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The Father Was Staying: Some of the possible effects of severe maternal deprivation on young children have already been mentioned in Chapter 5. In one case the mother had been committed to the state mental hospital. A public health nurse, who had already had contact with this family of two parents and eight children, made the initial visit. The mother, apathetic and withdrawn, had neglected the children, especially the twins, who were the youngest. The father was staying away from the home more and more, and the oldest girl was assuming responsibility for the younger children, a task too heavy for her.
RIDERS TO THE SEA, by John Milling- j ton Synge, is the most nearly perfect trapf!- * in one act in modern literature. The very sir pie plot is based not on the traditional confi:: of human wills but on the hopeless struggle.: man against the impersonal but relentless cruei; of the sea. It has taken from Maurya fouroi her six sons, their father, and their father's father.
Carol did not say anything else. She rang her doorbell, took the five-year-old's hand and, when her mother pushed the buzzer, went inside. The other little girl rode away on her bicycle.
Read the following incident, trying to understand what the child's behavior meant to him:
Father and nine-year-old David were out in the backyard; father was working on the rosebushes.
David, close by, picked up some of his father's tools.
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