Families with bank accounts, families with cars, families never before touched by social agencies, now figure large in the “relief population” of these United States. How the new problems they bring, rarely encountered by case workers of a few years ago, are being treated, how workers without extensive training are being prepapred to meet situations calling for quick and discriminating judgment, are the subjects of a series of Survey articles, of which this is the eighth, drawn from day-to-day experience in busy relief offices.

What should relief workers do when:

What should relief workers do when:
• A waiting client suddenly throws a paper‑weight across the office and begins to scream
• A client disrupts the waiting‑room with loud threats of what he proposes to do to the interviewer?
• A delegation with banners and baby‑carriages demonstrates noisily under the office windows?
• A large and voluble committee, with police hovering in the background, demands a hearing for its protest against the relief system?

What can an unskilled home visitor do when she finds that in families where relief is as adequate as conditions permit:
• Children, under threat of parental whipping, are coming to the office to make special pleas?
• Children and grown‑ups too are making a practice of begging?
• Children are being permitted, even sent, to hang around restaurants and explore garbage‑cans?

What about relief investigators who, in visiting families:
• Find a public‑health nurse also on the job?
• Opine that codliver oil is an old wives’ tale?
• Predict the goryness of approaching tonsillectomies?
• Report prenatal patients when the stork is on the wing?

What about relief investigators who, when visiting families:

Smoke if they feel like it
Holler upstairs
Pump the children and the neighbors
Look under the bed for extra shoes and into the cupboard for food?

What shall the untrained relief investigator do when she observes in homes such situations as:

The family on relief that she “catches” filing into the movie theater?
The girl in the family who blossoms out with a new permanent wave?
The family that, at the morning call, was in rags and despair, and is all dressed up and going to a party when she returns at night with a food order?
The family that supports a man‑sized dog?

What shall the untrained investigator do when she observes in homes such situations as:

Bootlegging?
Deserted wife with children on relief, living in sin with a lodger?
Father periodically drunk and (a) cheerful, (b) abusive to children?
Father demanding shotgun marriage for reluctant daughter?

There is perhaps no point in the whole business of relief about which the public is so sensitive as in the matter of car-ownership. The question comes up even in the most car-conscious communities. Stories of abuses multiply at dinner and bridge tables and sooner or later magnify into newspaper headlines. More than once they have occasioned formal investigations of relief agencies and sweeping “reforms.”