Abstract

Broken Homes

Students of juvenile delinquency and juvenile maladjustment lay great stress upon the factor of "broken homes." In the typical small American family of today--the father and mother and their two or three small children--divorce, like death, breaks up the home, cuts the child's universe in half if it does not shatter it entirely. Although it is true that among Americans of foreign stock and those who are least favorably situated economically, a different form of social organization persists, and families of parents, married children, and grandchildren live together and divide expenses, this is a type of family that is regarded as atypical and un-American. The poor are seeking to escape from it, and it is very rarely that it is encountered among even the reasonably well-to-do. In considering the effect of the divorce of the parents upon the welfare of children, it seems fairest therefore to discuss the effect under the type of family life toward which our society seems to be tending.