§ 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.