--- Title: "Pampered Style Is Increasing". Psychologist's Views. Juvenile Crime Discussed Description: The Telegraph (Brisbane), Monday, 22 June 1936, p. 5. Interview with Alfred Adler on his arrival in London (May 1936), reprinted from an unidentified English newspaper ("an English exchange"); unsigned. Author: Alfred Adler URL: https://adler.school/archivo/adler/entrevistas/original/1936-06-22%20Pampered%20Style%20Is%20Increasing --- # "PAMPERED STYLE IS INCREASING" ## Psychologist's Views ## Juvenile Crime Discussed **The growing seriousness of juvenile crime has been forced upon the public mind in England. In a recent report the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis revealed the fact that two-fifths of those arrested for indictable crimes in London last year were under twenty-one years of age.** On the same day there arrived in London the man who has devoted the greater part of his life to finding a remedy for juvenile crime; who has insisted for years that the potential criminal can be detected in childhood and changed into a normally happy member of the community long before he or she commits any criminal act. Dr. Alfred Adler, founder of the School of Individual Psychology, worked for twenty years in the schools of Vienna, compiling case-histories of delinquent children, striving by his friendly, questioning, drawing-out method, to adjust their relationships with their fellows and their parents. Now, as Professor of Medical Psychology in New York, he is continuing his work in the United States. ### "UNSETTLEMENT." "Juvenile crime increasing in London? It is everywhere the same," he said in answer to a question. "Why? Unsettlement after the war; the unsettlement of parents; the feeling among children that they have been born into an insecure world." Dr. Adler speaks quietly, undemonstratively, almost in a confidential whisper; his small, sharp eyes refusing to let the attention of his listener slip. His speech is swift, packed with illustration. He makes no pretence of scientific aloofness, but sets himself to give the layman in half an hour a comprehensive outline of his method (states an English exchange). "The pampered style is increasing. It is often the result of neglect . . ." "Isn't the pampered child one who is given too much rather than one who is neglected?" "I didn't say the pampered child. I said the pampered style. By that I mean the habit of greed, the tendency to be always thinking of what you can get. The neglected child, not being given what he needs, becomes the 'getting' type. If he cannot get, he takes. Perhaps the 'getting style' would be a better way of putting it. "Your police commissioner says the young offenders work to a large extent in gangs? Just so. I have noticed it everywhere. They cannot get what they want in the schools. They play truant. They run the streets. They associate with older delinquents. They get courage in gangs, for they are usually cowardly. Besides, they have caught the gang spirit from what they read, and from films." ### REMEDY IN THE SCHOOLS. "Then the root of the trouble lies in the schools?" "The remedy lies there. We cannot reach each parent by books or by lectures. Those whom we most want to reach do not read, do not care. But we can reach the teachers. "I could teach any teacher in a day—an intelligent one in an hour—how to detect tendencies toward delinquency in a boy or a girl; how to distinguish between the passive and the active type of child delinquent—one being potentially neurotic, the other potentially criminal. "The teacher can set questions, little compositions, to catch the child out, to discover whether he is likely to be a burden in the class or not. I have done it often. Ask him to write an answer to the question, 'How can I be useful?' or 'How can I make friends?' or 'What are my ambitions?' He will reveal himself." "And afterwards? Would you separate the delinquent children—make special clases for them?" "No. Keep them in the same class with the others, but give them what they want Let them find in school, in social life, what they would otherwise seek in an anti-social way. "The teacher who has been trained to understand them, to distinguish their tendencies, will know how to give them what they need. There is the boy, for instance, who is always giving trouble because he feels he cannot be successful in his lessons. He wants to stand out from his fellows in other ways. By talking to him, by setting him questions to trap him into saying what he wants, I can make him realise that he can get it in school, in his classes." ### TWENTY YEARS' EXPERIMENT. "I experimented in Vienna schools for twenty years. We had thirty schools there, in each of which we set up Advisory Councils—a deliberately colourless title. The Advisory Councils, not only set themselves to discover the potentially delinquent children. They tried to get in touch with the parents, to talk to them, not with any idea of making them feel guilty, but to understand their difficulties, to get them to co-operate in setting the children right. "My best teacher in Vienna has written a most valuable book, setting forth case-histories of delinquent and potentially delinquent children over a period of ten years. I am anxious to get it translat[¿ed.?] But I am afraid the work in Austria is at a standstill for the moment. The Present Government is not sympathetic. "They are a little more advanced in the United States. There is the New Jersey plan, for instance. Its method is to deal with all forms of juvenile delinquency in the schools. A policeman who finds a child committing some offence does not take him to the police court, or even to the juvenile court. He takes him back to the school, to be examined by a teacher trained in that method." Dr. Adler's secretary reminded him that others were waiting. He held out his hand in dismissal:— "You have heard enough to understand what I want to do." --- *Fuente:* «"Pampered Style Is Increasing". Psychologist's Views. Juvenile Crime Discussed», *The Telegraph*, Brisbane, 22 de junio de 1936, p. 5, sin firma; reproduce, según el propio texto («states an English exchange»), una entrevista de un diario inglés no identificado, hecha a la llegada de Adler a Londres en mayo de 1936. Transcripción hecha sobre la imagen de la página en Trove (National Library of Australia, nla.news-article183383550), cotejada con el texto OCR de la plataforma. Se conservan las erratas del impreso «clases» (por «classes») y la falta de punto en «what they want Let them»; «a bcy» es letra rota y se da como «a boy». Una mancha de tinta tapa el final de «translat[ed.]». El mismo texto apareció en el *Newcastle Sun* del 15 de julio de 1936, p. 8 («Neglect blamed for crime. Juvenile gangs finding solution», Trove 166575162; no cotejado).