In their farm house in a New York village, Ma Shelby prepares breakfast for her four children, Isaac, Tommy, Johnny and Susan, and then awakens them. The racket the boys make as they play and fight awakens their father, who spanks the eldest, Isaac. When a visitor chides Pa for not working, Ma sticks up for her husband, saying that he has a weak back and that he is waiting for a promised government job.
The mother of a large family is abandoned by her children and faces consignment to the poorhouse. But one of her offspring, the one no one had faith in, returns to rescue her.
Four young college students find themselves with no money and a lot of debts. Each has received a peremptory refusal from home to send any more money to them and they are in despair. Suddenly Claude has an idea. They will hire Susan B. Gabonthy to lecture for them, clear about one hundred dollars apiece, and have enough to tide them over into the next term.
The widowed elderly mother of three adult children, two sons and a daughter, wishing to relieve herself of the burden of care of her property, decides to divide it up among her children. To her son Charles, a wild but kind young fellow, she leaves a small amount, feeling that he will soon run through it. The good-hearted boy is perfectly satisfied, believing in the wisdom of his mother's actions. He assumes she will find a home with one of his siblings, who are married and settled. The old woman moves in with her married son, but is driven out by his wife over an argument about her young granddaughter. She is forced to move into a squalid apartment in a cheap tenement house, but is evicted for failing to pay her rent. Mack Sennett appears as a bartender in this film.
