The families and relationships of eighty-three adolescent delinquent girls were studied. Most of the girls were thieves or sex offenders. A significant number of the girls who stole had been severely rejected by their mothers or had been separated from their mothers for a long time during the first five years of life. Such a history was not frequent among the sexually delinquent girls, but many of these girls had mothers who were themselves promiscuous or otherwise 'conjugally unstable'.