Host Institution
The Child Development Center
A Manhattan research and clinical institution, operating by the late 1940s as an arm of the Jewish Board of Guardians, that for half a century did serious work on the developmental psychology of children. The twin study was its most consequential project — and the one whose institutional handling has shaped the Center’s legacy in ways the rest of its work cannot offset.
At a Glance
- Parent organization
- Jewish Board of Guardians (now Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services)
- Long-time director
- Peter B. Neubauer, 1951–1985
- Function
- Research and clinical practice in child psychiatry and psychology
- Period of the study
- c. 1960–1980
What the Center was
The Child Development Center was not, in its own time, a household name. It was a working institution in a particular tradition of mid-century American child psychiatry — psychoanalytically oriented, longitudinal in its sympathies, willing to take on cases and projects that required years of follow-up. It served children and families who came to it through the Jewish Board’s broader social-welfare apparatus, and it produced research that fed into the journals of its profession. Its faculty included serious clinicians and researchers, some of whom did important work that has nothing to do with the study and is not implicated by it.
The Center’s research culture was, however, the culture in which the twin study was undertaken. The study was not a rogue project. It was a senior project, run by the director, supported by the institution, and integrated into the Center’s ongoing operations. That is part of why its handling matters: the study was the work of the Center, not an aberration the Center hosted.
The relationship to the Jewish Board
The Center was an arm of the Jewish Board of Guardians, the large Jewish welfare organization that, after later mergers, became the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services. The Jewish Board today is one of the largest mental-health and human-service organizations in New York, with a long and substantial record in fields the Center never touched. Its inheritance from the Center is institutional rather than ideological: it holds material from the period, has succeeded to relationships and obligations from that period, and is one of the bodies whose cooperation would be needed to open the records.
The Jewish Board has, since the late 2010s, made limited public statements about the study and has assisted some subjects in obtaining redacted portions of their records. Its position has not extended to advocating for a full unsealing of the Yale collection. The position of this archive is that the Board, as the institutional successor to the Child Development Center (the research apparatus), is one of the bodies with the standing to change that. The adoption-side records inherited from Louise Wise Services on its 2004 closure are at Spence-Chapin, not at the Jewish Board.
The Center after the study
The Child Development Center continued operating as a research and clinical institution after the study’s active period ended in 1980. It eventually became, through institutional changes, part of a successor program within the Jewish Board’s broader child-services apparatus. Neubauer remained associated with it for decades. Subsequent generations of staff at the Center had no role in the design of the study, and many will have learned of its scope only when the documentaries of the 2010s made the picture available outside the institution.
That generational separation is real, and it is part of why the institutional accountability the records demand is not a matter of personal blame. The people who can open the archive today are not the people who decided to seal it. They are, however, the people in whose hands the seal currently rests.
Related: Peter B. Neubauer · Louise Wise Services · The Yale archive