Summary deficiencies. It is the duty of the school nurse to follow into the home each case needing attention, to give advice in regard to the hygiene of childhood, and to persuade the parents to have any physical defects which have been found promptly and completely remedied; and there should be school clinics maintained at public expense for the correction of such defects as will not otherwise receive attention. It is the poorest sort of economy to spend money on the education of a child so handicapped by physical ill health that he cannot profit by the opportunities which are placed before him. Finally, what is the message of medical science to the parent, in regard to the responsibility which rests upon him for the physical well-being of his child? It can be summarized in a very few words. The human body is a marvellous machine but by no means a perfect one. It is subject to manifold diseases and defects and many children are seriously handicapped and endangered by such diseases and defects, often without the knowledge of themselves or their parents that anything is wrong. If the conditions in question are promptly discovered they can generally be remedied by appropriate medical treatment or change in hygienic habits, or both, often with astonishing improvement in the health, happiness and mental and moral progress of the child. If you who are reading these lines live in a city where there is a good system of school health sypervision, it will only be necessary for you to follow the counsel of the school doctor and the school nurse in order to insure the best results which medical knowledge can produce. If there is no such system in your schools, or if your child is below school age, the responsibility must rest with you; and it is important to remember that a large proportion of the serious physical and mental handicaps of childhood have their origin in the pre-school period. The wise automobile owner does not wait till his car runs into a ditch before he calls in the repair man. He has his car overhauled and "tuned up" once in so often as a regular precaution; or, at the very least, he takes it to the service station when he hears the first "knock" or unusual sound which indicates that something is going wrong. Physical defects do not generally "knock" so obviously that the layman can hear them; so the only safe rule is to undergo regular medical examination. Your child should be examined by a physician, well or ill as he may seem to you to be, once a week during the first weeks of life, once a month during the first year, once a year up to school age, if you want him to have the fullest development, the strongest body, the most abounding vitality of which he is capable. This is the essential message of modern medicine,-that the doctor should be used as an agent of prevention and not merely for the disheartening task of repairing damage already done. It is on such a use of the resources of medical science that we can base the hope of a stronger and finer race of Americans in the days to come. Question: Treat Child or Environ ment The Punishment XII THE TREATMENT AND PREVENTION OF DELINQUENCY TH HE first nice discrimination to be made in the treatment of delinquency in childhood, if we are to act intelligently, is whether and how much the child is to be treated and whether and how much environmental conditions are to be treated. It is curious and interesting to observe how opinions range, in the family circle or in the juvenile court room, all the way from doing everything for the child to doing everything, by way of discipline, to him. To strike the balance that fair-mindedness and effective action call for requires more earnest consideration than most people give the matter. How poorly founded are off-hand opinions about the treatment of delinquency is seen both in the fact of the wide divergence of views concerning it and in the poor results so frequently obtained. It seems to be much the same as the treatment of ill health before the days of modern medicine. The way to treat bad behavior in children say, in Attitude substance, some men and an occasional woman, is to knock it out of them. Even a clergyman argues, "The rod is good. I'm thankful to the old-fashioned school teacher who used it on me. Boys have too much deviltry in their make-up to be successfully treated in any other way." Or perhaps some judge proclaims that the law of the adult courts calculated to make the individual feel the consequences of his acts is to a very considerable extent what is needed in the treatment of juveniles. These are typical utterances and attitudes. On the other hand, one hears from some mothers, fathers, yes and I have heard it, too, from employers who have lost considerable sums through some child's stealing, that the circumstances were such, the temptations so great, or the suggestions of companions so strong that really the delinquent should be excused. Their idea is that, above all things, one must be charitable in the face of such a situation. "I don't think he will do it again," or "You can't expect young people to have much sense about such things" are what these people say. Now the answer to both is the fact of the large number of failures resulting from each method. Anybody who has had considerable experience knows of instances where children have been beaten and beaten for misbehavior, without any essential change in conduct; the main results often being development of sneakiness, of self-defense lying, a hardening of character, a hatred of those in authority. Autobiographies of some habitual criminals give much evidence of a bitter reaction to early punishment. And we definitely discover children who are not self-conscious or self-analytical enough to attribute the source of their tendencies to it, nevertheless developing their most undesirable traits simultaneously with severe punishment inflicted. But then, the predictions of success for the opposite let-alone form of treatment often do not come true. The child may persist in going out with bad companions or in pilfering at home. The employer perhaps finds to his chagrin that the excused young employee accepts new chances to take goods or money. Many such instances are to be found in our recorded cases. Of course, there is a measure of success in each method. The clergyman may have been right about his own case, and about success with some others. The forgiving employer is, on occasion, rewarded by seeing reformation follow his kindness. Undoubtedly there are good out The Excusing Both Attitudes may be Wrong Moral comes subsequent to other off-hand kinds of treatment or non-treatment. No one can deny this any more than he can deny the fact that some patients get well of fevers in spite of anything that is done or not done. But we cannot logically attribute so much to either their moral or medical treatments as proponents of various set theories would have us attribute. A better statement of fact would be that some young Healing people have it in them to recover moral health rapidly. Perhaps there is less inner urge toward delinquency, perhaps there is better characterial fibre than in some others, perhaps there is less stress from the outside. Anyhow, some children do right themselves quickly without being steered by others morally and proceed in conduct ways on a steady keel. If it were not so this would be a sorry world; many offenses are committed and not repeated, many of us have been secretly delinquent and have recovered. For the sake of all-and sometimes mothers and fathers have to be told this by way of encouragement -it is well to think of the power of recovery in the moral world as one thinks of the healing power of nature in the world of physical health and disease. Better Methods of The foregoing is by way of introduction. After all, the aim in this chapter is to consider ways of effectually Delinquency treating delinquency which is not so slight and self-curable that it needs no treatment. And of course these ways must be better directed than are the off-hand undertakings of those who have only one narrow point of view. We must turn to what there is of a science of treatment of delinquency and build from the materials we find there. We can carry the analogy of the development of medical science still further. The handling of cases of disease in earlier times was according to ill-founded theory, or by following tradition or old wives' sayings. And then there came the new era of studying the causes of disease, |