Medicine: The Amazing Capacity

From pulpit and bench, from social workers and editorial writers, the U.S. regularly hears dire warnings about the growth of juvenile delinquency and the crisis this implies for urban civilization. Nonsense, says Dr. Lauretta Bender, senior psychiatrist at Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital; the proportion of juvenile crime to urban population is no greater now than it was at the turn of the century. The interesting psychological question, she told a law-school forum at New York University last week, is: "Why are so many of our children not delinquent?" "Children have an amazing capacity to tolerate bad parents, poor teachers, dreadful homes and communities," she said.

"They suffer all these, and yet they grow! Only a small number are overwhelmed.

Most of these flatten out, stop growing and become dependent on some person or institution. A really small percentage be come aggressive and delinquent. "At the turn of the century, communities had to cope with exactly the same types of youth crimes as we have today, and proportionately as often. And that was ... in a day of no mechanization, no easy communications and transportation, no radio, no television, no movies, no comics, no sight method of teaching reading, no world wars.

"We have blamed the home entirely too much. After all, who are these parents in 'bad homes'? Poor, unhappy people themselves. A broken home in adolescence is a tragedy, but by itself it will not cause delinquency."

Studies of 8,000 of the "worst cases" of delinquency at Bellevue show that the problem always has several causes. The commonest of these are: "Gross deprivation of love, severe punishment and brutality at home, enforced submissiveness and isolation, learning difficulties and organic disorders—especially of the central nervous system." True enough, some of these causes involve the home, but it takes a combination of several, said Dr. Bender, to push "a particular child along the road to delinquency." Even under such a malign constellation, some other factor is still needed to turn a child into a delinquent, Dr. Bender emphasized. Putting psychiatric jargon aside, she called this simply "happenstance."