Families in trouble / Earl Lomon Koos.

  • Koos, Earl Lomon, 1905-1960
Date:
1946
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Families in trouble / Earl Lomon Koos. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    дв Families in Trouble the stability of the family was shaken. The observation of Mrs. Der¬ ber on this point is of value: It shakes your family when you know that the one strongest person of all—your husband—isn't able to handle the jambs you get into. You have to have somebody in the family to lean on, and when he fails you, if you think it's his fault, it busts something up. Also, where there were successive troubles, there was a cumulative effect. The Richmond family had a succession of troubles, all involv¬ ing the husband's inability to keep out of debt, and Mrs. Rich¬ mond's observation is pertinent here: Something happened, I don't know what, but every time you get in a jamb, when you get out you feel a little less sure about the person who caused it. Not that I don't love my husband, of course, but I begin to think maybe he's a little weak. Then next time I lose a little more of what I think of him, and so it goes again. When you think less of the person you think of as the corner [stone] of your family, it make the whole family unsteady, and you get a feeling, as a family, about things happening to you. It was this point which seemed the major (and tragic) effect of trouble in family life. With the family playing so great a part in the development of human personality, this effect of trouble in destroy¬ ing the foundations upon which satisfactory interaction was based, i.e., the security in each other, was of paramount importance to the individual members, whether they were directly affected by the trouble or not. A family is after all, love-in-action, which includes interest, respect, the chance for interaction, and so on, and this ef¬ fect of trouble reduced measurably the chance for the working of all of them. In some few instances, the dominance of the father was raised as a result of trouble. In the Dickens family, where the husband's dominance over his wife was slight because of her aggressiveness (and in a measure be¬ cause of his passivity), a serious trouble involving debt as a result of death was unexpectedly solved through the husband's efforts. As a
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