1954 image from Journal of Scientology 39G. AI restored and colorized by Jeffrey Augustine

The document at the center of this article is the Journal of Scientology, Issue 39-G, published by the Hubbard Association of Scientologists International in Phoenix, Arizona, circa December 1954.[1]

I have posted this journal as a downloadable PDF at the bottom of this article. I encourage the reader to scroll down and read the original for themselves. Every quotation and page citation below can be checked against those pages.

The front page of that issue carries a short essay by L. Ron Hubbard titled “How to Live With Children!” (p. 1). It is, on its surface, the gentlest thing Hubbard ever put his name to. It is still passed around online seventy years later, quoted approvingly by people who have no idea where it came from, as a small classic of permissive, child-respecting wisdom: do not control the child, do not break him, do not train him into a social animal, and above all do not try to own him, because “train him, control him and you will lose his love.”

The words are not even original to 1954. They are lifted from Hubbard’s introduction to his 1951 book Child Dianetics and reprinted here “with his permission,” a fact the Journal itself confirms three pages later.[2]

A child, Hubbard writes, is “not a special species of animal distinct from Man.”

A child is “a man or woman who has not attained to full growth” (p. 1).

Everything turns on that. In the ordinary world, “childhood” is a protected category. We surround children with protections precisely because they are children — developmental, parental, medical, educational — and those protections carry authority: a parent’s authority, a doctor’s, a teacher’s. Hubbard’s sentence quietly dissolves the category.

If a child is simply an adult who has not finished growing, then the protections that attach to childhood are an error, a form of suppression, and the authority behind them can be stripped away and reassigned.

In “How to Live With Children!” that reassignment sounds like liberation. In practice, as the rest of this same issue shows, the authority does not go to the child. It goes to the auditor, the organization, and the price list.

To understand how total that dissolution becomes, you have to add the second half of Hubbard’s cosmology, which by 1954 he had already published in Scientology: A History of Man.[3]

The being in the small body is not young at all. It is a thetan — an immortal spirit trillions of years old, briefly wearing a child. Put the two ideas together and the modern child disappears entirely. What remains is an ancient adult who happens to be small, and who can therefore be processed, credentialed, drilled, put to work, and billed.

This is not my gloss laid over the text. It is stated in the issue itself. On page three, in an article reporting on Hubbard’s “crusade” to audit children, two of his auditors write that children “are thetans and, though in a somewhat smaller body, should receive the same respect and courtesy from an auditor that an adult would receive” (p. 3).

Seventy years later, one of the survivors of that doctrine put the same idea in colder words. Jamie Mustard, who was turned over to the Sea Org on the day of his birth, describes the children of Scientology as “trillion years old fallen gods in baby bodies at best and livestock for future Sea Org labor at worst.”[4] That is Hubbard’s 1954 premise, followed all the way to its floor.

What the “crusade” actually consisted of is laid out in the same article, “A Crusade for Our Children,” which runs across pages three and seven. Read it with the front-page doctrine in mind and it stops being a feel-good story about helping children.

The first thing the auditors describe is getting the parents out of the way. The recommended procedure was to have the child brought to the office by his parents and then to send the parents off “to the nearest cafe to wait” while the auditor worked the child alone (p. 3). The stated reason is that the child must be free to make noise, and that the parents’ presence “invalidates” the session. Strip the jargon and what is being described, at the very origin of the movement, is the deliberate separation of a child from his parents so that a stranger can run a procedure on him outside their knowledge and supervision.

The technique itself is described, in Hubbard’s own vocabulary, as one “given for auditing sick babies and sick animals” (p. 3) — the “run-away,” or withdrawal, process. I want to sit on that phrase, because it is Hubbard’s, not mine. The method used on the children is the method for animals. The front page insists a child is not “a special species of animal.” The working method three pages later treats the child exactly as one.

And when the processing produces distress, the distress is reinterpreted as progress. The auditors note, almost cheerfully, that parents begin to complain that “little Willie” has become unmanageable — and they explain that this is precisely the point at which “the child begins to work” (p. 3). A child who becomes agitated and difficult under repeated sessions is, in this frame, not a child being harmed. He is a case advancing. There is no version of the child’s behavior that can count as evidence against the process.

Nor is the crusade only about the children in front of them. The auditors are candid that part of the exercise was to assess “what public reaction to a large scale project for children” would be (p. 3). The children were, among other things, a market test.

If you want to see what the dissolution of childhood looks like when it is complete, this issue supplies a photograph and a name. Toni Savant, aged twelve, is presented as “our youngest auditor” (p. 6), a certified Hubbard Dianetic Auditor passed by the movement’s own Board of Examiners. She has her own byline in the issue, an article in which she explains how she processes younger children (p. 6). She has her own product: a set of child-processing tapes sold under her name for ten dollars (p. 4). The issue frames all of this as heartwarming — three generations of auditors, a gifted child.

Read through the front-page doctrine, it is something else. A twelve-year-old can be a working professional only because, doctrinally, there is no such thing as a twelve-year-old. There is only a trillion-year-old thetan in a small body, and the small body is no barrier to certification, labor, or sale. Toni Savant is not the exception to Hubbard’s teaching about children. She is its purest 1954 illustration — a childhood erased by the same sentence the front page celebrates.

That instrumentation of the child did not soften over time; it hardened into standing order. Fourteen years later, in Flag Order 1248 — “Basic Hygiene for the Nursery,” dated 22 August 1968 — the Sea Org reduced the care of toddlers to a drill.[5] The children were to be run on the routine of fetching their own towel and bag until each could do it, in the order’s own words, “without falter or comm lag.” A comm lag — communication lag — is an auditing term. It is what you measure in a preclear on the meter. In 1968 it was being measured in a toddler reaching for a towel. As I wrote when I published that document, care was replaced by repetition, and the toddler was processed. The line runs straight from Toni Savant with her hand on her head in 1954 to that nursery drill in 1968. It is the same act.

The consent problem visible in the Phoenix “crusade” — children processed with the parents sent to a cafe — appears again in the same issue in an even starker form. In an article headed “Teaching With a Difference” (p. 4), a Scientologist named Margaret Scholtz describes replacing sick teachers in London County Council schools between January and July 1953 and, being “a confirmed Scientologist,” processing the schoolchildren in her care. She is explicit about the need to keep the noise down so that “no enraged headmistress would descend” on her. In other words: children in a public school were run through Scientology processes by a substitute teacher, structured deliberately to avoid the notice of the school authorities, with no suggestion anywhere that a single parent knew or consented. That is not a fringe abuse. It is printed, approvingly, in the movement’s official journal.

The same issue also carries case-history material applying auditing to sick and, in one case, dying children. I have chosen not to recount those cases here, because they are genuinely distressing and this article is about the doctrine rather than its most painful individual results; readers who wish to read them can do so in the full PDF reproduced below.

It would be a mistake to treat any of this as merely ideological. Every doctrinal move in Issue 39-G terminates in a price. The same eight pages that dissolve childhood also carry the invoice. Certification as a Hubbard auditor ran five hundred dollars; the Advanced Clinical Course, eight hundred; a twenty-five-hour processing intensive, another five hundred (p. 8). 

The book the front-page essay is drawn from, Child Dianetics, sold for $2.75 (p. 7). Toni Savant’s child-processing tapes went for ten (p. 4). The “crusade for our children” was, structurally, the opening of a market — and children were both the product being processed and the public-relations vehicle for reaching their parents’ wallets.

The Dog on the Cover

In Child Dianetics, Hubbard declares:

And yet Scientology begins with repetitive training routines (TR’s). These exercises are used to train Scientologists of any age to become controllable and obedient. The TR’s are far worse than dog training. 

Hardcore adult Scientologists like to argue that Hubbard and Scientology respect a child’s self-determinism. This does not happen in actual Scientology where obedience to Hubbard’s doctrines and policies is expected and any departures from Scientology are punished by harsh ethics. 

The dog on the cover of Hubbard’s 1951 book Child Dianetics shows a dog. I will not pretend to know what the designer intended, and I do not need to. The irony does not require intent — it is already complete in the object. The single most humane line Hubbard ever wrote about children announces that children are not dogs, and it is printed on a book that put a dog on the front.

Hubbard’s disavowal that “children are not dogs” and the book cover of Child Dianetics with a dog on it  cancel each other out on the same cover.

It is the same contradiction the rest of this article traces through the pages of 39-G, only here it is compressed into one image, printed years earlier: he says a child is not an animal, and the working method three pages on treats the child exactly like one — the “run-away” process Hubbard himself describes as the technique for “sick babies and sick animals.” The cover tells on the doctrine. The doctrine tells on the cover. 

In my previous article The Disposable Children of Scientology’s Paramilitary: Each Child Shall Have Their Own Towel, I covered Flag Order 1248.

In that article, I show how Scientology had learned to minimize costs: the org supplied the toddlers’ nursery with a board, some cuphooks, and labels, and pushed every actual cost — soap, washcloth, comb, toothbrush — back onto parents who had themselves signed billion-year contracts.[6} The institution collected the eternal note and provided almost nothing in return. The direction never changed from 1954. 

Jamie Mustard’s memoir Child X, which this spring swept the Phillis Wheatley Literary Award from the Sons and Daughters of the United States Middle Passage, documents a childhood of medical neglect that left him nearly deaf and nearly dead, of a first billion-year contract signed — by his own account — at the age of five, of a boy warehoused as an infant in a Los Angeles nursery, the old ASHO Day house at 811 Beacon Street, with thirty or forty other babies to one or two caretakers, bathed once a week in water that, a fellow survivor told him, was never changed between children.[7][8]

Jamie is not the only such voice; in the same comment he points to Robert Dam, author of Hotels of Darkness, another survivor of the same machine. Jamie’s own estimate of the cohort runs to thousands of children, across four continents, from the 1960s through the 1990s.

What I want to establish here is only this: none of that was a deviation. When Jamie Mustard says Scientology spent his childhood “penning me and animalizing me,” he is describing, precisely, the doctrine printed on the front page of a Christmas-season Scientology journal in 1954.

When the Sons and Daughters of the United States Middle Passage placed a Sea Org survivor’s account inside the documentary record of American captivity, they were recording the endpoint of a doctrine whose first page I have reproduced below.

Flag Order 1248 did not invent the disposable child. Neither did the Sea Org nursery at 811 Beacon Street. Both are executions of an idea Hubbard printed, in a gentle voice, under a friendly title, in Issue 39-G: that a child is only a man or woman who has not attained to full growth — and can therefore be processed, drilled, worked, and sold like one.

The essay is still out there, still being shared as wisdom. Read it. Then scroll down and read the seven pages that came with it.

Journal of Scientology 39G:

[1]Journal of Scientology, Issue 39-G (Phoenix, Ariz.: Hubbard Association of Scientologists International, ca. December 1954). The -G series was published without printed cover dates; the December 1954 dating is established by internal evidence, including a notice of the HASI/HDRF Congress running December 28–31, 1954, a Congress-reservation deadline of December 18, 1954, and a retraining-course offer open “until December 20, 1954.” All eight pages are reproduced in full at the end of this article.

[2]The essay is drawn from L. Ron Hubbard’s introduction to Child Dianetics: Dianetic Processing for Children (1951), reprinted in the Journal “with his permission.” The reprint is confirmed on page seven of Issue 39-G, which states that Hubbard’s introduction “is the basis for the article on page one of this issue.”

[3]For the whole-track, trillion-year framing of the thetan, see L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology: A History of Man (1952).

[4]Jamie Mustard, reader comment, The Scientology Money Project, June 16, 2026, on “The Disposable Children of Scientology’s Paramilitary: Each Child Shall Have Their Own Towel.”

[5]Jeff Augustine, “The Disposable Children of Scientology’s Paramilitary: Each Child Shall Have Their Own Towel,” The Scientology Money Project, June 15, 2026. The article reproduces and analyzes Flag Order 1248, “Basic Hygiene for the Nursery,” dated 22 August 1968, issued under a twenty-four-hour compliance window.

[6]Augustine, “The Disposable Children of Scientology’s Paramilitary.”

[7]Jamie Mustard, Child X: A Memoir of Slavery, Poverty, Celebrity, and Scientology (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2024); and Jeff Augustine, “Exclusive: Jamie Mustard’s Child X Wins the Phillis Wheatley Literary Award,” The Scientology Money Project, May 28, 2026. The Phillis Wheatley Literary Award is conferred by the Sons and Daughters of the United States Middle Passage.

[8]Mustard, comment, June 16, 2026. In the same comment Mustard names Robert Dam, author of Hotels of Darkness, as another survivor of the same system.