, it was felt important to remove the boy, who
showed some promise, to surroundings where he could be under firm
discipline and learn decent standards of family life.

Feeble-mindedness, closely connected as it usually is with industrial
inefficiency in the man, bad housekeeping in the woman, and lack of
self-control in both, is of course, a potent factor in non-support and
probably also in desertion.

2. Faults in Early Training.--To low ideals of home life and of
personal obligation, which were imbibed in youth, can be traced much
family irresponsibility. It is by no means the rule, however, for
children always to follow in the footsteps of weak or vicious parents;
and it is the experience of social workers that such children, taught by
observation to avoid the faults seen in their own homes, often make good
parents themselves. Perhaps even more insidious in its effect on later
marital history is the home in which no self-control is learned. The
so-called "good homes" in which children are exposed to petting,
coddling, and overindulgence--and these homes are not confined to the
wealthy--produce adults who do not stand up to their responsibilities. A
probation officer in Philadelphia tells of the mother of a young
deserter who could not account for her son's delinquency. "He _ought_ to
be a good boy," she complained; "I carried him up to bed myself every
night till he was eleven years old."

3. Differences in Background.--Even though both man and wife come from
good homes, if those homes are widely different in standards and in
cultural background strains may develop in later life between the
couple. Differences in race, religion and age are recognized as having a
causative relation to desertion. Miss Brandt[9] found that, in about 28
per cent of the cases where these facts were ascertained, the husband
and wife were of different nationality. "In the general population of
the United States in 1900 only 8.5 per cent was of mixed parentage, and
for New York City the proportion was less than 13 per cent.... A
difference in nationality was more than twice as frequent among the
cases of desertion as among the general population of the city where it
is most common." Miss Brandt's figures for difference of religion are
less significant, but it existed in 19 per cent of the total number of
cases for which information on this point was available. In 27 per cent
of the families where age-facts were learned, there were