November 19, 1980

Psychologist Dr. Lee Salk spoke about children’s mental health and rights in Taylor Hall. Salk told an audience of students, faculty and psychoanalysts, according to Mary Green ’82 writing in The Miscellany News, that the American family “frequently forgets about the rights of children…. early experiences have an impact on later life and may create effects in the child that are irreversible, such as a state of frustration or an alteration of perceptive sensibility.”

Salk extended this psychological concept into the realm of parenting, saying, “What is needed is structure. What is needed is a more ordered life for the child rather than having him work through his problem…. If you push a child younger than three years of age into a child-care institution, you’re pushing him into an atmosphere that will create hostility within the child because he is not equipped with the social abilities needed to cooperate with others.”