In the moderate-size modern family, however, where there is enough companionship within the home for family good times and not enough to cause breakage into groups within the group, we have the ideal conditions for child development.
For the only child there are happily some substitutes for this home companionship in the "residential school," or the school with long days of group relationship of like age and condition, but it is not the same and seldom as good as the home circle of the right size and variety.
The modern conditions make the old ties seem less important to many.
In the United States, where people move about so freely across the vast spaces of our continent, and where in the large cities so many move each year to try vainly to better themselves in hired houses, the ties of family outside of the immediate circle seem remote and to be easily set aside.

It is not, however, a sign of advanced social spirit which makes a young girl declare "she has no use for her relations; she cares only for her chosen friends," and it is often of the essence of social danger that a young man wants to give up all connection with his family.

The fact is that one can understand better how one came to be what one is by knowing something of one's forbears and one's living relatives.
=Permanent Value of the Family Bond.=--The feeling that one belongs to a blood group, the feeling so old and so wonder-working in the past, gives at least one ideal of permanence in a world of affairs whirling in such rapid change that the common mind becomes dizzy and the common idealism confused.

On the other hand, it is cause for gratitude unspeakable that the old bondage of the family life is relaxed, never to be tightened again to such oppression as once prevailed.

The fact that inheritance is now seen to be so varied and so unpredictable that one child in a family may "take back" to one ancestor and another to a different one to ends of complete divergence of character and capacity, shows that the old attempt to keep them together, whether they could love each other or not, was a social mistake.