The Children of the Dream: Communal Child-Rearing and American Education was published by Macmillan in 1969. Bettelheim spent seven weeks on Israeli kibbutzim in 1964, observing the unique system of collective child-rearing that the kibbutz movement had developed: children lived in communal children’s houses from infancy, cared for by trained metaplot (caregivers) rather than their parents, visiting their families for a few hours each day.
Bettelheim’s findings were nuanced and, characteristically, contrarian. He found that kibbutz children were psychologically healthy by most measures — socially competent, emotionally stable, strongly identified with their peer group, and remarkably free of the neurotic conflicts that plagued his American patients. But he also found that they lacked something: the intense, exclusive parental attachment that he regarded as the foundation of individual identity. Kibbutz children were group-oriented, loyal, and cooperative, but they were not, in Bettelheim’s assessment, creative, ambitious, or emotionally deep in the ways that individually raised children could be.
The book provoked debate in Israel and among developmental psychologists worldwide. Kibbutz supporters argued that Bettelheim had imposed Western individualist values on a communal culture. Critics of communal child-rearing cited the book as evidence that children need exclusive parental bonds. Later research on kibbutz-raised children has produced mixed results, broadly supporting Bettelheim’s observation that communal rearing produces strong group identity at some cost to individual differentiation.
Collecting The Children of the Dream
First edition (Macmillan, New York, 1969): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good/very good: $8–$20