Growing Pains for Parents, Kids

Hurrah for Fred Hougardy, executive director of the Assn. for Retarded Citizens, as quoted in “Growing Up Different”--”. . . the rolling locomotive of civil rights ran over everything including common sense.”

It’s apparent that the rights of society have completely given way to the rights of the individual, and often to his (the individual’s) own detriment. There is a wide range between the old snake-pit institutions that used to warehouse both the mentally ill and the retarded and the condition of freedom in which they find themselves today. This “freedom” all too often results in total abandonment as they are allowed to drift to the city streets with all of their civil rights intact--except the right to care and treatment.

MARY SOMMER

Rancho Palos Verdes