How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.

It is precisely where the family life is most perfect that its results are most insidious. Bad families cause their children to leave them—bitter medicine, it is true, but often drastically effective if the young rebels are not humiliated and discouraged by their family difficulties to such an extent that they dread to establish families of their own in the future. In many families the mothers still have only one profession-—the raising of their families. This leads to mental enslavement. No woman who has invested her total life’s capital in her family likes to see her children becoming mature and leaving the family hearth. Despite her best intentions, she tries to keep her children babies, although they have assumed mature and independent sexual and occupational responsibilities. I have known men, forty years old, who still reported to their mothers every night when they returned to their homes, and accounted for every moment of their time, despite the fact that they were supporting the family. I have known girls who have broken one engagement after another because mother or father did not approve their choice. Independence, social courage, a healthy attitude toward one’s fellows, are almost unattainable in the stifling, albeit loving, atmosphere of the professional family. The over-emphasis of the family is very common among the Jews, who are often cursed with neuroses that hinge on the family situation. During the Middle Ages, when the Jews were compelled to live in ghettoes, their family life saved them from extinction. Without the strong and beautiful family life in which individual Jews found the only available sphere of social significance, the Jews would have perished, and with them their valuable cultural contributions to our civilization. But the translation of this hermetically sealed family life into modern civilization has often worked havoc for the Jewish children of the modern world, brought up “ as if ” the dangers and deprivations of ghetto life still existed. The world has out-grown the constricting bonds of patriarchalism. To maintain the family as the end of