ABSTRACT
Parents who can manage to keep a home together do in fact provide something that is immensely important to their children, and naturally when a home breaks up there are casualties among the children. The extreme of the idea that security is good would be that a prison is a happy place to grow up in. In time and in health children become able to retain a sense of security in the face of manifest insecurity, as for instance when a parent is ill or dies, or when someone misbehaves, or when a home for some reason or other breaks up. Adolescents quite characteristically make tests of all security measures and of all rules and regulations and disciplines. It usually happens that children do accept security as a basic assumption. True growth gradually, and in the course of time, carries the child or adolescent on to an adult sense of responsibility, especially responsibility for the provision of secure conditions.
