Quote of the Day

There is one thing all children have in common, irrespective of age, background, and neighborhood. Many times during a twenty-four-hour day, their ego is confronted with the task of behavioral control. This is as true of the most normal and healthy youngster as of the severely disturbed one. For not only distorted or "sick" desires and fantasies need to be blocked from being acted out; even the most understandable and normal urges of childhood quite often need to be cut off from behavioral expression, or must at least be stopped for the time being and postponed for a future chance. For instance, a boy or girl skipping through the toy floor of a department store doesn’t have to be a kleptomaniac to be assailed by desires, wishes, impulses, and fantasies of owning and using some of the seductively displayed gadgets on the counters. There is nothing abnormal in intensive yearnings to have them, and even a not too impulsive child may literally drool at the mouth with greed when exposed to such an alluring display of gratification potentials. In fact, we would even grant as perfectly normal some "substitute" fantasy produced by the child’s ego in a flash and designed to keep the mounting frustration and disappointment from breaking down his morale. The most wonderful and nondelinquent youngster might, exposed to such torture, easily have a short daydream in which a stranger suddenly approaches him, and, with the explanation that he is too old to enjoy such pleasures himself, happily buys the child that bicycle to take away for keeps right now. Or, if temptational challenges are too heavy to be totally repressed, a daydream might weave them into the following spur-of-the-moment design:
The child might visualize himself riding off on this bicycle, with greater and greater temptation of taking it with him, and then deciding, at the last moment, to take it back. The floorwalker, who had already begun to suspect him, is touched by his honesty of confession and final self-control to such a degree that he makes an exception and lets the youngster have the trophy as a reward for being such a sincere and repenting child. A wide leeway of such "temptation daydreams" must be considered perfectly normal, and, as long as the child is able to block his desires from cutting into the scene of open behavior, and as long as these supportive daydreams do not assume too pathological a design, everything is all right. But it is clear that the naturalness and legitimacy of the child’s desires and impulses themselves do not solve the problem entirely. His ego is still saddled with the task of behavioral control. In short, this task of behavioral control hits not only the child with an unusual amount of greed or with special distortions and perversions in his impulse system, but is part of the daily job of the ego of the most normal child in the pursuit of everyday life.

Our life with the children who hate has shown us just what happens if an ego is totally unable to fulfill this task. But, let us forget for a moment the children who hate. For, the trouble they have is only a magnified and intensified picture of some of the troubles every child has to go through in his attempt at self-control. And here is where the most important challenge of the ego disturbances observed in our Pioneers hits the educator and parent at large: The fact that your child’s ego is basically "normal" and your youngster is a "wonderful kid" does not mean that his ego is expected to succeed in its task at behavioral control under all circumstances. On the contrary, we can make two statements with great assurance: first, all egos of children, even those of the most normal and wonderful ones, develop gradually over a long stretch of time, and in the meantime need a good deal of "support from the outside"; and, second, even the best ego is meant to fulfill this task of behavioral control only within a certain limit of complexity. If circumstances pile up on a child, or if an unusual pressure of impulsivity hits a youngster at a certain time, or if a variety of other things go wrong in the picture, even the normal and most well-developed ego is not expected to manage the task of behavioral control all by itself. It is in need of support in order to accomplish its job. In short, the difference between the normal and the severely disturbed child is not that the disturbed child cannot handle the task of self-control by himself while the normal one can. The difference is that the normal child can handle the task of behavioral control even under adverse circumstances if given adequate ego support, while the really sick one cannot even make use of valid ego support which it is being offered.

This, then, makes it obvious that the search for effective ways of ego support is not an exclusive task of the clinician who tries to survive with children as severely disturbed as the ones described in these books, but that it is an equally important pursuit for the parent and teacher of any child.

FRITZ REDL AND DAVID WINEMAN.
Redl, F. & Wineman, D. (1952). Tool Vacuum on the Educational Scene. Controls from Within. Techniques for the Treatment of the Aggressive Child. New York: The Free Press. pp.26-28.