Page 39 - 1926 February - To Dragma

202 TO DRAG MA OF ALPHA OMICRON PI

Frequently disease is responsible f o r incapatibility and friction in
the home, making it an unhappy and cheerless place f o r the chil-
dren. To such a condition have been traced the causes of many
runaways and persistent truancies.

W e must always realize that behavior is no longer regarded
by the psychiatrist as a moral question. Our behavior is our
emotional response to a given situation. The child is not able
to control the nature of this emotional response. I t is up to the
adults who surround him to see that he is not subjected to such
an unfavorable environment that unsocial behavior results. Be-
havior is caused by something. I f we wish to understand the
behavior problem child, we must know what caused his emotional
reactions. Dr. Bernard Glueck says: "Frequently normal chil-
dren, subjected to an environment which brings out abnormal
reactions, may become problem children."

Miriam Van Waters, in her remarkable book, Youth in Con-
flict, says: "Delinquency is a way of responding to the human
situation, it involves the whole being—heredity, physical make-
up, intelligence, habits of emotional response, life history, inter-
action with other human beings and with nature. Y o u cannot
explain delinquency by reference to any one part of the child's
being or environment. I t is the total situation, the entire stream
which must be studied."

We realize that the family life offers the most normal and
constructive human relationships. For this reason, every effort
is made to reconstruct the situation in the child's own home and
family, so that he can live in his home without emotional conflict.
I f , f o r any reason, the reconstruction of the child's own home
life is impossible, then a plan has to be made to place him in a
private family where he can have individual attention and normal
surroundings.

Dr. Esther Richard, in studying problem children in Balti-
more, found that, when undesirable home situations were solved,
the child's work at school improved, the retardation in certain
cases being due, not to feeble-mindedness, but to mal-adjustment.

I t is because we believe that much of the unhappiness and
misery of adults could have been prevented i f they had been sym-
pathetically and understanding^ dealt with as children, that
many of us are striving to give every child a fair chance to de-