Word: mikes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Mike is a skinny little boy of six, but he strode confidently into the schoolroom on Chicago's North Shore, past half a hundred adults, and straight to the table up front. With the poise of a veteran performer, Mike perched himself on a stool next to Dr. Rudolf Dreikurs, who asked simply: "Well, Mike, how do you feel?" The boy's answer came in a happy flood: "I have an alarm clock and I dress myself and my mommy loves me all the time...
Only a month earlier, when Mike attended the first of these Saturday sessions, he had done nothing but shriek and wail: "Is my mommy coming back soon?" With Mike out of the room, his mother had explained that he was always whining and crying at home, and not getting along well in school. He was hard to get up in the morning ("Of course I always dress him"), just as hard to get to bed at night, and between times he ate poorly...
...Loves My Sister." At the weekly counseling session of the Community Child Guidance Center, Dr. Dreikurs asked Mike how old he was. The boy gave himself away by answering: "Nine months" (he has a sister nine months old). Asked, "Does your mother love you?", he replied: "She loves my baby sister." All Mike's answers confirmed what the family's first interview at the center, backed by observation of Mike in the playroom, had indicated: the boy felt himself dethroned by his baby sister, and was doing his poor best to take her place...
...Dreikurs told Mike, in his mother's presence, that she loved him so much that she had decided to let him do more things for himself-notably, of course, to dress himself. Mike was included in a weekly "family council," where his parents treated him as an equal and let him get things off his chest. (If his sister had been old enough, she would have been required to take part, too. It often develops that the "good" brother or sister is the real cause of the "problem child's" behavior...
...improvement in Mike came a bit quicker than the average. Dr. Dreikurs and his dedicated associates who run the four Chicago guidance centers (without fees) figure that ten counseling sessions is about par for the course. Many parents pick up so much from just sitting in on the group sessions that they do not need individual treatment for themselves or their children. In little more than four years, the centers have helped 6,000 parents and 5,000 youngsters to win release from such family problems as lying and stealing, bed-wetting and school failure...