Family: Good or Evil? If I were to go and interview 15 elementary school teachers about deviance, I bet at least half would say that the family is the problem behind social deviance. If I would have asked the same question 10 years ago teachers would have said "peers, friends, classmates, etc." No way would anybody have dare said that the family was the leading cause behind social deviance. In a society nowadays that experiences over 50 percent of marriages ending in divorce, things have definitely changed. Most children live in one of three environments in today's society: single parent, latchkey (they come home from school and nobody is there), or they have both