Parent and Child - Child Study and Training Part 17

2. What influences are at work in each instance?

3. Is it because conditions outside the home offer more, or is the home offering less of that which the boy or girl desires?

4. When you find your boy going to the pool room do you throw his deck of cards into the fire and advise him as to what will happen if he attempts to use such things in or about the house?

5. When your girl shows a preference for taking her leisure at Smith's or Brown's rather than at home, do you at once adopt a code of rules and proceed to make emphatic statements as to your intention to enforce those rules and also to impose certain penalties?

6. Did it ever occur to you that "desire" may be diverted, but that it cannot be destroyed?

7. Is it not best to divert by subst.i.tution rather than by prohibition?

Also to subst.i.tute in kind as near as may be?

8. What are you doing in your home to satisfy the desire which takes your boy or girl to the neighbors or the public places?

9. What share are you taking in the interests of the growing boy or girl?

10. Parents, are you companionable? Do you get into the boy or girl's field of discussion? Do you talk _with them_ rather than _to them_? Do you get into their games, their troubles, their pleasures, their life?

LESSON IX

1. What certain acts or omissions ent.i.tle a boy to be cla.s.sified as "wayward?"

2. The first sign of waywardness is the breaking of what commandment, if any?

3. Under any condition would you let your boy know that you considered him wayward?

4. Should your regard for, as shown by your treatment of the wayward boy, differ in the slightest degree from your regard for your treatment of the circ.u.mspect, dutiful, and obliging boy?

5. Does the worst tendency of the boy call for any more from us than mere direction?

6. Is not the boy's worst offence a bad form of satisfying a good desire?

7. What is your method of dealing with your boy? Is it "Never do that" or "Better to do this?"

8. Do you ever undertake to show the boy how much more of the thing he is after he can get out of a method that is all around helpful than one that is all around harmful.

9. How would it do to subst.i.tute jointly planned "Do's" for unqualified "Don'ts"?

10. In almost every instance can you not justly ascribe the boy's waywardness to an unnatural companions.h.i.+p on your part or to no companions.h.i.+p at all?

LESSON X

SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT IN BOYS AND GIRLS

"_Training the Child in the Way He Should Go_"

1. Quote from the Doctrine and Covenants a pa.s.sage wherein parents are admonished as to their duty in teaching the Gospel to their children.

2. Give three first steps in religious training in children.

3. What difficulties and successes have you, as parents, met with in cultivating your little ones? proper habits in prayer, in attendance to Sunday School and in other religious duties? To what do you ascribe your success or failure?

4. At what age do boys and girls grow most careless as regards religion?

(Study the statistics of your Sabbath School on this point.)

5. Is it true that our religious training fails most just at the point where the boy and girl are in greatest need of it? What are the causes of this failure?

6. What can and must parents do to reinforce the Sunday School and our other organizations in their efforts to guide the boy and girl safely during their teens? during the critical periods of life?

LESSON XI

LIFE LESSONS DURING THE WAYWARD AGE

1. Show, by citing examples from history, that youth is a period of strong religious tendencies. What can be done to keep the "dreams of youth" on high ideals?

2. What stories? what lessons? to boys and girls at this time? What books appeal most impressively to boys and girls at this time?

3. Recalling the things that left deepest impress on you for good or ill during the period of "the teens," what advice would you give as to cultivating in a child right feelings for religion?

4. Wherein do we as religious teachers most fail to get the boy or girl?

5. In what way should the Bible be taught during this age?

6. What individual work with boys and girls can and should be done by parents and teachers to guide the children past the dangerous places?

LESSON XII

TEMPTATIONS OF BOYS AND GIRLS

1. What are the commandments children are likely to break first?

2. In what ways are homes often responsible for habits of lying, stealing, profaning the name of G.o.d, and other sins?