Handicaps of Childhood

by H. Addington Bruce

Taking the increase in divorce, however, as a concrete, definite measure of marriage failure, the problem of explanation and remedy remains obviously and sufficiently urgent. And it must be said that as a rule the offered solutions are either evasive or superficial.

Some investigators, despairing of finding any solution, insist that the increase in divorce is an unavoidable product of the complex, strenuous life of modern civilisation. Others, much of the same mind, advocate "trial marriages" as a palliative. Still others, singularly lacking in courtesy, or of a myopic vision so far as women are concerned, throw the blame on the "feminist movement," on the increasing emancipation of woman from her old-time position of slavish inferiority. Finally, there are investigators who, noting that the increase in divorce has steadily been gaining momentum since the Civil War, attribute this to the difference in economic conditions before and after the war. In effect, they say that there are more divorces because the country is wealthier, the inference being that increased national prosperity has had an unsettling effect on the national life.

That this contention is sound cannot be gainsaid; but it does not go deep enough. Of itself, it no more explains the increase in divorce than it does the increase in crime and the increase in mental and nervous disease, equally in evidence since the Civil War. These, too, there is warrant for affirming, have increased because of changed economic conditions. It remains, however, to ascertain the precise factor or factors brought into operation by this economic change to account for the growth in crime, insanity, nervous troubles, and divorce. And, in this connection, it is most interesting and important to observe that, so far as concerns crime, insanity, and nervous troubles, recent research has made clear exactly why there has been an increase and how this may best be checked.

It is now recognised that, psychologically speaking, crime, insanity, and nervousness represent an imperfect adaptation to the environment in which the criminal, the lunatic, or the nervous person lives. This failure of adaptation may be due either to inborn lack of capacity to meet the requirements of the environment, or to lack of proper training.

Not so many years ago it was the consensus of scientific opinion that in most cases of crime, insanity and nervousness the victim was hopelessly handicapped from the start by the nature of his being. There was much talk of "inherited criminality," "congenital brain defects," and "neuropathic inheritance." But observation and experiment have compelled an almost complete abandonment of this doctrine of fatal degeneration. To-day scientists largely hold that not more than 1 or 2 per cent. of criminals can be stigmatised as criminals by birth; that insanity is not inheritable, like eye-colour or hair-colour; and that nervousness is, at bottom, an acquired, rather than inherited, disorder.

Accordingly, if crime, insanity, and nervousness are on the increase, it follows that faults of training, rather than innate and unescapable tendencies, are the responsible factors. More specifically, crime, insanity, and nervousness have increased because no adequate effort has been made, by appropriate training, to fit the individual to withstand the extra strain put upon him by the economic changes of the past half century.

Still further, modern scientific research has discovered the specific training fault which, more than anything else, accounts for the failure in adaptation. Stated briefly, this fault consists in neglect to develop moral and emotional control during the first years of life.

In the case of criminality it has been proved, by repeated experiment tried on a large scale,[10] that even the descendants of a long line of criminals, if carefully trained in early childhood, will lead upright lives. In the case of insanity, the discovery that the three principal causes of mental disease are excessive indulgence in alcohol, sexual indiscretions, and emotional stress, points directly to the importance of training, aimed at the development of moral control. But most impressive, as emphasising the need for beginning this training at an early age, is the evidence accumulated in the case of those functional maladies, hysteria, neurasthenia, and psychasthenia—evidence which we have already discussed in much detail in these pages.

Study the history of every case of "nervous breakdown," of psychasthenic fear, of hysterical anxiety and disabilities, of neurasthenic aches and pains, and there will always be found a background of emotional intensity and self-centredness, persisting from early childhood. Hence, the demand of the modern neurologist and medical psychologist for training in youth that will foster control of the emotions and that will habituate the individual to forget self in useful activities. "The mind occupied with external interests will have neither time nor inclination to feed upon itself."

If, therefore, the one sure check to the increase in crime, insanity, and nervous disorders is moral training in early life, can it be doubted that the same process offers the strongest means of checking the tendency to flood the divorce courts?