Preliminary Report on Children's Reaction to the war including a critical survey of the literature - by J. Louise despert. Cornell University, College of Medicine. 1942.
With the invasion of Poland by Germany and the opening of World War II, the authorities in Britain decided to transfer children from their families to foster families to allow their parents to enlist in the war effort. This report includes a critical study of the psychological impact of leaving home during wartime on those children, and presents among other things the results of a study conducted on a specific group of children at the Payne Whitney School. The report provides data on anxiety and fear responses of a group of children under supervision at the school, particularly since the United States entered the war. Also, several American writers, psychologists and psychiatrists were sent on official missions to investigate the psychological impact on the six thousand seven hundred children in Cambridge who were evacuated from their homes and parents and handed over to foster families in early September 1939. The report describes a considerable increase in the level of anxiety among the children, in the first year of the war an increase in the percentage of juvenile crime was reported, homesickness (about half of the children who were sent to foster families returned home after a few months), mental illnesses, restlessness and nervousness that developed as a result of coping with leaving home and with the reality of war. They examined the effect of air raids on children with or without bombing, diagnosis of aggression in children as a result of growing up in wartime, and more. The report also examines the long-term psychological impact of the war on children, their ability to adapt to a new reality of an ongoing world war between the world powers. Whether war games helped children cope with the new reality, or the opposite, distorted reality for them. The report concludes that if the British could turn back the clock they would not recommend evacuating the children from their homes, and that the long-term damage far outweighed the short-term benefit of releasing their parents. Among other things, the report makes use of reports received from medical officers sent to population concentrations during the war, at the end of the booklet are no less than ten pages of bibliographic sources, and more.
92, 10 pages. Good condition.
