Broken Homes: A Study of Family Desertion and its Social TreatmentColcord, Joanna C. (Joanna Carver)
General
Broken Homes: A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment
Colcord, Joanna C. (Joanna Carver)
Desertion and non-support
In addition to such conscious efforts to reach out after marital tangles
in the pre-court stage, there has recently been an interesting though
accidental development in the city of Cleveland. During the thrift
campaign of 1918, several savings banks of that city conceived the idea
that their depositors could be induced and helped to save more money if
the banks opened a bureau for free advice to their patrons on household
management. This bureau is still in the experimental stage but it has
had an increasing clientele so far. One thing that has astonished its
management--but which causes no surprise in the mind of a social
worker--has been the great variety of problems other than those
connected with the family budget that have come to light in the bureau's
consultations. Particularly is this true of marital discord centering
about money affairs.
If such bureaus prove their usefulness there is no reason why they might
not be greatly extended, and why other agencies than banks (insurance
companies, for example) might not be eager thus to serve their
customers. This opens a new field for the home economist, but
incidentally it would appear that, in order to function successfully,
such bureaus would need to have access to the services of agencies
employing highly skilled social case workers. It is conceivable that, if
there are developed in our large cities consultation facilities under
social auspices for people who feel their marriages going wrong, and
want help and advice in righting them, such bureaus as those described
above would be excellent "feeders" for this new form of social service.
Family social agencies have been distinctly backward in some of their
approaches to the fundamental problems of family life. The failure of
most of them, for instance, to study or seek improvements in the laws
governing marriage or in their administration, is difficult of
explanation. Such a consultation service as that suggested does,
however, indicate a new point of departure in dealing with marital
relations which would seem to fall distinctly within the field of the
family case work agencies. It is time that these agencies began to find
means of dealing, not with the dependent family alone but with the
family in danger of becoming dependent--not with the family broken and
estranged only, but with the one whose bonds, even if cracking and
ill-adjusted, still hold.
Concretely, why should not family agencies establish such consultation
bureaus as have just been mentioned, distinct from their regular
activities and hampered by no suggestion in their title of association
with problems of dependency? Dr. William Healy of Boston ascribes much
of his success in getting the parents of defective and backward children
to bring them voluntarily for examination to the fact that the name of
his organization (the Judge Baker Foundation) conveys no hint of stigma
or inferiority. Here is a valuable lesson in right publicity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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