A Child's Private Logic

Mike is a skinny little boy of six, but he strode confidently into the schoolroom on Chicago's North Shore, past half a hundred adults, and straight to the table up front. With the poise of a veteran performer, Mike perched himself on a stool next to Dr. Rudolf Dreikurs, who asked simply: "Well, Mike, how do you feel?" The boy's answer came in a happy flood: "I have an alarm clock and I dress myself and my mommy loves me all the time!"

Only a month earlier, when Mike attended the first of these Saturday sessions, he had done nothing but shriek and wail: "Is my mommy coming back soon?" With Mike out of the room, his mother had explained that he was always whining and crying at home, and not getting along well in school. He was hard to get up in the morning ("Of course I always dress him"), just as hard to get to bed at night, and between times he ate poorly.

"She Loves My Sister." At the weekly counseling session of the Community Child Guidance Center, Dr. Dreikurs asked Mike how old he was. The boy gave himself away by answering: "Nine months" (he has a sister nine months old). Asked, "Does your mother love you?", he replied: "She loves my baby sister." All Mike's answers confirmed what the family's first interview at the center, backed by observation of Mike in the playroom, had indicated: the boy felt himself dethroned by his baby sister, and was doing his poor best to take her place.

Dr. Dreikurs told Mike, in his mother's presence, that she loved him so much that she had decided to let him do more things for himself--notably, of course, to dress himself. Mike was included in a weekly "family council," where his parents treated him as an equal and let him get things off his chest. (If his sister had been old enough, she would have been required to take part, too. It often develops that the "good" brother or sister is the real cause of the "problem child's" behavior.)

The improvement in Mike came a bit quicker than the average. Dr. Dreikurs and his dedicated associates who run the four Chicago guidance centers (without fees) figure that ten counseling sessions is about par for the course. Many parents pick up so much from just sitting in on the group sessions that they do not need individual treatment for themselves or their children. In little more than four years, the centers have helped 6,000 parents and 5,000 youngsters to win release from such family problems as lying and stealing, bed-wetting and school failure.

Struggle for Power. Vienna-born Psychiatrist Dreikurs, 55, and the psychologists and social workers around him are devotees of Alfred Adler (who argued that Freud overstressed the sex drive and understressed the power drive). They believe that a child's problems are seldom the result of something wrong within the child, but nearly always the result of difficulties with other members of the family. "Often," says Dr. Dreikurs, "you will find one of the most bitter struggles for power going on in the U.S. home." He believes that family problems are multiplied because this is an age of rapid social, moral and economic changes. And Dr. Dreikurs makes much of a resemblance that he sees between democracy and mutual respect and tolerance within the family.

Like all Adlerians, Dreikurs & Co. brush past the Freudian patter of hostility and rejection, Oedipus and Narcissus, and drive straight for the child's "private logic." Their argument: no matter how wacky the child's actions may seem to an adult, they are logical to the child if it is recognized that his own picture of the world around him governs his reactions. So the trick is to find out how he sees the world, how this makes him do what he does, and help him to feel secure without setting the rest of the family on edge.

Give-Away Smile. When a child is questioned at a counseling session, says Dr. Dreikurs, it is easy to tell the moment when his inner purpose is revealed to the youngster. There comes an odd, sudden smile or some other distinctive facial expression, often so dramatic that newcomers to the parent group can spot it. It is remarkable, too, how young a child can give the needed responses to questioning.

Stephen, aged three, kept his parents in a frenzy by waking them at 5:3O every morning and, despite punishment, using any room in the house as a toilet. In a counseling session, Stephen was asked: "You're the boss, aren't you?"

"Yes, I am," said Stephen.

"Is it fun to run all those big people?"

The fleeting, telltale smile crossed Stephen's face--and the counselor had made the big breakthrough in Stephen's case.

Last week, in his annual report, Dr. Dreikurs noted that the success of Chicago's guidance clinics had touched off a flood of inquiries from groups who wanted to start them in other cities. And he could go to the kids for testimonials. One little girl told a playmate: "You ought to get your mother to go to the Guidance Center. Since my mommy goes there, she doesn't scold me any more."

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