Seventy-three families each with a delinquent boy were compared with seventy-three families of the same socioeconomic class who had a boy of the same age who was not delinquent. The rate of broken homes, parental disabilities such as psychiatric illness, sibship size, and other variables were examined in these two groups. A number of parental disabilities including broken homes, mental illness, criminality, and welfare history were significantly more common in the delinquent families. The data support the idea that factors which can result in insufficient parenting are strongly associated with delinquency, and the absence