|
 JOHN
Age 17 months
In a Residential Nursery for Nine Days
Silver Medal, Venice Film Festival
Silver Medal, British Medical Association
1971 B.L.A.T. Trophy for a Film of Outstanding Educational Merit
43 minutes VHS B
Available in Canada from the CSPCC
At 17 months John was a placid child and easy to manage. He and his parents had moved into the district a year earlier, and there were neither kin nor close friends to care for John while the mother was in hospital to have a second baby. Father would ordinarily have stayed home to look after John, but in that very week an insuperable circumstance prevented him. The family doctor recommended placement in a local residential nursery.
There in the toddlers' room John joins five other children between 15 months and 2 years of age. Four of these children have been in the nursery from the first few weeks of life, and because of the frequent changes of nurses have never known stable loving relationships; they are aggressive and unattached. The fifth child, Martin, had spent his first year in foster care and continues to see affection - the only child apart from John to do so.
During the first two days in the nursery John behaves for much of the time as he did at home, confident that people in the environment will respond to his needs as his parents had done. When this does not happen he is increasingly bewildered and confused, but he does not immediately break down. He makes more determined efforts to get attention from the nurses, but he cannot compete with the more assertive institutionalized children and his quiet advances are usually overlooked.
When John fails to find a nurse who will take the place of his mother he turns to teddy bears almost as big as himself. But clinging to these gives only fleeting comfort, and John gradually breaks down under the cumulative stresses of loss of his mother, the lack of mothering care from the nurses, strange foods and institutional routines, and attacks from the aggressive toddlers. He refuses food and drink, stops playing, cries a great deal, and gives up trying to get the nurses' attention.
His distress becomes so obvious that it can no longer go unanswered; the nurses pick him up and hold him more, but they are on shift duty and have also to attend to other children. Because of the work-assignment system, they cannot give sufficient individual attention to help John sustain the temporary loss of his mother.
When his father visits John revives briefly and gives a glimpse of the normality behind his distraught behaviour. But as the days go by he turns away from the father who does not answer to his wish to be taken from the nursery, clearly shown by John's gestures. Father is painfully aware of the deterioration in his son, and is distressed that he cannot take him home. John withdraws more and more from the busy life around him. For long periods of the day he lies with thumb in mouth, enveloped by a large teddy bear. He is overwhelmed by a situation with which he has tried to cope using all the resources of a normal healthy 17-month old child, and has withdrawn into apathy. Throughout his stay in the nursery the young nurses have been kind and friendly, but none has looked after him for any length of time. When on the 9th day his mother comes to take him home, John screams and struggles against her attempts to hold him.
A Note on Later Events
For several weeks after returning home John showed extreme upset, often refusing his mother's comfort and the food she offered. He had severe temper tantrums. For some time any reminder of his stay in the nursery threw him back into the earlier distraught behaviour. Many months later he continued to be acutely anxious if he did not know where his mother was, and to have outbursts of unprovoked hostility against her.John is a simple story of a type found in journals, short case notes which make little impact before the page is turned over. But, as with A Two-Year Old Goes to Hospital twenty-five years earlier, when told by the visual medium the story was powerful; it pierced defences and caused much disturbance in viewers. The reactions of a few colleagues convinced us we had a bomb on our hands...
...In July 1969 a special edition of the Bulletin of the Home Office Inspectorate devoted all of its thirteen pages to John, accepting its message and considering the implications for policy (Home Office Children's Department Inspectorate, 1969). This marked a turning-point in the provisions for young healthy children in care in Britain. Moreover, the great number of reviews in professional journals in Britain and around the world were without exception keenly appreciative. A leading medical journal predicted, "This film is a landmark. What A-Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital did for paediatrics, John will probably do for residential care" (Lancet, 1970).
Below is a selection of quotes from the great number of reviews:
A horrifying film which forces us to look at what despair is for a young child...What is so frightening is that the behaviour of the young nurses is kindly, but the system results in total failure to meet John's needs of a stable substitute mother (British Journal of Psychiatric Social Work).
Should be compulsory viewing for everyone engaged in child care. It forces the observer to identify with the plight of this little boy, and through him with that of all young children in care (British Journal of Medical Psychology).
No words could convey John's stress reactions as powerfully as the camera does. The impact of John's hour by hour increasing misery and deterioration becomes almost unbearable. (Journal of Child Psychotherapy).
Superb photography, a disquieting film which upsets our complacency (Nursery Journal).
John is an individual who is defeated by a system which fails to recognize or meet his needs. The nursery can be seen as a microcosm of many other caring institutions, and perhaps of society itself and the many thousands who are damaged. (Child Care).
Shows with disturbing clarity that institutional care is not geared to meet the emotional needs of small children. The camera dos not allow us to ward off John's mounting misery or to disregard his desperate need for comfort. It becomes quite harrowing to watch (Mental Health)...
...The dangers of early separation had long been known intellectually. Every social worker and child-care officer had answered examination questions about separation. But it had not been known with appropriate affect. A story that could be told in twenty lines of textbook without causing comment, in its visual form struck deep and provoked emotional turmoil in most viewers. Although we had many grateful communications we also had others which verged on the abusive. Some said the film was 'obscene.' Some reacted as bereaved persons can do, searching in their pain for someone to blame -- the parents, the nurses, the authorities, the Robertsons. We were accused many times of having sacrificed John to research, of having sat by without doing anything about his plight, about being heartless; some thought the nurses could have played more with John and were critical of the parents for having left him in a nursery, etc. All this was avoiding the essential communication about the vulnerability of the very young. The film touched upon childhood fears of loss and, in some, activated forgotten memories of events that had scarred their lives. The hostile reactions were classic examples of "shooting the messenger."
A university tutor wrote that she would not use the film again for teaching, because it had been too upsetting for her social work students; I replied that if she could not help her students to learn from this piece of reality in the classroom, how would they fare when they entered the field and were exposed to situations which could set up defences? A committee which recommended films for use with church groups blacklisted John as "unethical" -- as if we had caused John's distress, instead of merely showing it.
Those who could use the experience of seeing John were helped by it, but some others seem to lock into their irrational responses. These ignored the fact that the four minutes shown of John's behaviour each day were focused on the stages of John's deterioration under fragmented care and gave no basis for making judgments on what, for instance, the Robertsons did or did not do. For some people reality was more than they could bear, whether for John or for forgotten parts of themselves. Even some consultants in psychiatry and psychoanalysis could not see through their defensive antipathy. "I could kill you," said a distinguished psychoanalyst... |
