How to Study a Child. A complete study of the child includes his physical and psychological characteristics, personality, gifts, deficiencies, his heredity, environment, training. In studying a child it is of first importance to avoid carefully any stirring of his self-consciousness, which might lead to either morbidness, introspection, priggishness, or vanity. The necessary physical measurements should be made as naturally and impersonally as possible, without discussion. The physical inspections should be made incidentally, during the processes of the daily life, without comment. Recording, except of measurements, should be done without attracting the attention of the child,—preferably not in his presence, and filed without his knowledge. The child’s traits or characteristics should not be discussed in his presence. Psychological characteristics can best be studied under natural, usual conditions:
(1) in the child’s play: what he plays; how he plays
(2) his stories: what he prefers or tells
(3) his handiwork, especially his drawing
(4) what he observes
(5) his questions
A Score Card for Home Use. The following score card has been especially prepared to meet the practical needs of the untrained layman and amateur in the intelligent observation and better understanding of normal young children. It does not attempt to include marked abnormalities. It is merely preliminary to a more detailed and scientific analysis by the specialist. Such a general score card is necessarily applicable only for certain ages. The following outline does not attempt to cover special development beyond ten years of age.
Physical Measurements and Inspection. During the first year the weight should be taken weekly, at the same hour, in order to bear the same relation to feeding, bath, elimination; other physical measurements and inspections should be recorded at least quarterly. In the succeeding years records should be made at least semi-annually and preferably quarterly. The person in charge of young children should observe daily the physical conditions, and be able to detect at once the special danger signals, or deviations from the normal.
Any person careful in details and accuracy can make these measurements and inspections, at least as preliminary to the specialist. Detailed directions are given in Pamphlet V, American Medical Association Press, and in “The Health Index of Children” (Hoag). For ordinary household use, the apparatus required includes a new, firm tape measure, yardstick, accurate beam scales, and cards for testing vision. For school or institutional work it is desirable to have also calipers, laboratory apparatus for taking heights, instruments for taking blood pressure, and a dynamometer for testing strength of muscles. Economic and social conditions, differences of race and heredity, will cause considerable variation among children of the same age.
Psychological Analysis. No generally accepted standards or tests have yet been devised for measuring psychological development. The standards developed by Binet and Simon for mental ability as one phase of psychological age, have been widely tested in this country but have not proven wholly satisfactory. American revisions are now being worked out. The outline here given does not provide standards for measurement, but depends entirely upon the judgment of the person making the analysis. During the first year a chronological record can profitably be kept of the psychological development, noting particularly each gain in motor control, every indication of increasing recognition of sense impressions, the development of speech.
Standards of normal and average conditions and development can be learned by:
(1) observations of numbers of children of the same age.
(2) the study of published tables of measurements.
(3) published records, studies, and stories of children.