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Child Guidance was both an evolving 20th-century social construct, sometimes called the Child Guidance Movement, and an influential network of multidisciplinary clinics set up to address the problems of childhood and adolescence. It began in the United States and after World War I spread rapidly to Europe, especially to England, though not to Scotland. It was the first child-centred institutional response to meet perceived child and youth behavioural and mental disorders. It therefore predated the advent of child psychiatry as a medical specialism and of distinct child psychiatric departments as part of modern hospital settings.
Although people working in the child guidance movement were among the first to adopt child psychotherapy as a treatment method and generated a body of mainly psychoanalytic theory on child development based on observation and case studies, they were late in adopting the scientific method.