ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Making of the 'Modern Child': From a Child of the Future in the Second World War to the Nervous Child in Cold War Thailand

• In Event: Psychological Sciences in East and Southeast Asia, 19th to Mid-20th Centuries

English Abstract

This paper examines the role and impact of the psy disciplines on child development projects in Thailand from the Second World War to the early Cold War. In 1929, the Rockefeller Foundation sent Luang Vichien Patayakom, the first Thai psychiatrist, to study under Adolf Meyer and other pioneers of the mental hygiene movement in the United States. Upon his return, he began promoting mental hygiene and child development projects by appropriating ideas from Meyerian psychiatry and behaviourism, aiming to modernise the Thai mind to keep pace with developed nations. Rejecting traditional child-rearing practices, he proposed new methods to train the child of the future. The rise of the Thai fascist government during the Second World War enabled his ideas to flourish. During the Cold War, however, the goal shifted from modernising the Thai mind to protecting it from the negative effects of modernisation. Phon Sangsingkeo, regarded as the father of Thai psychiatry, proposed a new framework in which the child had become nervous and vulnerable as a result of urbanisation and industrialisation. His approach combined social psychiatry, family ties, and maternal deprivation syndrome. These ideas aligned with the establishment of child guidance clinics in Thailand and the expansion of both global and local mental health networks from the 1950s. This paper argues that the appropriation and localisation of the psy disciplines shaped child development projects in Thailand, transforming the image of the child from a self-governing figure of the future to a nervous figure requiring preventive care amid rapid social change.

Author

• Krittapak Ngamvaseenont, University of Manchester & Chiang Mai University