new family that they know
and see everything have a far more difficult role to play than do the
grandparents who have their own home and simply visit and are visited.
It is, however, often a necessity of financial provision and often a
choice of ease in ministration to the needs of the aged, that brings
one grandparent or even two within the daughter's or son's household.
The time-worn jokes about the "mother-in-law" are based upon the fact
that it is more often the daughter than the son who is expected to or
needs to personally care within her own home for the mother. The son
is not so bound by social custom to take his mother in. Hence, more
husbands than wives have trials with their parents-in-law.

=Reasons Why Husbands Desert Their Families.=--The statistics of
deserting husbands, as compiled in a careful study made by Lillian
Brandt and Roger Baldwin, show that among the chief causes of "leaving
home" is "trouble with the wife's relations." In these cases it is not
only the grandmother, although she is often a member of the disturbed
family; it is also often other relatives--a sister, a brother, or a
first husband's people--who cause trouble. The wife's mother is,
however, often enough a member of the household the husband leaves
behind to give some point to the coarse and often unjust jokes
concerning the mother-in-law.

Where the feeling is right, and both generations reasonable and just,
there are still many problems of adjustment arising from an attempt to
bring either or both parents of the married couple into the same
household. The first problem is that of the financial support. It
ought not to be the case that any aged couple or any widowed father or
mother should be left wholly dependent upon their children. The demand
for better economic provision for the aged is one of the most vital
and pressing of social needs. The difficulty of taking care of the
father and mother when the children are coming on with pressing needs
of their own is felt acutely in cases of narrow income. The call is
almost universal to provide more adequately for grandparents. How can
we meet this call?

=The Financial Provision for Old Age.=--In the case of those whose
earning capacity is not equal to saving a sufficient old-age provision
while at work the claim for an Old-age Pension is growing. This may be
either a subsidy from the state, a joint pension from the state and
the employing business in which the man or woman has wor