ABSTRACT
Meaning of Primary Groups—Family, Playground, and Neighborhood—How Far Influenced by Larger Society—Meaning and Permanence of "Human Nature"—Primary Groups the Nursery of Human Nature. It is not to be supposed that the unity of the primary group is one of mere harmony and love. The most important spheres of this intimate association and cooperation—though by no means the only ones—are the family, the play-group of children, and the neighborhood or community group of elders. In the life, the intimacy of the neighborhood has been broken up by the growth of an intricate mesh of wider contacts which leaves us strangers to people who live in the same house. The family and neighborhood groups are ascendant in the open and plastic time of childhood makes them even incomparably more influential than all the rest. In short the family and neighborhood life is essential to its genesis and nothing more is.
