SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT 5" 



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 devel- 

 opment. 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 fre- 

 quency 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 gi'eat 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 diffi- 

 cult problem than curing a disease. How difficult this training prob- 

 lem 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 collec- 

 tion 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 5'ears of age. A year after that he had adenoids 

 removed which had also been troubling him for years. Another ail- 

 ment, 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. 



