THE BOY AND GIRL IN THE FAMILY
Much that has been said so far has had in mind only the problems of
dealing with younger children in the life of the home. Indeed, almost
all literature on education in the family is devoted to the years prior
to adolescence. But older boys and girls need the family and the family
needs them. Many of the more serious problems of youth with which
society is attempting to deal are due to the fact that from the age of
thirteen on boys have no home life and girls, especially in the cities,
are deprived of the home influences.
§ 1. THE GROWING BOY
The life of the family must have a place for the growing boy. It must
make provision for his physical needs; these are food, activity, rest,
and shelter. Youth is a period of physical crisis. Health is the basis
of a sound moral life. Many of the lad's apparently strange propensities
are due to the physical changes taking place in his body and, often, to
the fact that it is assumed that his rugged frame needs no care or
attention.[35]
It will take more than tearful pleading to hold him to his home; he can
be held only by its ministry to him; he will be there if it is the most
attractive place for him. Some parents who are praying for wandering
boys would know why they wandered if they looked calmly at the crowded
quarters given to the boy, the comfortless room, the makeshift bed, and
the general home organization which long ago assumed that a boy could be
left out of the reckoning.
The boy needs a part in the family activities. He can belong only to
that to which he can give himself. It will be his home in the degree
that he has a share in its business. Begin early to confer with him
about your plans; make him feel that he is a partner. See that he has a
chance to do part of the work, not only its "chores," but also its forms
of service. But even a boy's attitude to the "chores" will depend on
whether they are a responsibility with a degree of dignity or a form of
unpaid drudgery. His room should be his own room, and he should be
responsible for its neatness and its adorning. Services which he does
regularly for all should receive regular compensation. In all services
which the home renders for others he should have a share; this is his
training for the larger citizenship and society of service.[36]
The boy is a playing animal. Not all homes can be fully equipped with
play apparatus. But no parents have a right to choose family quarters as
though children needed nothing but meals and beds. The shame of the
modern apartment building is that its conveniences are all for passive
adults. To attempt to train an active, growing, vigorous, playing human
creature in one of these immense filing-cases, where all persons are
shot up elevators and filed away in pigeonholes called rooms, is to
force him out to the life of the streets. The thoughtless
self-indulgence of modern parents, seeking only to live without physical
effort, is the cause of much juvenile delinquency.[37]
But play for the boy is more than shouting and running in the grass and
among trees; he needs books and opportunities for indoor recreation. For
the sake of the lad we had better sacrifice the guest-room if necessary,
and make way for the punching-bag and the home billiard-table or
pool-table; here is a magnet of innocent skilful play to draw him off
the street and to bring the boy and his friends under his own roof. If
possible his room ought to be the place that is his own, where his
friends may come, where he may taste the beginnings of the joys of
home-living in receiving them and entertaining them.[38]
A workbench in the attic or basement has saved many a boy from the
street. Such apparatus truly interferes with the symmetrical plan of a
home that is designed for the entertainment of the neighbors; but
families must some time choose between chairs and children, between the
home for the purpose of the lives in it and the household for the
purpose of a salon.[39]
§ 2. RELIGIOUS SERVICE
In the religious family there is valuable opportunity to train youth to
one form of participation in the religious life. Whatever the family
gives or does for social service, for philanthropic enterprises, for the
support of the church or religious work, ought to be, not the gift of
one member or of the heads alone, but of the whole family, extending
itself in service through the community, the nation, and the world. The
form and the amount of the gifts ought to be a matter of family
conference and each member ought early to have the opportunity and the
means of determining his share in such extension. The child's gifts to
the church should not be pennies thrust into his hand as he crosses the
threshold of home for the Sunday school, but his own money, from his own
account--partly his own direct earnings--appropriated for this or for
other purposes by himself and with the advice of his parents. Family
councils on forms of participation in ideal activities, by gifts and by
service, bind the whole life together and form occasions in which the
child is learning life in terms of loving, self-giving service.[40]
The boy needs friendship. Not all his needs can be met by the schoolboys
whom he may bring into his room, nor can they all be met by his mother's
affection. He needs a father. The most serious obstacle to the religious
education of boys is that most of them are half-orphans; intellectually
and spiritually they have no fathers. The American ideal seems to be
that the man shall be the money-maker, the woman the social organizer,
and the children shall be committed to hired shepherds or left to shift
for themselves.
§ 3. THE FATHER AND THE BOY
No one else can be quite the teacher for the boy that his father ought
to be. No man can ever commit to another, still less to some tract or
book, the duty of guiding his boy to sanity and consecration in the
matter of the sex problems.
The first word that needs to be said on this subject is that such
problems receive safe and sufficient guidance only in the atmosphere of
affection and reverence. Do not attempt to teach this boy of yours as
though you were dealing with a class in physiology. The largest thing
you can do for him is to quicken a reverence for the body and for the
functions of life. By your own attitude, by your own expressions and
opinions, lead him to a hatred and abhorrence of the base, filthy, and
bestial, to a healthy fear and detestation of all that despoils and
degrades manhood, and to a reverence for purity, beauty, and life.[41]
Be prepared to give him, on the basis of reverence, the clean, clear
facts. Be sure you have the facts. Do not think he is ignorant; he is in
a world seething with conversation, stories, pictures, and experiences
of evil. The trouble is that his facts are partial, distorted, and
unbalanced by positive errors; his knowledge is gained from the street
and the school-yard. Only a personal teacher can help him unravel the
good from the bad, the true from the false. Do not trust to your own
general knowledge; take time to read one of the simple and sane books on
this subject.[42] Be ready to lead him aright. Remember this subject has
provoked a large number of books, many of which are foolish and others
unwholesome. Do not try to deputize your duty to some doubtful book.
§ 4. FATHERING THE BOY
But the boy needs more than instruction on a special subject; he needs
personality, he needs the time and thought of, and _personal contact_
with, his father. Men who do not live with boys never know what they
lose. And alas, see what the boy misses! He has been his mother's boy up
to school age when school takes him and gives him a woman's guidance,
while the Sunday school is likely to keep him--for a while only--under
the eye of some dear sister who "just loves boys." The system is a
vicious one. The lad needs developed masculinity. If he gets it neither
in school nor in the home he will find it on the street corner, through
the vicious boy-leader of the degrading poolroom or the alleys.
The boy who finds his father eager to talk over the game, to discuss the
merits of peg-tops, to walk, row, play, and work with him, finds it as
simple and natural to talk with him over his moral and religious
questionings as it is to talk over the daily happenings. To live with
the boy is to find the youth with you. But it is hard work discovering
your young men if you lost your boys.[43]
§ 5. THE GROWING GIRL
Almost all that has been said about the boy applies to the girl of the
same years. Let _a special plea_ be entered here against the notion that
girls are favored when sheltered from a share in the activities of the
home. They desire to express their ideals as much as do boys. Much of
the so-called craze for amusements is due to the fact that the family is
so organized that there is no vent to the ideals there, no chance to
have a share in the business of life. Young folks with the sense that
"this is our home," not "our parents', but _ours_" bend their energies
to its adorning, and find in it the chance to realize some of their
passion for beauty and for service.[44]
Mothers usually do better than do fathers in the matter of sex
instruction. Yet they usually begin too late, long after the little girl
has acquired much misleading information in the school. Here, too, the
first aim must be to quicken reverence for life, to set up the
conception of the beauty and dignity of sex functions before the baser
mind of the street has had an opportunity to interpret them in terms of
the dirt.[45]
Above all, with boys and girls, the whole subject, including marriage
and the founding of a family, must ever be treated with dignity and
reverence. Foolish parents jest with their girls about their beaux and
boast that their little ones are playing at courtship. If they could
realize the wonder awakened, followed by pain and then by hardened
sensibilities and coarsened ideals, they would sacrifice their jests for
the sake of the child's soul. We wonder that youth treats lightly the
matter of social purity when we have treated the sacred relations of
life as a jest. If this family in which they now live is to be a place
of sacred associations, of real religious life, the whole matter of
marriage and the family must be treated with reverence. Their practice
will not rise above our everyday ideals as expressed in casual
conversation and in our own practice.
I. References for Study
THE BOY
W.A. McKeever, _Training the Boy_, Part III. Macmillan, $1.50.
_Boy Training_, Part IV. A Symposium. Associated Press.
Johnson, _The Problems of Boyhood_. The University of Chicago
Press, $1.00.
THE GIRL
Margaret Slattery, _The Girl in Her Teens_, chaps. iv, vii. Sunday
School Times Co., $0.50.
Wayne, _Building Your Girl_. McClurg, $0.50.
II. Further Reading
W.B. Forbush, _The Coming Generation_. Appleton, $1.50.
Puffer, _The Boy and His Gang_. Houghton Mifflin Co., $1.00.
Irving King, _The High School Age_. Bobbs-Merrill, $1.00.
_Building Childhood_, A Symposium. Sunday School Times Co., $1.00.
III. Topics for Discussion
1. What are the special needs of the growing boy?
2. What are the things that a boy enjoys in his home?
3. In what way does city life interfere with the natural
development of the child?
4. What are some of the natural expressions of religion for a boy?
5. How early should the sex instruction begin?
6. What does a father owe to the boy, and what are the best methods
of meeting the duty?
7. What are the normal activities for girls in the home?
8. What are their especial needs?
FOOTNOTES:
[35] A good brief book on the problem of the adolescent is E.T. Swift,
_Youth and the Race_; another, from the school point of view, is Irving
King, _The High-School Age_, which has much material of great value to
parents.
[36] On the various activities of boys see W.A. McKeever, _Training the
Boy_.
[37] See the notable report by Breckinridge and Abbott, _The Delinquent
Child and the Home_.
[38] On the gregarious instincts see J.A. Puffer, _The Boy and His
Gang_.
[39] See the books on manual work given in chap. vii, "Directed
Activity."
[40] On the religious life of the boy in relation to society and the
church see Allan Hoben, _The Minister and the Boy_, and the author's
treatment of boys and the Sunday school in _Efficiency in the Sunday
School_, chap. xiv; also J. Alexander _et al._, _Training the Boy_, a
symposium.
[41] On the attitude of reverence in this question read Dr. Cabot's fine
essay, _The Christian Approach to Social Morality_.
[42] The works of Dr. W.S. Hall, _From Boyhood to Manhood_, for parents'
guidance with boys of thirteen to eighteen; E. Lyttleton, _Training of
the Young in Laws of Sex_, is excellent for fathers; _Reproduction and
Sexual Hygiene_ is a text for older youth to be recommended; also, for
reading, N.E. Richardson, _Sex Culture Talks_, D.S. Jordan, _The
Strength of Being Clean_.
[43] For further studies of the problem of the boy parents would do well
to read: _Building Boyhood_, a symposium; W.A. McKeever, _Training the
Boy;_ W.B. Forbush, _The Coming Generation;_ W.D. Hyde, _The Quest of
the Best_.
[44] On activities see W.A. McKeever, _Training the Girl_.
[45] On the problem with young children see M. Morley, _The Renewal of
Life_; in connection with older girls see K.H. Wayne, _Building Your
Girl_.