Man is social. He must have companionships and pleasures in common with his kind. Only when physically deficient, mentally deformed, abnormal, does he become anti-social. This is true all through life and especially true in adolescence when nature is most keenly conscious of elemental powers and passions.
It is true that the girl in her teens is often alone. Alone she dreams her day-dreams, writes her poems, floods her imagination with all the things that are to be. In common with all humanity she meets her deepest experiences alone. Yesterday a girl of nineteen tried to tell me of the happiness her engagement to a fine, strong man had brought to her. She said, “all that it means can’t be said.” Last week a girl of eighteen tried to tell out all the loneliness and crushing disappointment her mother’s death had brought, but she ended her appeal for help with the old cry, “no one can really help, I’ve just got to bear it.” Before the teens have passed so many girls learn that great joy and great sorrow must be met alone.
But for the common life of the every day, man lives with others. He can neither work alone nor play alone, and with adolescence comes the realization of it sweeping into the life. “The gang,” “our crowd,” “our set,” work and play together.
The girl who loves and seeks solitude continually is ill mentally, physically, or spiritually, and needs watchful, sympathetic care, which shall discover the cause of her morbidness and help her to escape from it.
Environment fixes largely the companions of the girl, and her place in the social scale predetermines to some extent how she shall play. If she is in a home where the family is closely related to the church in all departments of its active work and life, the church becomes her natural social center. Its entertainments, suppers, young people’s socials, etc., furnish the means for her amusement and the place where she may form friendships. If she is a working girl boarding in a strange city or living in a home in no way connected with the church, unless the Y. W. C. A. through the gymnasium or other classes reaches her, where shall she find her social center where she may enjoy the society of other young people, form friendships and have a good time? In summer the public parks answer that question. In winter, the skating rink, “the dancing party,” the moving picture show.
If the girl lives in a happy home surrounded by wealth, together with culture and refinement, her social life will be guided and guarded during her teens and she will be helped to have a good time. If she be that happiest of all girls, the one whose own home is the social center, where music, games and fun abound, and where friends are always welcome, she is safe. Such homes might solve the whole problem, but there are not enough.
When the teacher looks seriously at the social side of her girls in their teens and realizes the craving of the whole nature for companionship, laughter and fun, she finds it hard to say “Don’t” even to the things of which she does not personally approve, because she must meet the question clear and frank, “What can I do then?” That question has been answered, so far as the church is concerned, only here and there. Some splendid and successful attempts have been made that give us hope for the future.
Most Sunday-school teachers of girls in their teens have awakened recently to the fact that unless the demands of the social side be satisfied in a sane, healthful way, the girl’s spiritual nature suffers, and the mental and physical as well.
When once the teacher really sees it she can no longer be content to meet the interested members of her class just an hour on Sunday, to discuss the lesson of the day. The crowded parks, the trolleys, the “parties,” the call of the great demanding whirl of amusements from Sunday to Sunday, presses upon her soul. She learns how her girls spend the week end and the evenings and then she throws herself, her knowledge, her skill, her time, into the scales, hoping where she finds girls in the danger zone to turn the balance in favor of clean, safe, sane pleasure.
Any teacher willing to make a little investigation will be surprised to learn how many of the girls enjoying the kind of amusements which do not make for sound moral health, were at ten or twelve regular members of the Sunday-school, and how many still come occasionally.