Mental Hygiene of Childhood

A child may be said to enjoy a high degree of mental health when his potentialities and his special talents have developed in keeping with his need for survival and satisfaction and with society's need for a tolerable relationship with him, and when he is given opportunity to express his potentialities. This differs markedly from a concept of mental health as the absence of mental disease, for it centers on a positive goal toward which to drive, rather than a negative one from which to recede--progress by walking backwards, as it were. If one adheres to this positive motivation of mental hygiene, i.e. working toward an ideal, he finds an incentive to progress over a wide range of possible achievement; whereas to strive merely for the absence of mental disease leaves one unmoved by the larger wastage of unrealized potentialities and satisfactions

Developmental psychology · Environmental health · Hygiene · Mental health · Mental hygiene · Psychiatry · Early Childhood Education and Development · Medicine · Psychology