The cause of shy, bashful, self-conscious youngsters is wrong training. They are repressed instead of developed. Their natural tendencies are held down by constant reminders and scoldings and warnings. Instead, they should be brought out by proper encouragement, by kind, sympathetic understanding. Some children have the idea, in their extreme youth, that parents are made only to forbid things, to repress them and make them do things against which their natures revolt. The bond that should exist between parent and child is a certain understanding friendliness—an implicit faith on the part of the child, and a wise guidance on the part of the parent.
Remember that a child is like a flower. If the flower is not permitted to struggle upward towards the sun, and to gather in the tiny dewdrops, it will wither and die. If the child is not allowed to develop naturally, its tastes and ideals will be warped and shallow.
Teach your child to be well-mannered and polite, but do not disguise him with unnatural manners and speech.
THE YOUNG GIRL
There are two kinds of young girls—those who face life as some great opportunity, who consider it a splendid gift to be made the most of, and who help to create the beauty that they love to admire; and those who are butterflies of society, whose lives are mere husks, without depth, without worth-while impulses and ambitions. They are satisfied if they know how to dance gracefully, if they know how to enter a room in an impressive manner, if they know how to be charming at the dinner table. Their conversation is idle chatter; their ambitions are to be "social queens," to earn social distinction and importance.
Fortunately, the twentieth century girl is less of a butterfly than the tight-laced hoop-skirted young miss of the latter part of the nineteenth century. Perhaps the war had something to do with it. Perhaps it is because so many new occupations have been opened up to her. Perhaps it is evolution. But the young miss of to-day is certainly more thrilled with life and its possibilities than her sister of two or three decades ago ever was.
Life is no longer shown to the young daughter as a plaything by fond parents who plan no future except marriage and social success for the young woman whose future rests in their hands. To-day life is shown to her as it is shown to her brother—as something beautiful, something impressive, something worthy of deep thought and ambitious plan.
To-day the young girl is not only taught to dance gracefully, to enter a room correctly, and to conduct herself with ease and charm at the dinner table, but she is taught to develop her natural talents and abilities so that the world will be left a little better for her having lived in it. Her conduct, therefore, is tinged with a new dignity of purpose, a new desire to make the best of the gift of life. Instead of idle chatter her conversation assumes the proportion of intellectual discussion, and young men and women to-day discuss intelligently problems that would not have been mentioned in polite society a generation ago.
It is to help the young girl to prepare for the glorious future that awaits her that the following paragraphs are written.
THE GIRL'S MANNERS