The family and its members

by Anna Garlin Spencer

The demand of the eugenists that such, if obviously defective, should be prevented from bringing forth after their kind is clearly the only social wisdom. The statistics of social pathology all point to mental defectiveness as the prolific cause of crime, immorality, vocational incompetency, illegitimacy, family failure, and marital tragedy. In a recent study of one hundred families in which feeble-mindedness was obvious, a study carried on by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, immorality was found in 58 per cent. of them; extreme filth and bad home conditions were found in 30 per cent.; and in 47 per cent. one or more members of these families were public charges. Where the mother is subnormal there is almost certain to be a line of feeble-minded progeny, and in this study, while there were only 7 per cent. of the fathers hopelessly deficient, in 25 per cent. the mothers were notably defective in mind. Thirty-seven of these families showed illegitimate children—a far larger number than the average of normal population. Physical deficiencies also figured largely in these family records.

This particular study takes us into the region where Doctor Fernald, Doctor Goddard and many others have prepared material for convincing the public mind that no one thing so increases social degeneracy and so adds to the sum of human misery as the unprotected freedom of defectives to procreate and pollute the family currents.[14] This is not a treatise on social pathology and elsewhere must be found the details of investigation and information that justify this statement. What is here attempted is only a study of what should be the attitude of fathers and mothers toward feeble-minded children if such should be their tragic problem.

Custodial Care of the Defective.—In the first place, the attitude of mind of the parents, if they are themselves normal, is to be considered. What gives us feeble-minded children from feeble-minded parents is clear. The social prevention for carrying on known degeneracy cannot be too strongly stressed, and hence the first duty of normal parents is to consider the social danger of leaving a feeble-minded child, especially a feeble-minded girl, to any chance of parenthood. This leads to the question of removal from home of feeble-minded children to permanent custodial care in institutions provided especially for their segregation, possible teaching and thrifty use of small work-power. Alexander Johnson, who has done so much in the United States to make all philanthropy wise and effective and particularly has helped to form public opinion concerning right methods of care and training of the feeble-minded, tells us that "one-half of the mentally defective can become one-third of a normal person," can be made happy and useful to the extent of considerable aid toward self-support if under constant supervision and given the trained care of special teachers.

There are few private homes in which any feeble-minded boy or girl can attain such a condition. The children who are "different," if having the sole devotion of father and mother, may be protected and made happy in the measure of their power for happiness. But if there are other children in the family neither they nor the afflicted one are comfortable. The measure of feeble-mindedness is usually the measure of unhappiness when the normal and abnormal are in close companionship. In most families it is not possible for either or both parents to give entire time, strength and devotion to one subnormal child. Where it is, there is no security that death will not prevent the permanency of that devoted care. Hence, it is generally safer and better for all concerned to place the feeble-minded in collective homes where their own kind are cared for exclusively and where segregated control can be complete and permanent through life. There is no horror of such places for those who have seen what flowers of happiness and what miracles of devotion may be found in "Training Schools for the Feeble-minded."

The affectional side of the nature of a mental defective may be of unusual strength and may find special objects of love among those still more handicapped than itself. Those visiting intimately in such School-homes may see a higher-grade imbecile caring for a lower-grade with patience and devotion; they may see the competitive element in training, reduced in levels for the accommodation of the slender stock of mentality, producing on that lower level the same good results that normal children gain from trying to imitate and to excel. Small attainments are sources of pride in a class of defectives which if exhibited among the normal would give bitter experience of contrast. By making the standard of behavior and of attainment suited to their little power, the delight of conquest over difficulties need not be denied to the feeble-minded.

Hence, again, it is far from wise and often far from most loving to keep the child who can never grow up in the company of those who follow the usual path from infancy to maturity. This means, of course, if this idea of the more general use of special homes for the subnormal is to be carried out, a large increase in provision of such homes. Such large increase is often opposed by short-sighted economy. The expense of establishing and maintaining such homes in adequate number and of scientific and humane provisions is counted over and taxpayers made alarmed at the sum total. What is lacking usually in the count is the sum total of the enormous sums society now pays out for the unregulated and socially dangerous neglect of this class of unfortunates. Doctor Goddard's "Kallikak Family" and many other accurate showings of what it costs to leave uncared for one feeble-minded girl in unbefriended freedom should convince any sane person that the most wasteful extravagance any community can commit is such neglect of what Mr. Johnson has called "the divine fragments" of humanity.

To make provision for the insane is seen to be a social necessity and the family more than any other social institution profits by the hospitals and asylums for the treatment and care of such. The relief of having an insane relative taken away from the home, after months and perhaps years of anxiety, fear, and suffering on the part of every other member, cannot be too strongly pictured. The effort now making to secure early treatment for the first symptoms of mental derangement and to give even "border-line" cases and exceptionally "cranky" and nervous people special treatment in mental hygiene marks the beginning, we must believe, of effective preventive work in this line. The feeble-minded, however, have a claim of perpetual childhood upon the parental sympathy, and that, together with common ignorance concerning their condition or numbers and the social dangers inherent in their neglect, give us the alarming discrepancy in numbers between the feeble-minded in suitable segregated care and those left to find their way or lose it in the usual walks of life. Since Doctor Seguin wrote his Treatise on Idiocy in 1846 the verdict of science and of philanthropy has been accumulating as to the need for the full and complete protection of all who cannot manage successfully, even in the simplest details, their own lives and the lives of those with whom they are most closely related. Yet to-day, it is claimed by many observers, we have only about fifteen per cent, of those requiring special protection on this account adequately cared for by society.

The family must be relieved of personal care of its insane, its lower-grade feeble-minded, and its moral idiots. It must be so relieved for the sake of the normal members of the family. It must be so relieved still more for the sake of lessening vice, crime, degenerative tendencies, and actual waste of public money in public court procedure and in other public institutional provisions.

To induce the state of mind in parents which will help on the better and more adequate social care of these afflicted members of society, the sense of shame and the keen suffering from social stigma in such cases must be mitigated. It must be seen that although it may be the fault of one or both parents that such a child has come into the world, it is an added and deeper fault, even in many cases a social crime, to leave that child in ordinary relations of life. It is true that what Dr. Caleb W. Saleeby well calls "racial poisons" are often the cause of the damaged germ plasm that starts the handicapped human being along his devious course. Alcohol, syphilis, and other elements of degenerative action may have doomed the child and in such cases the father's or mother's sin or carelessness is the cause of the child's tragical condition. In such cases the dullest conscience must feel remorse. It is, however, not always the fault of the immediate parents. It may be a far more remote inheritance that has started the degenerative psychosis that results in either insanity, feeble-mindedness, dipsomania, or "general debility of character."

Heredity.—Prof. E.G. Conklin says, "Heredity may be defined as the appearance in offspring of characters whose differential causes are found in germ cells." Doctor Galton says "the two parents between them contribute on an average one-half of each inherited faculty, or each parent one-quarter. The grandparents contribute between them one-quarter, or each one-sixteenth." The responsibility for a poor specimen of humanity, therefore, is not solely the parents'; they may share it with a considerable group. Many a defective obviously owes his condition to some remote ancestor, "to the third or fourth generation," as the old Scripture said; and many a charming trait, for which the immediate parents would like to take credit, is really a gift from some great-grandparent.