ABSTRACT
Societal reluctance to tamper with the dominant childrearing patterns is at times overcome by cataclysmic events. Early writers on the kibbutz (see Viteles 1967) thus found parents very much at a loss on how to care for children in their new social situation, since their own childhoods provided no examples. To be sure, ideological considerations predisposed them toward group care, but in retrospect it seems that harsh economic realities may well have exerted as much influence on the long-term childrearing patterns in the kibbutz as did the dedication to egalitarian principles, women's liberation, and early exposure to group decision making and social constraints.
In wartime (World War II) England all of the ideological pressures undoubtedly were arrayed against separating young children from their London parents to rear them in countryside nurseries a good distance away. Yet, ironically, the country that gave us the influential Bowlbian position against group care has also, under the stress of the time, yielded some natural experiments to test its general validity. Freud and her co-workers (1942, 1951) described the early development of children in these circumstances. Maas studied adult adjustment of wartime group care children.
