The entire family has been upheaved, and is striving to adjust itself to its new surroundings.  The men, for the most part, work on railroad extensions through the summer, under the direction of a padrone, who finds the work for them, regulates the amount of their wages, and supplies them with food.  The first effect of immigration upon the women is that of idleness.  They no longer work in the fields, nor milk the goats, nor pick up faggots.  The mother of the family buys all the clothing, not only already spun and woven but made up into garments, of a cut and fashion beyond her powers.  It is, indeed, the most economical thing for her to do.  Her house-cleaning and cooking are of the simplest; the bread is usually baked outside of the house, and the macaroni bought prepared for boiling.  All of those outdoor and domestic activities, which she would naturally have handed on to her daughters, have slipped away from her.  The domestic arts are gone, with their absorbing interests for the children, their educational value, and incentive to activity.  A household in a tenement receives almost no raw material.  For the hundreds of children who have never seen wheat grow, there are dozens who have never seen bread baked.  The occasional washings and scrubbings are associated only with discomfort.  The child of such a family receives constant stimulus of most exciting sort from his city street life, but he has little or no opportunity to use his energies in domestic manufacture, or, indeed, constructively in any direction.  No activity is supplied to take the place of that which, in Italy, he would naturally have found in his own surroundings, and no new union with wholesome life is made for him.

Italian parents count upon the fact that their children learn the English language and American customs before they do themselves, and the children act not only as interpreters of the language, but as buffers between them and Chicago, resulting in a certain almost pathetic dependence of the family upon the child.  When a child of the family, therefore, first goes to school, the event is fraught with much significance to all the others.  The family has no social life in any structural form and can supply none to the child.  He ought to get it in the school and give it to his family, the school thus becoming the connector with the organized society about them.  It is the children aged six, eight, and ten, who go to school, entering, of course, the primary grades.  If a boy is twelve or thirteen on his arrival in America, his parents see in him a wage-earning factor, and the girl of the same age is already looking toward her marriage.