She is keenly critical, because she is comparing theories and life—because her ideals are high and her requirements match her ideals. She is scornful, because she has not lived long enough to realize how easy it is to fail, and she has not learned to let mercy temper justice. She doubts because she is not able to adjust things which seem to conflict, and experience has not yet helped her find harmony in seeming discord.
She still loves a good time, and has it. Her ability as leader, manager, or organizer reveals itself quickly if opportunity is given. Her tendency toward introspection and self analysis often makes her unhappy, dissatisfied and restless. She longs unspeakably to find her work, to be sure she is in the right place in the great world. She needs patience, real sympathy, and understanding from those with whom she lives; to be led, not driven, by those who control her; positive teaching on the part of all who instruct her, concrete interests, social opportunities, and some one to love.
“What does the girl in her teens need?” has been asked these past few years, by fathers, mothers, and teachers of girls, with increasing desire to find a real answer. As yet, not enough thoughtful people have even attempted to meet the question to make us sure that we have a safe and universal answer. Yet we may be reasonably sure of a few things.
She needs love. But, comes the reply, we do love her. From the time when she “lengthens” her dresses and “does up” her hair, to twenty when we greet her as an equal and consult her about all things, we love her. Who could help it?
But she needs intelligent love, which is really sympathetic understanding and keen appreciation wisely expressed. And she needs, from thirteen to twenty, to be taught two things: to work and to play. The girl in her teens needs to be helped to realize her dreams in action.
She has the dreams, the hopes, desires and longings. We must furnish the opportunity to work them out into reality. Real, healthful, natural enthusiasms for all phases of life, she can furnish if she be a normally developed girl. The opportunity to express that enthusiastic abundance of life legitimately is ours to supply.
It sometimes seems as if Shakespeare must have been thinking of the adolescent period of life when he said:
“There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which taken at the flood leads on to fortune,
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.”
The teen age is the period where the battle for an honest, clean, pure, righteous type of manhood and womanhood must be waged and won. Having realized this, it now remains for us to bend all our energies and summon all our skill to meet the task.