By Hon. Nancy HODGES

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WHY BAD BOYS?

(Speaker of the B.C. Legislature)

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OME CHERISHED illusions as
to what makes bad boys — or
girls, for that matter — have

been shattered by the findings of a
man and his wife after one of the most
comprehensible studies of the causes
of juvenile delinquency ever made.
For 10 years Dr. Sheldon Glueck and
Dr. Eleanor T- Glueck, both of the
Harvard Law School, have been
making an intensive research into
that pressing problem.

They used 500 delinquent boys
from the slum areas of Boston, Mass.,
and another 500 boys from the same
city, who didn’t get into trouble with
the police, as “guinea pigs” for their
experiments. And what they found
out, while it may be no news to social
workers and psychologists, will sur-
prise a good many other folk.

Home First Factor

With the growing tendency to
shelve much of the responsibility for
character-building on schools and
teachers, it is interesting to note that
the Glueck researches confirmed what

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Page Thirty-two

Hon. Nancy Hodges

some of us have long maintained—
that the crucial roots of character
which make for proper adjustment to
the realities of life are to be found in
the home and in the parent-child re-
lations made there.

And that the kind of relationships
that exist in the home between the
child and his parents has far more to
do with the making of either a good
child or a delinquent than whether
he lives in a slum area, or grows up
among conflicting cultures, or comes
from a large family, or a family where
there is much ill health or has a high
or low LQ.

Parents’ Failings

In their study of those 1,000 boys
and 1,000 homes, the investigators
found that the factors which stood
out above all others in contributing
to delinquency among the boys were,
not poverty, but inadequate and irre-
sponsible parents.

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In this category were the father
whose discipline was lax, or over-
strict or erratic—instead of being firm
and kindly; the mother who left the
tiny lad to his own devices without
providing for a healthy use of his
leisure time; the father or mother who
rejected the boy emotionally, and,
finally, the family whose home was
“Just a place to hang your hat.”

Minor Offences

However, if little Billy commits
such childhood offences as smoking,
staying out late and petty stealing,
don’t think he is inevitably destined
to end up in a felon’s cell! According
to the Harvard team’s findings, such
minor mischiefs are no indication that
the young culprit will become a per-
sistent violater of the law, bad as he
may seem at the time.

They found that one-fourth of the
500 non-delinquent boys they studied
had been guilty of the usual boyish
pranks and peccadilloes which might
have caused a passing policeman to
arrest them.

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