The Unadjusted Girl, With Cases and Standpoint for Behavior Analysis

by William Isaac Thomas

Margaret is another: She was the oldest in a large family headed by a dissolute factory operative and a quarrelsome, complaining mother. Her home life was marked by coarseness and obscenity of language, and her personality by alternate melancholy and violence. At El Retiro it became apparently probable that her behavior was the reaction made by her organism in seeking that which it really craved most, peace and security. She became an El Retiro homemaker. A troublesome asthma yielded to treatment based on quiet and contentment. She is now an officer of the alumnæ club and she has returned to her own home, which has largely become rehabilitated through her efforts. The club life apparently affords her all she needs of contact with the outside world.

Geraldine is a girl of eighteen, wrecked on the moving picture industry. She was seduced by an under-director in attempting to sell a scenario, and was passed from hand to hand until her health broke. Her experiences were unbelievably tragic and unbelievably common. Her health, self-confidence, and charm were restored at El Retiro. She took to nursing but the key to her interest in everything was affection. A professional man understood her real and genuine capacity and married her. She is an exceptional wife and mother. She too is a club member, proud of her school and eager to assist.

Maggie was a rollicking, buxom girl of seventeen. Her parents were dead and her living relatives of doubtful reputation. Indeed all the female members of her family had “gone to the bad.” Maggie’s own escapades were many. At El Retiro she was rough, noisy, daring, fearless, impetuous, in short filled with the spirit of adventure. She did not graduate but was returned to the custody of the probation officer. While on probation she became pregnant. She refused to tell who was responsible but concocted a story of nameless attack. The court commented on her strength, her bravery, her resourcefulness, and gave her two weeks in which to find the man and bring him herself, unaided to court. Surprised but not daunted the girl succeeded. The man proved to be a soldier with a temperament much like her own; on careful examination, physical, mental, and social he was proved to be a fit husband and was permitted to marry Maggie. This social rehabilitation has restored her to club life, much to her delight. For several months she has been happy and successful.[^[97]]

In the meantime another important step has been taken,—the attempt to forestall delinquency by working on the maladjusted, neurotic, predelinquent child, or to adjust the delinquent child without resort to the court and the consequent court record. In the larger cities departments of child study, children’s welfare committees, bureaus of children’s guidance, institutes for vocational guidance have been formed in the public schools or working in connection with the schools. In this work the object has been to work by cases, bringing the girl under the influence of the social worker, improving the home conditions and the attitudes of the parents, placing the girl in a better environment, moving her from one situation to another until one is found to which she responds, and developing in her some activity interests. The ideal is to coördinate the girl immediately with the large society in which she lives instead of building up a complete institutional community about her as in the case of El Retiro.

The possibilities of this type of approach to the problem are illustrated by the following cases reported by Doctor Jessie Taft of Philadelphia.

88. Ruth, fourteen, Irish, pink-cheeked and blue-eyed, in her first year of High School, the picture of attractive, innocent girlhood, had been taken to the house of detention for stealing a diamond pin and taking money from a teacher’s desk. When her denials were finally broken down by proof, she confessed to a long history of petty thieving, hitherto unpunished and for the most part undiscovered....

Ruth was an intensely egotistic person, desirous of social recognition, approval, personal success; but due to lack of training, unfavorable conditions and an impulsive, impatient make-up had never learned to work for her satisfactions or make her impression on society in constructive ways. She was quickly discouraged and resentful in the face of failure or hardship and at once turned to some pleasure experience as a compensation—something which could be obtained immediately and easily. She used boastful stories and even her own misdeeds to heighten the impression of her importance and superiority. This is a natural reaction in childhood, where immediate gratification is obtained through crying, tantrums, day dreams, purely subjective methods; but they are not appropriate to a developing organism and must be abandoned for an objective dealing with the facts of life. All of Ruth’s normal cravings had been thwarted by her environment. She had lost her love object in the death of her mother. Her family ideals had been shattered. Her father had been exposed as unfaithful to her mother, and a weakling in the battle between the stepmother and Ruth. He was a failure as a provider and did not pay his debts. Ruth was forced to live in a home situation which had for her none of the elements of a home, nothing to be proud of, no loving approval and overlooking of faults, no faith, no support and assurance of safety. She was forced not only to give up her love object but to see it supplanted by an enemy, who also usurped her place and influence with the father. Undoubtedly her sex ideals also met with shock. She became convinced that her father was interested in another woman before the death of the mother. Father and stepmother quarreled and made up—separated and came together repeatedly. She saw marriage as a series of endless petty conflicts. Both of them were churchgoers, given to religious interests. Ruth’s disillusionment with life was complete. There was nothing genuine, no real satisfaction. The father and mother who constitute the bridges over which the emotional life of the child may cross to a more and more social development had blocked normal growth and thrown the child back upon subjective or anti-social satisfactions. One of the defense reactions to such a thwarting of fundamental needs is that taken by Ruth—a cynical, suspicious, critical attitude toward everything and everybody. To want and never get satisfaction is too painful a state to keep up, so the individual criticizes every possible love object that he may make himself and others believe he wouldn’t have it if he could. The reason he has no love object is that none are worth having; thus he defends his inferiority. Also he undermines any criticism from others by showing up the inferiority of the source. He is protected by having already discredited the other person. Moreover, there is a sense of power and superiority in being able to criticize everything, so it offers a natural compensation for the inferiority from which the critical or cynical person suffers. Not having admirable loving parents one must remember is a source of tremendous inferiority. A child of eight has no intelligent weapons with which to combat a hostile family situation. It has no chance against the egoism of the adults around it. All it can do is to react blindly in ways that offer some temporary solace. Stealing from the stepmother is a way of satisfying the needs to fight with or injure or destroy the pain-giving stimulus. It gives the child a tremendous sense of power and victory. Here is something which he can do secretly and effectively. It really hurts the hateful object and it supplies pleasure-giving stimuli, such as candy, which are otherwise denied....

Ruth ... was so absorbed in the injuries done her by life that she thought of nothing but pleasure compensations. She would face nothing that demanded effort or any unpleasantness. She had a right to take things because life owed her reparation. She saw nothing in school or work, or the ordinary habits of daily hygiene but hardship to be avoided. She wanted nice clothes and felt she had a right to take them, but she saw no reason why she should take any care of them. If a garment was torn or dirty, get a new one. She thought she ought to be placed where there were servants so she would have no housework and no laundry to attend to. She had no loyalty to any one. She played one person against another and used everything to her own advantage as she saw it. As soon as an effort was made to give her insight she reacted to protect herself from the painful revelations by criticizing the worker and taking the attitude that there was a game going on between her and the worker in which each was trying to get ahead of the other. She could not believe in disinterested effort on her behalf.

Ruth was turned over to a child-placing agency with the foregoing interpretation of her behavior and suggestions for working on the problem, but with great doubt as to the outcome. She was to be given as much gratification of her pleasure wants as possible in order to reduce the struggle to satisfy them and leave some of her energy and interest free to be developed along other lines. She was to be placed with a really superior person whom she might finally come to respect as genuine and her best chance would be to find some one person, the worker or the foster mother, who had real faith in her possibilities.

The social worker who took her over was young and enthusiastic, undaunted by the impossible and full of faith in her own ability to get results. She transferred this faith to Ruth. She never wavered in her belief that Ruth could change her ways. She lived through stealing episodes, truancy periods, every kind of discouragement and finally found a home which did some of the things we had hoped for. Ruth’s first experience in this home was a summer trip and a glorious good time. When she came back there was little housework and a doctor’s important business to help with after school. There was social prestige in this home. The mother was a good disciplinarian and insisted on the formation of certain daily habits of living, but she took Ruth in as a member of the family and had, like the worker, supreme faith in her own ability to make Ruth go to school every day, study her lessons and keep going in the path of righteousness.