THE NEEDS OF YOUTH
Families are for the spiritual development of youth as well as of
childhood. The home is for the young people as well as for the younger
ones. But the very period when they slip from church school is also the
period when they are often lost to the real life of the family. In some
measure this is due to the natural development of the social life. The
youths go out to work, move forward into enlarging social groups which
demand more of their free time. They are learning the life of the larger
world of which they are now a part.
§ 1. THE SCHOOL OF YOUTH
But the family is still the home of these young people; normally it is
still the most vital educational influence for them. Yet there is no
problem more baffling than that of family ministry for, and leadership
of, the higher life of youth.
It is a short-measure interpretation of the home which thinks of it as
only for young children and old folks. The young men and women from
sixteen to twenty and over still need training and direction; they need
close touch with other lives in affection and in an ideal atmosphere. In
a few years they, too, will be home-makers, and here in the home they
are very directly learning the art of family life.
For youth there are few effective schools, outside the home, other than
the streets and the places of commercialized amusement. Even where the
other agencies of training are used, such as college, classes, and
associations (such as the Y.M.C.A. and the Y.W.C.A.), life, at that
period, needs the restraints on selfishness that come from family life,
the refining and socializing power of the family group.
§ 2. SPECIAL NEEDS OF YOUTH
What are the special needs of youth upon which the family may base a
reasonable program for their higher needs?
First, the need of sound physical health. This is a period of physical
adjustment. Rapid bodily growth is nearly or quite at an end; new
functions are asserting themselves. The new demands for directed
activity may, under the ambitious impulses of youth, make undue drafts
on the energies. The apparent moodiness that at times characterizes this
period may be due to poor health. The moral strain of the period will
need sound muscles and good health. Parents who would sit up all
night--perhaps involuntarily--when the baby has the colic treat with
indifference sickness in youth and too readily assume that the young
man or the young woman will outgrow these physical ills. But bodily
maladjustment or incapacity has most serious character effects. To live
the right life and render high service one needs to be a whole person,
with opportunity to give undivided attention and undiminished powers to
the struggle of life.
Secondly, this is peculiarly the period of the joy of friendships. The
social nature must have its food. This young man has discovered that the
world consists of something besides things; it is full of people. He is
just learning that they are all persons like himself. He enters the era
of conscious personal relationships. He would explore the realm of
personality. He touches great heights of happiness as other lives are
opened to him. It is all new and wonderful, this realm of personality,
with its aspects of feeling, thinking, willing, and longing.
§ 3. MAINTAINING FRIENDSHIP WITH YOUTH
Do parents know how hungry their older children are for their
friendship? They will never tell us, for this world is too new and
strange for facile description; they are always bashful about their
hunger for persons until they find the same hunger and joy in us. We
imagine that they are indifferent to us; the trouble is we are hidden
from them. We seldom give them a chance to talk as friend to friend,
not about trifling things, but about life itself and what it means.
Perhaps at no point do parents exhibit less ability for sympathetic
reconstruction and interpretation of their own lives than here. They
recall the pleasures of childhood and provide those pleasures for the
children. Why not recall the hunger of eighteen years of age and give
these youths the very bread of our own inner selves? Or do we, when they
ask this bread, give them the stone of mere provision for their physical
needs or the scorpion of careless indulgence in things that debase the
tastes?
One perplexing phenomenon must not be overlooked: it will often happen
that young people pass through a period of what appears to be parental
aversion. There will sometimes seem to be suspicion, violent opposition,
and even hatred of parents. This is no occasion for despair. It is a
stage of development. It is due to the attempt of a will now realizing
its freedom under social conditions to adapt itself to the will that has
hitherto directed it. To some degree the sex consciousness, which leads
to viewing the parents in a new light, may enter in. It may be easily
made permanent, however, if parents do not do two things: first, adjust
themselves and their methods to the new social freedom of the youth,
and, secondly, fling open the doors into their true selves now fully
understandable by these men and women.
But the family life must make provision for the wider friendships of
youth. Somewhere this insatiable appetite for the reality of lives will
feed. Groups of friends your young man and woman will find somewhere. If
they cannot bring them into your home they will go elsewhere. You can
scarce pay any price too high for the opportunity that comes when they
are perfectly free to have their friends with them and with you, when
home becomes the natural place of the social meetings of youth. If you
are afraid of the wear on the furniture you may keep your furniture, but
you will lose a life or lives. Here is the opportunity of the home to
enter a wider ministry, to be a place of the joy of friendships to many
lives.
§ 4. AT THE DOOR OF A NEW WORLD
As through friendships the youth enters and explores this wonderful
realm of personality he will find some persons more wonderful than
others. Those instincts of which he is largely unconscious will impel
him to make a selection. The same law is operative with the young woman.
Mating is normally always first on the higher levels of personalities;
it first calls itself friendship, nor does it think farther. But father
and mother, if they have the least spiritual vision, stand in awe as
they see their children taking their first evident steps toward
home-making. What an opportunity is theirs!
Yet here, as the home faces its duty toward a family yet to be, is just
where some of the most serious mistakes are made. This is no time for
teasing and jesting, still less for mocking ridicule. If you treat this
essentially sacred step as a joke it will not be strange if the young
people follow suit and take marriage as a yet larger joke. The home is
the place where the home is treated most irreverently. Of course one
must not take too seriously those "calf" courtships, prematurely
fostered by boys and girls, under the pressure of the high-school
tendency to anticipate all of life's riper experiences. But even here
jesting and teasing will only tend to confirm and make permanent what
would be but a temporary aberration. In that case either silence or
kindly, simple advice will help most of all.
To young people who think at all courtship has its times of vision, when
they stand trembling before the unknown future, when they, with youth's
idealism, make high vows and stand on high places. Give them at least
the opportunity to enter your inmost self, to find there all the light
you can give them and all the memory of your own joys and hopes. Make
them feel, though you need not say it, that they are at the threshold of
a temple. If to you this is an affair of the spirit it will be a matter
of religion to them.
Approached in such a temper, many of the practical problems of courtship
settle themselves. Take the case of the young man at home. If he knows
that you think with him of the high meaning of this experience he will
not hesitate to bring the young woman to the home. She will feel your
attitude. Upon this level questions of times and seasons, hours in the
parlor, and all the matters of their relations will settle themselves.
If you treat courtship as a matter of the spirit he will do just what he
most of all wants to do, treat this woman who is to be his mate as a
person, a spirit, with reverence and love that lifts itself above lust.
This is the only ground upon which you can appeal to either in matters
of conduct at this time. The conventions of society they will despise;
but the inner law speaks to them when the outer letter has no meaning.
§ 5. THE SOCIAL LIFE
We must expect our children to go out into their larger world. The
beginning of adolescence is the normal time of their social awakening,
their conversion from a nature that turns in upon itself to one that
moves out into a world of persons. For them, now, the home group ought
to be seen as a society as well as a family, as the social group
gathering about a definite ideal and mission into which they should
delight to project themselves. The appeal of religion is peculiarly
vivid just now, for it involves a recognition of one's self as a person
with the power of personal choices and with the opportunity to find
association with other persons. The family must aid its young people to
see the opportunity which the church offers for ideal social
relationships which direct themselves to high and attractive service.
§ 6. AMUSEMENTS
What should the family do about the question of the amusements of young
people?
Healthy young persons must have recreation. They will seek it on its
highest level first and find their way down the facile descent of
commercialized amusements only as the higher opportunities are denied
them. They would always rather play than be played to; they would
rather, where early labor has not sapped vitality, play outdoors than
sit in a fetid atmosphere watching tawdry spectacles. But play, the
idealization of life's experiences, they will find somewhere. To this
need the home must minister by the provision of space, time,
opportunity, and the means of play. If through either sloth,
selfishness, preoccupation, or a mistaken idea of an empty innocence of
life you make recreation and social intercourse impossible in the
family, the young people will find it on the street or in the crowd. In
the family that plans for recreation and provides facilities and time
for young people to play the problem is a minor one.
But young people will naturally desire to project themselves into the
social amusements of the larger groups. Then we ought to know what those
amusements are; we must be able to advise, from actual knowledge, not
from hearsay or prejudice, as to the healthful and worth while. The home
must insist on the provision in the community for the safe socialization
of amusements. The thousands of young girls in the cities, who tramp the
pavements down to dance halls, primarily are only seeking the
satisfaction of a normal craving; and they, on their way to the dance
halls, pass the splendid plants of the schools and the churches,
standing dark and idle. Families must develop a public opinion that will
demand, for the sake of their young people, a provision for amusement
and recreation that, instead of poisoning the life, shall strengthen,
dignify, and elevate it. If the demand for clean drinking-water is a
proper one, is the demand for healthful food for the life of ideals less
so?
There can be no doubt of the attitude of any home with the least
conscience for character toward all forms of public amusements in which
young people are herded promiscuously for the mere purpose of killing
time in trivialities. The "white cities" with their glittering lights
and baubles are often moral plague colonies. The amusements debase the
intellect, blunt the moral sensibilities, and appeal to the baser
passions. They are the low-water mark, we may hope, of commercialized
amusement. But they remind us that young people demand company and
change from the monotony of the day's toil. They ask us as to the
provision we are making for young people and challenge us to use their
inclinations for good.
But besides these "shows" there are many dignified forms of social
recreation. Good music is to be heard and good plays are to be seen.
The theater, whether of the regular drama or of the motion-picture type,
offers a perplexing problem, principally because, in the first place,
American people have been too busy conquering a new soil and making a
living to give careful thought to the social side of aesthetics and
recreation, and, secondly, because the ministry of social recreation has
fallen almost entirely under the dominance of the same trend; it has
been thoroughly commercialized. We cannot cut the puzzling knot by
simply prohibiting all forms of public theatrical entertainment. For one
reason, these forms shade off imperceptibly from the church service to
the extremes of the vaudeville. But the simple fact is that we no longer
indiscriminately class all theaters as baneful and immoral; we are
coming to see their potentialities for good. If the young will go, as
they will--and ought--to the theater, and if the theater can lift their
ideals, parents would do well to guide their children in this matter and
to enlist the aid of the theater.
It is worth while to come to a sympathetic understanding of the place of
the drama and the opera, to see what they have meant in the education of
the race and what is the significance, to us, of the fact of the strong
dramatic instinct in childhood. Naturally the subject can only be
mentioned here and the suggestion be offered that parents take time to
cultivate an appreciation of good orchestral and concert music and of
the drama.
The social life will find outlet in other directions. Young people need
our aid to find social groups which will inspire and develop them,
especially groups that are serviceful.
§ 7. THE CALL TO SERVICE
This is the period when ideals begin to give direction to the hitherto
undirected activity of childhood and youth. Young people are idealists.
They see no height too giddy, no task too hard, no dream too roseate,
and no hope unattainable. If the times are out of joint they believe
they were "born to set them right." Whatever is wrong or imperfect they
would take a hand in setting it right. We know we felt that way, but we
are loath to believe our children also cherish their high hopes. And so
the tendency of the adult is to treat with cynicism the dreams of youth.
Often we sedulously endeavor to pervert him to our blasé view of the
world; we would have him believe it is a fated heap of cinders instead
of an almost new thing to be formed and made perfect. In the home those
ideals must be nourished and guided. See that at hand there are the
songs and essays of the idealists. Give them Emerson and forget your
Nietzsche. Renew your own youth. Get some of Isaiah's passion and let it
breathe its fervor on them. Feed by poem, song, story, essay, and
conversation the life of ideals.
Stop long enough to see the life that like an engine with steam up is
surely going somewhere and help it to find an engineer. We call this the
period of sowing wild oats. Wild oats are simply energies invested in
the wrong places. The dynamic of youth must go somewhere and do
something. Fundamentally it would rather go to the good than the bad. We
know that this was true of us at that time; why should we assume less of
others? Hold to your faith in youth. Fathers who with open eyes and
active minds--not with sleepy fatalism--believe in their boys, have boys
who believe in them.
They wait for leadership. If you have dropped into the easy slippers of
indifference to social reform and other types of ideal service, get
back into the fight again beside this new man of yours.
They wait for friendship in this matter of their ideals and their
service. At any cost keep open house of the heart.
They wait for a life-task. This is the period of vocational choice. It
will make a tremendous difference to this life whether his work shall be
merely a matter of making a living or shall be his chance to invest life
in accordance with his new ideals. Shall he go out to be merely one of
the many wage-earners or salary-winners to whom life is a great orange
from which he will get all the juice if he can, regardless of who else
goes thirsty? Or shall he see an occupation as his chance to pay back to
today and tomorrow that which he owes to yesterday? as his chance to
give the world himself? He need not be a minister or a missionary to
make his life a ministry; he will find life, he will be a religious
person in no other way than as his dominating motive shall be to find
the fulness of life in order to have a full life to give to God's world.
The answer will depend on what life means to you, how you are
interpreting it, and how you aid him in thinking of it and making his
high choice. You will have abundant opportunity to show what it is to
you--as you have been doing all along--by your daily attitude; you will
have abundant opportunity to talk it all over, for he will certainly
discuss his trade or profession with you. The family must give to the
life of the new day makers of families to whom life means a chance to
realize the God-vision of the world.
I. References for Study
H.C. King, _Personal and Ideal Elements in Education_, pp. 105-27.
Macmillan, $1.50.
E.D. Starbuck, _The Psychology of Religion_, chaps., xvi-xxi.
Scribner, $1.50.
II. Further Reading
1. ON YOUTH
C.R. Brown, _The Young Man's Affairs_. Crowell, $1.00.
Wayne, _Building the Young Man_. McClurg, $0.50.
Swift, _Youth and the Race_. Scribner, $1.50.
Wilson, _Making the Most of Ourselves_. McClurg, $1.00.
2. ON RECREATIONS
L.C. Lillie, _The Story of Music and the Musicians_. Harper, $0.60.
Gustav Kobbe, _How to Appreciate Music_. Moffat, $1.50.
P. Chubb, _Festivals and Plays_. Harper, $2.00.
_Dramatics in the Home, Children in the Theater, Problems of
Dramatic Plays_, monographs published by the American Institute of
Child Life. Philadelphia, Pa.
L.H. Gulick, _Popular Recreation and Public Morality_. American
Unitarian Association. Free.
M. Fowler, _Morality of Social Pleasures_. Longmans, $1.00.
Addams, _The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets_. Macmillan,
$1.25.
The moving-picture or cinema presents a problem to parents; see
Herbert A. Jump, _The Religious Possibilities of the Motion
Picture_ (a pamphlet) and _Vaudeville and Moving Pictures_, a
report of an investigation in Portland, Ore. _Reed College Record,
No. 16._
III. Topics for Discussion
1. What are the reasons why young people leave home?
2. Where do the young men and young women whom you know spend their
evenings? Why is this the case?
3. Mention the special needs of young people in the family.
4. What are the difficulties in maintaining the friendship of our
young people?
5. Have you ever seen evidences of the phase mentioned as aversion
to parents?
6. What are some common mistakes of treating the subject of
courtship?
7. What are the special social needs of young people?
8. What is the religious significance of the period of social
awakening?
9. What are the special dangerous tendencies in public amusements?
10. How does the social instinct express itself in social service?
11. What of the relation of "wild oats" to directed work?
12. What may be done for vocational direction in the family?