Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/515

Rh found delinquent in our juvenile court, that the most prominent measurable difference between these delinquents and the ordinary school children is apparently their retardation in school and in mental development. Seven out of ten of the offenders among the boys and nine out of ten among the girls were lagging a year or more behind the average position attained by those of their ages in school. This frequency of retardation in the delinquent groups is three and four times as great as among Minneapolis school children generally. When the average amount of retardation in school is considered it is found to be nine times as great among the delinquent boys and twenty times as great among the girls as among school boys and girls generally in the city. In intellectual development the indication is that over half of the repeaters and those sent to the detention home or state training schools are a year or more backward, while about twenty per cent, are three years or more retarded mentally.

Another serious condition which our study has disclosed is that nearly half of the girls who get into the juvenile court and half of the boys at the detention home are living with one parent or with neither. In other words, half of these more serious offenders and half of the delinquent girls come from homes which have been broken up by death, desertion or divorce.

Any child will be handicapped by disease, physical defects, bad training, or unsympathetic and improper environment at home, in school or at play. The removal of these handicaps, however, does not at once convert a youthful offender into an intelligent and upright citizen, when he has been subject for years to these baneful influences. This is a lesson which the difficulty of reforming character always drives home. To make a good boy or girl requires more than restoring his health and giving him some money to spend. He must be taught how to use his strength and his resources. This is a vastly more difficult problem than curing a disease. How difficult this training problem is may be indicated by telling you the story of one of the boys we have studied in our juvenile court work.

There is to-day nothing very bad about this boy, Harold, either as to his health or his mental ability, and yet his history shows a collection of physical handicaps which he carried from infancy. One of these disabilities of health made it impossible to send him to school until he was nine years of age. A year after that he had adenoids removed which had also been troubling him for years. Another ailment, with which he had suffered nobody knows how long and which would have kept him in a highly nervous state so long as it lasted, was discovered and corrected since the first of the year. Last December, when he was examined, he had the mentality of a child about two years younger than himself, although he had then been improving noticeably.