RUNAWAY CHILDREN, OR DROMOMANIA—A 1913 VIEW

Abstract

Young People's problems are not too different from one generation to the next. We hear a great deal today about young people who run away from home. But even in 1913, Dr. Leonard Guthrie, of London's Paddington Green Children's Hospital, considered the issue of runaway children important enough to warrant publication of the following in one of the best pediatric textbooks ever published in English. Dromomania may be a high-sounding name for playing "truant" but different causes of vagrancy should be recognized. Imaginative and romantic children will sometimes roam in search of adventure. Some, like St. Theresa, seek martyrdom; and some, like Maggie Tulliver, run away to be gypsyqueens because they do not reign at home. Some not only wander abroad at every opportunity, but account for doing so by inventing stories of ill usage and privation, in which they may appear to believe. Others seem to obey a nomadic instinct to stay out and sleep out whenever they get the chance. . . . The ordinary truant is easily detected as a rule by his general demeanor, and by the manner in which he has occupied his time of unenforced leisure. A short and sharp shrift awaits him in accordance with his deserts. But truancy is not abnormal, whereas there is a distinctly morbid or neurotic element in all the other forms of vagrancy or dromomania. It is only the highly neurotic and sensitive schoolboy who runs away to escape punishment or persecution. A single escapade may result from mere thoughtlessness or from habits of morbid introspection and selfish disregard for the feelings of others.