Children at psychiatric risk / edited by E. James Anthony and Cyrille Koupernik.
- Date:
- [1974]
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Credit: Children at psychiatric risk / edited by E. James Anthony and Cyrille Koupernik. Source: Wellcome Collection.
82/584 page 54
![54 Theory for a New Field Some early learnings which initially are adaptive may inadvertantly turn out to be maladaptive. For example, in a study of a class of high-achieving children who were observed and tested from the third grade through high school [13] many faltered in their school work for a time when pubertal changes occurred. Furthermore, some of the best students seemed to be faced with an awesome decision; to yield their very superior level of academic achievement or to yield the prospect of psychosexual maturity. Generally speaking, this decision had to be made by those students who with a vengeance had focused their major interest in life on intellectuality and academic achievement. It appears that several children who chose intellectuality rather than suffering the temporary disorganizations of adolescence remained in a psychological-intellectual latency period and came to resemble those intellectuals who excel as critics of others' work while remaining essentially sterile as scholars.^® Although behavioral plasticity decreases with age, the extent of man's ability to adapt to different environmental contexts is indicated by the wide variety of cultures that exist and to which infants adapt. Bombard [15] also suggests that, other things equal, children are more likely to weather a crisis situation than adults are.^® 13 These generalizations are based on systematic observations and interviews, and on intelligence, achievement, and personality tests on all of the children. Although the propositions discussed here are not based on statistical tests of the data, such tests were made in a similar study of college freshmen [14] with compatible findings. In terms of the proposed behavioral system, it can be assumed that some of the children had developed rigid and highly effective В schemata in association with a prepubertal A component (which included latent anger toward those who had pushed them excessively to achieve academically, and which emerged as a keen critical and competitive attitude toward their fellow students and teachers, and often their parents as well). With the onset of puberty, and the consequent redefinition of the A component, some of the children apparently chose to maintain (or were afraid not to maintain) the prepubertal AB relation rather than developing new ones in association with the changing A component, because to do so would have interfered too much with their current high level of academic achievement. (The average performance for the group as a whole on standardized achievement tests—the 50th percentile for them—corresponded to the 95th percentile on the national norms.) 14 With respect to linguistic skills, for example, it is said that every normal infant spontaneously makes all the speech sounds that are used in all the languages spoken by man. By middle childhood, however, much of this plasticity is lost, so that most individuals will speak a second language (i.e., one not native to them) with a discernible accent. 15 In commenting on the sinking of the Titanic, Bombard wryly observed, When the first relief ships arrived, three hours after the liner had disappeared, a number of people had either died or gone mad in the lifeboats. Significantly, no child under the age of ten was included among those who had paid for their terror with madness and for their madness with death. The children were still at the age of reason (p. x).](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18021876_0083.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
