Maladjustment to the Family Home

N HOMES, factories, office buildings, and educational institutions, we create shelters against the vicissitudes of the climate, shelters within which the greater part of our life time is spent. In the construction and subdivision of these shelters, we arrange for a routine of private and public life that is full of social implications. Home planning is aimed at the accommodation of specific social functions, visualized by the good architect on the basis of informal experience. After construction, the four walls of the house and the interior partitions dictate a pattern of social interaction from which the inhabitants can free themselves only at the cost of considerable frustration. Thus, home planning involves social policy, framing the very details of our private lives for a period of half a century or more. About the relationship between the ever-changing pattern of family life and its physical shelter, unfortunately, a minimum of controlled information is available. This is the more astounding, as our social scene is abounding with a large number of distinctive family types as characterized by their home environment. The personality development of the growing child assumes widely different qualitative characteristics in either a Manhattan city apartment or in the small town one-family home. There are lack of space, lack of open air play space, and traffic hazards in the former case. Contacts with friends and relatives are arranged according to a different pattern in both cases. The neighborhood functions more constructively within the social interaction pattern of small town and suburb. On the other hand, the one-family house with a high burden of individualized maintenance performances left to the owner is apt to cut off the family from the wider community, barring participation in numerous secondary-group activities and fostering the escapism of self-indulgent home ownership. But these are only two of the most obviously contrasting patterns of home adjustment. There is the newly built home of a middle aged couple with children in a good school-district but far from the center of the city. There is the ambitious home of the turn of the century, located in a somewhat undesirable neighborhood and with greatly decreased market value; the maintenance costs are high and the owners rent out apartments that have been partitioned off to get a reasonable return from the inheritance. There is the fixer who moves and moves again, improves the value of the home and sells out, increasing in this manner his property at the cost of continuous readjustments of his children to new friends and neighborhood institutions. There is, at all income levels, the home that is the center of family relaxation in the evening hours and the home which, after dinner, functions as a distribution center from which the various