Religious Education in the Family Part 19

[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 att.i.tude 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 s.e.x_, is excellent for fathers; _Reproduction and s.e.xual Hygiene_ is a text for older youth to be recommended; also, for reading, N.E. Richardson, _s.e.x 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_.

CHAPTER XVI

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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 amus.e.m.e.nt. Even where the other agencies of training are used, such as college, cla.s.ses, and a.s.sociations (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 a.s.serting 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 a.s.sume 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 friends.h.i.+ps. 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 relations.h.i.+ps. 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 FRIENDs.h.i.+P WITH YOUTH

Do parents know how hungry their older children are for their friends.h.i.+p? 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 pa.s.s 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. .h.i.therto directed it. To some degree the s.e.x 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 friends.h.i.+ps of youth. Somewhere this insatiable appet.i.te 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 friends.h.i.+ps to many lives.

-- 4. AT THE DOOR OF A NEW WORLD

As through friends.h.i.+ps 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 friends.h.i.+p, 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" courts.h.i.+ps, prematurely fostered by boys and girls, under the pressure of the high-school tendency to antic.i.p.ate 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 courts.h.i.+p 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 courts.h.i.+p 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 att.i.tude. 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 courts.h.i.+p 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 l.u.s.t.

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 a.s.sociation with other persons. The family must aid its young people to see the opportunity which the church offers for ideal social relations.h.i.+ps which direct themselves to high and attractive service.

-- 6. AMUs.e.m.e.nTS

What should the family do about the question of the amus.e.m.e.nts 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 amus.e.m.e.nts 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 amus.e.m.e.nts of the larger groups. Then we ought to know what those amus.e.m.e.nts 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 amus.e.m.e.nts. 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, pa.s.s 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 att.i.tude of any home with the least conscience for character toward all forms of public amus.e.m.e.nts 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 amus.e.m.e.nts debase the intellect, blunt the moral sensibilities, and appeal to the baser pa.s.sions. They are the low-water mark, we may hope, of commercialized amus.e.m.e.nt. 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, princ.i.p.ally 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 cla.s.s 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