The family and its members

by Anna Garlin Spencer

A girl born of ordinarily intelligent and moral parents became a prodigy of sex perversion and the accomplice of thieves and murderers. She gave untold misery to all her family, but the father never gave up his search for her when she left the home and never failed to give her succor and the most tender care when she came back worn and ill, and at last left all other interests in life to snatch her away from bad companions and try to establish her in a new place and a better surrounding.

The story of the prodigal son was taken from life itself; it is the moving story of the one greatest affection of the family bond, that for the bone of bone and the flesh of flesh, the child that needs most the tenderness of the parent, the child that has worn out all other patience and lost all other consideration and has only the claim of its deep need to insure its parent's service.

Children's Courts.—Society has lately become wise and humane enough to establish Children's Courts for Juvenile Delinquents. These, beginning merely in "Separate Hearings" in Boston Courts, and assuming definite and autonomous form in Chicago, have become more widespread and more inclusive in character. Now we are securing, as by a recent State Law in New York, the County Courts for children, in which the limitations of local sentiment and neighborhood reluctance to testify of family conditions are surmounted and yet the near-at-hand interest in the children is preserved.

All modern philanthropy tends toward dealing with wayward boys and girls as those who need and should have not punishment but education, necessary but kindly restraint, protection from bad surroundings and training toward self-support. To this we are adding Domestic Relations Courts dealing with juvenile delinquents not, as some one has said, "so as to punish parents for the wrong-doing of their children," but rather as indicating the recognition of the fact that one member of the family cannot be "saved" without an effort to save all the other members, and that in the family relationship there are permanent bonds that courts should recognize and seek to enforce and make more helpful to every individual concerned.

Domestic Relations Courts.—When the history of cases coming before either Children's Courts or Domestic Relations Courts is studied, certain facts of social condition stand out prominently as causes for juvenile delinquency. First of all, the broken family, one in which there has been separation of father and mother, is a cause of child-neglect and consequent wrong-doing. The death of either parent, also, is often the cause of such unhappiness or privation in the home as to induce disobedience to law and bring the child before a court. The lack of employment by the father or his too low wages, which reduces the family income dangerously and makes the mother attempt to be both breadwinner and care-taker of the home, and hence lessens family comfort and sends the children on the streets for amusement, is also a cause often appearing as a reason for delinquency. The evils of housing congestion, too many families living in one building or in one neighborhood without chance for privacy, choice of companionship or household arrangements conservative of domestic virtue or happiness, these evils constitute a heavy indictment of society in the returns of Children's Courts. The complex problems which the immigrant faces, with his children early learning the language of the country to which he has come, while it is to him a sealed book, are responsible for much juvenile delinquency. Jacob Riis has told us, in compelling description, the story of the evolution of the "gang" and of the "tough" from the children of parents who, well-meaning and in their own ancestral land capable of parental control, here lose command of the family life because the children have to become the interpreters and representatives of the family in the new country to a degree that reverses the natural order of dependence and direction in the family life, and gives the children undue power of leadership in family affairs. As Professor Cooley wisely says, "It is freedom to be disciplined in as rational a manner as you are tit for." We might give the converse of this truth in the statement that it is not freedom but dangerous tendency toward anarchy and disaster to be called upon for rational decisions in advance of our intelligence and will-power, and a tragedy to lose the habit-drill of parental control in the period of life when that is a necessary foundation for wisdom in independent choice. The child of the immigrant often lands in the Children's Court not because he is bad or stupid or even mischievous by nature, but because he is too early forced by circumstances into a position of command and of unrestricted choice in action, due to the ease with which the young can learn new ways and the difficulty of the old in mastering strange language and manners.

Dangerous Rebound from Ancient Family Discipline.—Again, the Children's and the Domestic Relations Courts bear testimony to the fact that to-day we are in a rebound from inherited forms of discipline of children and youth which have given to all, immigrant and native-born alike, a feeling that society exists for their benefit and that they owe nothing to society in return. The very standardization of child-care by public demand, in matters of health and education, of free books and free recreation and free music and free parks and playgrounds and even free lunches in schools, and free baths and medical and nursing care—all that is increasingly called for and provided out of the public purse for the nurture and development of child-life—tend toward giving children and youth the idea that the world belongs to them.

The old crushing and often cruel pressure of older life upon the young is happily gone. The new ideals of education, within the school and the home, which emphasize the right of each human being to its own development into a unique, a free and a happy personality, are ideals that must grow in realization more and more if we are to have fit people for making democracy work toward the rule of the best. It is, however, profoundly true that we have gone farther in demand for and effort toward individual freedom than we have in any translation of the old social pressure upon the individual conscience and life to assume social obligations and bear them worthily and usefully. There is a dry rot at the core of any class or any nation which turns its inmost psychology toward what it can get from life without regard to what it should give back to life. Too many children and youth in conditions in which, happily, the old despotism of age is outgrown, have unhappily missed the old sense of obligation and old call to service which the earlier forms of family and school discipline implanted in all responsive natures.

Do Modern Youth Need New Community Disciplines?—There is abundant evidence that William James was profoundly right when he suggested a need in youth for some required devotion to "the collectivity that owns us," some "moral equivalent for war" and the military drill of older forms of civic order. When the Athenian youth took his oath of devotion to the city of his birth, he signalized his coming of age and expressed the ideal of service of each to all and all to each. This is not the place for detailed discussion of what is lacking in modern training of American Youth analogous in spirit and effect to this classic custom. It must be insisted, however, as we discuss the conditions that make for juvenile delinquency, among the children and youth otherwise normal and capable of useful life, that we have not done all that democracy demands when we have made children healthy, sent them to tax-supported schools, prevented them from too early earning at "gainful occupations," and instituted all manner of recreative and stimulating provisions for their free use. We must also give them some sense of what Seneca meant when he said, "We are all members of one great body; remember that each was born for the good of all." We must also burn deep into the consciousness of youth in some fashion that shall be through our modern mechanisms as effective as were the old "Fraternities" of primitive life, and as are still the outworn but persistent forms of military discipline, that idea of subordination of private whim to public well-being which lies at the base of all true and ordered social advance. The Children's Courts are a response to the effort of society to give each child a fair chance in life. There are needed, also, devices of education and of compulsory social service and social obedience which may tend to give society a fair deal from every adult.

Prodigal sons and daughters, therefore, who are abnormal, weak, morally invalid, must be cared for in the way easiest and best for the social whole. Parents must help and not hinder in that task.

Prodigal sons and daughters who are normal save for some accidental divergence from legal or actual right-doing must be helped to come back into the line of social usefulness. And, above all, the facts of juvenile delinquency should give us impetus, strong and intelligent, toward a social and family discipline that shall make freedom and happiness of childhood a way to social order and never a pathway toward social degeneracy or personal wrong-doing.