Joyce Robertson

In 2003, Robertson and her husband were awarded the Bowlby-Ainsworth Award for Documenting And Improving The Lives Of Young Children In Difficult Circumstances.

When the Robertsons retired from the Tavistock clinic, they immediately established the Robertson Centre in 1975 as an educational trust, whose remit was to promote understanding of the emotional needs of infants and young children. During their time at the centre, they continued to publish high quality articles, with a focus on adoption and fostering and as well as promoting their films.

In 1969, the Robertsons attended an awards ceremony to collect an award for their film, JOHN, aged 17 months, for 9 days in a residential nursery. They were told that their film was not going to be shown. However, they decided to take along the film and a projector, on the off-chance that they could show a segment. At the ceremony they insisted on showing 10 minutes of it. Attending the ceremony was Lord Keith Joseph, at the time opposition spokesman on Social Services at the Department of Health and Social Care. He was so struck by the film that he ordered that all key people in his department watch the film. As a result, all the civil servants in the department were also affected. This resulted in an impetus that eventually led to the closure of residential care nurseries in Great Britain.

The findings from the project which ran from 1965 to 1976 were contrary to much of the published literature. Separation per se did not cause acute stress and despair, but rather anxiety, which could be kept to a minimum allowing development to continue. Data indicated that 1 .mw-parser-output .sfrac{white-space:nowrap}.mw-parser-output .sfrac.tion,.mw-parser-output .sfrac .tion{display:inline-block;vertical-align:-0.5em;font-size:85%;text-align:center}.mw-parser-output .sfrac .num,.mw-parser-output .sfrac .den{display:block;line-height:1em;margin:0 0.1em}.mw-parser-output .sfrac .den{border-top:1px solid}.mw-parser-output .sr-only{border:0;clip:rect(0,0,0,0);height:1px;margin:-1px;overflow:hidden;padding:0;position:absolute;width:1px}1/2-year-olds make a complete transfer to the caretaker, while 2 1/2-year-olds are more ambivalent. The institutionalised child displayed evidence of trauma and cumulative stresses after six years. Their 1971 paper Young Children in Brief Separation, A Fresh Look was also published in the journal, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. In the summary section, the Robertsons concluded that Bowlby had overgeneralised James Robertson's earlier findings about how children respond in institutional settings. They concluded by stating:

James and Joyce decided to try to determine the influence of variables on the behaviour of healthy young children during a ten-day separation from the mother. The couple decided to become foster parents to a series of young children by providing 24-hour support and make written and filmed observations of their reactions. James made a proposal to Bowlby, who at the time was director of the Tavistock clinic, for a new project that would look at separation in young children in much greater detail. In 1963, Bowlby assigned £1000 pounds for the new unit and in the same year, Robertson joined her husband at the Tavistock clinic as a research associate to work on a project that would be known as Young Children in Brief Separation.

Papers and books relating to the establishment of the 1963 Young Children in Brief Separation project

In a paper published in 1961 entitled Maternal deprivation: Toward an empirical and conceptual re-evaluation, the paediatrician and psychologist Leon J. Yarrow conducted a review of the research and concluded that maternal separation had never been studied under pure conditions. Yarrow believed the complicating factors were always present. In Bowlby's book, Attachment and Loss, there is a passing reference to the complexities of the institutional situation, and a disappointing emphasis on the assertion that regardless of age and conditions of care, the young child's response to separation is usually the mourning sequence initiated by acute distress:

In the early 1960s, her husband James and John Bowlby, both working at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, began to disagree on the factors involved in separating children from their parents. In 1960, Bowlby published a paper, Grief and Mourning in Infancy and Early Childhood. In the paper Bowlby made what many in the profession considered sweeping generalisations without evidence stating that:

She didn't return to work with Freud until 1957, when her second daughter started primary school. She worked initially in the Well Baby Clinic. At the clinic, she started the first parent-toddler group. Joyce understood that the parents would need help in understanding their infant's new development stage, once they moved out of the clinic. Later she moved to the kindergarten of the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic. In 1948, her husband James Robertson joined the Tavistock Clinic to make observations of the behaviour of small children.

In 1954, Robertson's second daughter, Jean, who at the time was four years old, required a tonsillectomy. Robertson kept a diary of the event, which resulted in a paper entitled A Mother's Observations on the Tonsillectomy of Her Four-Year-Old Daughter. The paper was published in 1956 in the journal The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child and had several pages of comments by Anna Freud. Joyce began the diary six weeks before the visit to the hospital with daily entries that continued until three weeks after the operation, with addenda in the 11th and 20th weeks.

In 1952, her husband James made the film A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital and published a paper with John Bowlby. Robertson and Bowlby were planning to abandon the documentary since the child being studied (Laura) did not cry very much. She had been in hospital for eight days, admitted for a hernia operation. In the film the mother is seen leaving the child, assured by the nurse that she would settle down when she leaves. When the mother does leave, Laura reacts violently and her mood changes for the worst. By the end of the stay it appears that Laura is withdrawn and depressed. When her husband and Bowlby showed her the film, it was Joyce who made the critical breakthrough in realising why Laura was not crying, being a desperate attempt by the tiny girl to control her feelings. The film had an enormous impact and it was agreed that mothers should be able to spend the night with their children in hospital.

The Robertsons started their work by conducting a comprehensive research review, similar to the type of review that Yarrow conducted. The purpose of the project was to study the influence of factors such as age, level of maturity and object constancy, previous parent-child relationships and quality of substitute care, on the responses of young children to separation from their mother, seeking to identify optimal substitute care. The subjects were between 1.5 and 2.5 years old, healthy, loved and never previously out of their mothers care. The methods involved non-statistical naturalist observations throughout day while the Robertsons were away, using checklists and tape recordings. During the 1950's, James Robertson had used a 16 mm movie camera to study the reactions of young children who were admitted to hospital for treatment, and he planned to make 20 minute Cinéma vérité recordings every day for later study..

Joyce had two daughters, Katherine McGilly (born in1944) and Jean Clelland (born in 1950). She had two grandchildren and three great grandchildren.

Robertson took time off for the birth of her first daughter in 1944. In the early 1950s she had to take her baby into hospital for treatment. She was devastated to discover she was not able to visit her child, although she knew that the baby needed her. At that time, the rule was no mothers, with hospital visits commonly limited to 30 minutes per week. This experience sparked Robertson's interest in the field of childcare.

In January 1941, while she was a student, Robertson went to work with Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham in Hampstead to look after infants. At the time, Freud and Burlingham were offering shelter to women with families who had been bombed. Knowing that Robertson came from a large family, and as she was the only Briton in the war nurseries, Freud employed her and asked her to research the different methods of childcare, determine what types of practice were in use and write detailed observations on index cards. A few weeks later, James Robertson was employed by Freud as a boilerman, fire watcher and handyman. At that time, James Robertson was courting Joyce Robertson and it was through her that James met Freud.

Robertson (nee User) came from a large working-class family in London. Robertson left Grammar school in 1933 when she was 14 and enrolled for evening classes at the Workers' Educational Association. In 1939, Joyce met her future husband James Robertson in Birmingham while he was studying the humanities at the Fircroft College of Adult Education and she was studying at the Hillcroft College for working women. During World War II, Joyce and James were conscientious objectors, and during the late 1940's both worked at the Pacifist Service Unit in East London with the victims of the bombing.

Joyce Robertson (27 March 1919 – 12 April 2013) was a British psychiatric social worker, child behavioural researcher, childcare pioneer and pacifist, who was most notable for changing attitudes to the societally acceptable, institutionalised care and hospitalisation of young children, that was prevalent. In the late 1940s Robertson worked with Anna Freud first at the Well Baby Clinic and later in the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic. She was later joined by her husband James Robertson. In 1965, both of them moved to the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations to work with John Bowlby on the Young Children in Brief Separation project and the development of attachment theory. This was to research the mental state and psychological development of children who underwent brief separation from their parents. Later in her career, Robertson worked with her husband to produce a series of celebrated documentary films that highlighted the reaction of small children who were separated from their parents. These were shown in hospitals, foster care and state run hospitals. Later she was known for promoting the idea of foster care instead of residential nurseries.