rmitted them. Children in these over-careful homes are
likely to grow up neurotic, conceited, timid, babyish, daydreaming men
and women, who are of little use in the world and are often a serious
problem for normal people. Probably this second type of a deficient home
is more dangerous than the first, for children without sufficient home
care often discover a substitute for their loss, but the over-protected
children can obtain no antidote for their misfortune.

Everyone knows that attacks are increasingly being made upon the home in
its present form by people who regard it as inefficient or as an
anachronism. It is usually thought, however, that these attacks come
mostly from agitators who set themselves more or less in opposition to
all the institutions established by the present social order. Perhaps
for this reason many do not believe that the family is receiving any
serious criticism and its satisfactory functioning is therefore taken
for granted. Such an easy-going optimism is not justified, for criticism
of the home is coming from science as well as from the agitators. For
example read "The Deforming Influences of the Home," by Dr. Helen W.
Brown, which appeared in the _Journal of Abnormal Psychology_ for April,
1917. She writes in one place as follows:

"Small wonder, then, if we begin to see that many of the mental ills
that afflict men are not due, as has been commonly supposed, to lack of
home training and the deteriorating influence of the world, but to too
much home, to a narrow environment which has often deformed his mind at
the start and given him a bias that can only be overcome through painful
adjustments and bitter experience."

The psychoanalysts and the clinic psychologists are gathering material
all the time that illustrates the bad results of home influences, and
soon the agitator will be using this as proof of the harmfulness of the
home as an institution. Some of us believe that no skepticism can be
more dangerous socially than that relating to the value of the home. The
best protection of the home must come from its moral efficiency and this
cannot be obtained if people are unwilling to face reasonable and
constructive criticism of the present working of the home. It is natural
for the adult looking backward to his childhood to assume too much for
the home, and then to transfer his emotion and his sense of the value of
his home experience to the present family as an institution. With this
eno