ABSTRACT
This chapter examines child guidance in the inter-war period and its perspective on, and engagement with, the home life of its child ‘patients.’ Concern with the home derived in part from child guidance’s organisational structures and the respective roles of those who carried out its work, in part from the psychiatric model employed, which emphasised the need to understand the whole child and his or her environment, and in part from an increasing emphasis on the child’s relationship with its parents in the domestic setting. While child guidance was in principle a clinic-based form of psychiatric medicine, it was through observation and treatment in the home that mental maladjustment was to be tackled.
