The chief means by which every society induces its members to exercise a modicum of self-control and to assign a reasonable value to the preferences of others is the family. Developmental psychologists are in broad agreement that the parental practices most likely to achieve these goals involve a combination of affection and discipline such that the child's attachment to the parents is strong and the rules of everyday behavior are clearly understood andconsistently enforced. Fortunately, most babies are biologically eager for attachment and predisposed to socialization, and most parents love their children and invest without compensation in their rearing. Unfortunately, since temperament is to a significant degree under genetic control, there is an elevated probability that difficult children will be born to incompetent parents. Crime runs in families, alcoholism runs in families, impulsive and sensation-seeking behavior runs in families.
Matters become worse if families cease to exist or are transformed into pseudo-families.
Poverty, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan steadily and rightly reminds us, has now become a children's problem owing chiefly to the fact that an increased proportion of children live for long periods, sometimes their entire childhood, in mother-only families, a large fraction of which are also poor. If the family is headed by a teen-age mother, the risks are even greater. Children of teen-age black mothers are less able to control their impulses, have a lower tolerance for frustration, are more likely to be hyperactive, have more difficulty adapting to school, and, if boys, are more likely to be hostile, assertive, and willful than children of older mothers. In principle, the answer is yes. The problem arises in trying to imagine a program that by plan and in the hands of ordinary managers will achieve the necessary personal redemption for large numbers of people.