Marro, in his
valuable book on puberty, some years ago brought forward interesting
data showing the result of the age of the parents on the moral and
intellectual characters of school-children in North Italy. He found
that children with fathers below twenty-six at their birth showed the
maximum of bad conduct and the minimum of good; they also yielded the
greatest proportion of children of irregular, troublesome, or lazy
character, but not of really perverse children who were equally
distributed among fathers of all ages. The largest number of cheerful
children belonged to young fathers, while the children tended to become
more melancholy with ascending age of the fathers. Young fathers
produced the largest proportion of intelligent, as well as of
troublesome children, but when the very exceptionally intelligent
children were considered separately they were found to be more usually
the offspring of elderly fathers. As regards the mothers, Marro found
that the children of young mothers (under twenty-one) are superior,
both as regards conduct and intelligence, though the more exceptionally
intelligent children tended to belong to more mature mothers. When the
parents were both in the same age-group the immature and the elderly
groups tended to produce more children who were unsatisfactory, both as
regards conduct and intelligence, than the intermediate group.[4]
But we need to have such inquiries made on a more wholesale and
systematic scale.
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