How can it fail to be the duty of every parent to protect the child against the chance of making these fatal mistakes through ignorance? Young people cannot be kept wholly out of reach of temptation, nor would it be best for them if they could be. Far better is it so to strengthen the moral fibre that they can resist.
From time to time there appears in our best publications an appeal from some noted educator for the better instruction of youth at home, and their almost universal plea is that the youth be told by the mother the facts needed to give him a reverence for womanhood.
XIII
THE TRANSFORMATION
The most difficult problems of the educator are found in connection with changes which take place in the child at the age of adolescence or puberty. This age has never been so carefully and systematically studied as at the present time, and it is proving an unsuspected key for solving many puzzling problems of racial evolution as well as of individual development. Personally it is a time of tremendous stress,—physical, mental, and moral; the young person who escapes turmoil being the exception, not the rule.
Certain of the physical changes which occur are familiar to all, but the deep meaning of these changes is less generally understood. The parent who has wisely guided the child to this critical period has done much, but it would be a mistake to suppose that all has now been done that can be done.
The habits of self-reliance, self-control, and right thinking formed through the years of childhood will indeed help now. But there awakens for the first time a new force: the child is, in a literal as well as figurative sense, being born anew. At this new birth, which is sometimes very difficult, he enters into a hitherto unknown world of interests and feelings. While the change from child to adult may proceed as a gradual and placid unfolding in some individuals, in the great majority it advances with irregular and disturbing demonstrations. This great change takes place in girls generally at from thirteen to fifteen, and in boys a year or two later, though it is not completed for a period of five or six years. During this time the most profound alterations take place in nearly all parts of the body; the mind undergoes a similar metamorphosis, so that often the child so carefully watched from babyhood seems entirely superseded by a new being.
This is preëminently the age of romance. It is the borderland where is fought the battle of individuality, and it is probable that at this time is decided in a very deep way what is to be the trend of the whole after life. There is at this period such susceptibility to impressions that there may be indelibly stamped mental images that are the exact opposite of those of childhood, the childish memory remaining as a thing apart and by itself,—a curious separation and continuation of two lines of ideas, which every one has perhaps experienced to some extent and on some subject.
It is probable that impressions received now are of more importance in determining conduct than at any other period, or at least in determining it for a long period of years, the period when the individual makes his strongest impression upon the world. Reversion to the faith or the ideals of childhood, which so often occurs in old age, is of slight importance to society as compared to the influence of the individual when at the zenith of his powers. Consequently, it is of the utmost importance that the right thought and the high ideal be firmly implanted at this new birth. Undoubtedly the habits of childhood make impressions in the same direction more easily received, and where self-indulgence and gratification of the senses have been prominent, they will be sure to exert a tremendous power now, and vice versa. Thus a clear understanding of this period is of the utmost importance to whoever undertakes the guidance of youth.