongen: van acht in 1947 tot 15 in 1952 en 83 in 1962, naast een snel groeiend aantal rooms-katholieke bureaus (Bakker, 2006)…”

Section: Het 'Zwakbegaafde' Kindunclassified

De identificatie van kinderen met leerproblemen in tijden van expansie van het speciaal onderwijs en vestiging van de academische orthopedagogiek in Nederland (ca. 1945-1965)

Bakker

2015

Pedagogiek

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21De identificatie van kinderen met leerproblemen in tijden van expansie van het speciaal onderwijs en vestiging van de academische orthopedagogiek in Nederland (ca. 1945Nederland (ca. -1965 N e l l e k e B a k k e r ( R i j k s u n i v e r s i t e i t G r o n i n g e n ) URN In de eerste paragraaf bespreek ik de ontwikkeling van het speciaal onderwijs, met name de manier waarop leerlingen werden geselecteerd voor de scholen voor 'zwakzinnigen', zoals kinderen met een verstandelijke beperking lange tijd werden genoemd. Daarna komen een nieuw schooltype, de school voor kinderen met 'leer-en opvoedingsmoeilijkheden' (LOM), en zijn leerlingen aan bod. De laatste twee paragrafen bespreken het discours van deskundigen in de naoorlogse jaren over respectievelijk 'zwakbegaafdheid' -een centraal begrip in deze jaren -en de identificatie en diagnostisering van leerproblemen. Zij laten het verband zien tussen het onderzoek naar leerstoornissen en de creatie van nieuwe categorieën abnormale kinderen aan wie specifieke onderwijsbehoeften werden toegeschreven. Bronnen voor dit onderzoek zijn professionele tijdschriften en andere publicaties over speciaal onderwijs, orthodidactiek en geestelijke volksgezondheid. Selectie voor het buitengewoon onderwijsSedert de vroege twintigste eeuw was de selectie van leerlingen voor het 'buitengewoon' onderwijs in handen van de schoolarts in samenwerking met het hoofd van de ontvangende school. Samen vormden zij de toelatingsautoriteit. Waar het ging om toelating tot een school voor 'zwakzinnigen' was hun onder- 23De identificatie van kinderen met leerproblemen in tijden van expansie van het speciaal onderwijs en vestiging van de academische orthopedagogiek in Nederland (ca. 1945Nederland (ca. -1965

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Child Guidance and Mental Health in the Netherlands

Cited by 12 publications

References 2 publications

From defence mechanism to insufficient bladder control: Dutch experts on enuresis nocturna in an age of developing child sciences (c. 1950-1990)

From defence mechanism to insufficient bladder control: Dutch experts on enuresis nocturna in an age of developing child sciences (c. 1950-1990)

Rethinking the origins of autism: Ida Frye and the unraveling of children's inner world in the Netherlands in the late 1930s

De identificatie van kinderen met leerproblemen in tijden van expansie van het speciaal onderwijs en vestiging van de academische orthopedagogiek in Nederland (ca. 1945-1965)

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