Rene Spitz, M.D. conducts a comparison of five pairs of children, each pair age-matched within one week. Each pair consists of a.) A desired, loved child in a comfortable middle-class environment and b.) A waif raised by its mother in an excellently appointed foundling home with good hygienic care and adequate food during the first four months of life. The activities of ten children are shown during the first five months. The second part of the film shows the comparison between the children raised in families and the foundling-home children at age levels between thirteen and fourteen months. While the family children continue to be raised in an atmosphere of happy emotional interchange by their parents, the institutionalized children were separated from their mothers around the age of five months. A comparison, age for age, between the behavior of the family children and that of the institutionalized children is shown. The ravages wrought by the emotional deprivation of the institutionalized children is vividly illustrated in their extreme bodily retardation, in their progressive mental deterioration, and in their lowered resistance to disease. Silent © 1953 Rene Spitz, M.D., Psychology. From the Psycholoanalytic Research Project on Problems in Infancy film studies.
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