ABSTRACT
There are hundreds of children who present a combination of childish dependency and negativistic bravado. They are full of resourcefulness and cunning about how to get along in the streets, yet they are hopelessly ignorant and illiterate after six grades of public school. They demand constant gratification but do not admit being gratified. This chapter is confined to two areas, namely, what the authors have observed about how the families function, and the adaptations of therapeutic technique they have devised for clinical work with them. The author's first job was to design an approach that would tap the operations of the subgroups in the family and help in understanding their separate dynamics and create conditions within which the critical split between parents and siblings could be mended by bringing the sibling operation into the sphere of parental awareness. The ultimate goal was the re-establishment of the parental control and guidance children need for their growth.
