Rural Problems of Today

This book is written for the men and women who love the country and are interested in its social welfare. Fortunately there are many such, and each year their number is increasing.
Rural life has as many sides as there are human interests. This book looks out upon country-life conditions from a viewpoint comparatively neglected. It attempts to approach rural social life from the psychological angle. The purpose of the book forces it from the well-beaten pathways, but this effort to give emphasis to the mental side of rural problems is not an attempt to discount the other significant aspects of the rural environment. The field of rural service is large enough to contain all who desire by serious study to advance at some point the happiness, prosperity, and wholesomeness that belong by social right to those who live and work in the country.
The author desires to thank the following for the privilege of using material previously published: American Sociological Society, American Journal of Sociology , National Conference of Social Work, Association Press, and Rural Manhood .
E. R. G.
Durham, N. H. April 1, 1918.




With reference to the care of children, faulty homes may be divided into two classes. There are homes that give the children too little care and there are homes that give them too much. The failure of the first type of home is obvious. Children need a great deal of wise, patient, and kindly care. Even the lower animals require, when domesticated, considerable care from their owners, if they are to be successfully brought from infancy to maturity. Of course children need greater care. No one doubts this. And yet it is certainly true that there are, even in these days of widespread intelligence, many homes where the children obtain too little care and in one way or another are seriously neglected.
The harmfulness of the homes that give their children too much care is not so generally realized as is the danger of the careless and selfish home, although, in a general way, everyone acknowledges that children may be given too much attention. The difficulty is to determine when a particular child is being given too much adult supervision and too little freedom. No one would question the fact that a child can become an adult only by a decrease of adult control and an increase of personal responsibility. Nevertheless, in spite of a general belief that a child needs an opportunity to win self-government, there are parents not a few who, from love and anxiety, run into the danger of protecting and controlling their children too much. The father or mother spends too much time with the children. The children are pampered. Too many indulgences are permitted them. Children in these over-careful homes are likely to grow up neurotic, conceited, timid, babyish, daydreaming men and women, who are of little use in the world and are often a serious problem for normal people. Probably this second type of a deficient home is more dangerous than the first, for children without sufficient home care often discover a substitute for their loss, but the over-protected children can obtain no antidote for their misfortune.