and help which the teachers and medical
practitioners in mental hygiene are now developing and offering which
may be used later on, when we are wiser, in this work of preventing
families from breaking up. Regularly constituted "social doctoring"
for the prevention, even more than for the treatment of social disease
as it manifests itself in family life, is surely called for.

=The Children to be Affected Society's Chief Care.=--Above all, we
must place the children affected by any decision that gives society a
broken family in the front rank of interest and of protective care. If
the paid attorney were eliminated, divorces would certainly be
lessened in number. If publicity were avoided in all divorce
proceedings, much of the harm to children arising from separation of
married couples would be avoided. If, in addition, there were advisory
aid to the confused and unhappy, many now drifting to complete
division of interest and affection would be enabled to start on again
toward better realization of married opportunity. If, in further
addition, the Domestic Relations Courts were changed with the
supervisory care of all children whose parents were legally separated,
and the well-being of those children made the chief legal concern even
if it required the complete separation from both father and mother,
more fathers and mothers would hesitate to place themselves where
their parental control and their parental influence would be so
minimized. Yet who doubts that among the rich as well as among the
poor such judicial protection and care of the children, whom the
broken family leaves without true parental care, is needed? To give
children into the hands of either parent alone is in many such cases
no fitting substitute for the normal home influence. In any case,
there should be an external conscience and an external solicitude
enlisted in the interest of every child whose parents have made such a
failure of marriage and the home that the divorce court is the only
refuge.

This does not ignore the fact that many couples separate to the
advantage of the children, that many parents are quite innocent of any
cause for the broken family, that many times there is a rehabilitation
of the family life on other lines that means full nurture and
development for the children. The fact remains, however, that the
average child of divorced parents has to meet difficulties and face
disadvantages in life which the child of permanently unite