Meet each awakening interest
A very reliable general rule of guidance for the parent child trainer is to strive to furnish intensive practice for each and every childish and juvenile interest at the time of its awakening. As stated in [Chapter II] the most predominant interests in the young emerge in response to the unfoldment of instincts and the development of organic growths within. Perhaps all do so. But the point of importance for the parent is to meet each of these awakenings at the time of its highest activity with intensive training. The instinct to play, to fight, to steal, to run away, to work (?), to fall in love, to engage in some occupation, to marry and make a home, to have children—these have been named as especially important by virtue of their awakening successively the individual’s interests in matters of great consequence to character development.
But instincts are blind. Their possessor does not foresee the way they point. They come suddenly and catch the subject unprepared to direct their force in what we call intelligent ways. Hence, the extreme necessity of there being present at the side of the child, at the time of his instinctive awakening, some mature and intelligent person who has been through the experiences the former is about to begin, and who will sympathetically point the right way and insist that it be followed.
Work for social democracy
One can scarcely become deeply interested in the future of his own child without coming intimately into touch with the child welfare problems at large. Even country parents, isolated though they may be, will discover that serious study of the matter of bringing up a family of good children will require that they study the lives of other human young. Moreover, they will need the use of other children as “laboratory” material for training their own. All this will gradually lead the way to a fuller social sympathy in such parents and to the inculcation of more wholesome social ideals in the minds of their offspring.
Finally, the rural parents who are seeking a full and adequate development of the young members of their own family will most probably see their way clear to assume a helpful leadership of the young people of the neighborhood as advocated in [Chapter X] of this volume.
While many agencies for the betterment of rural youth have been discussed,—such as the County Y.M.C.A., the Boy Scout Movement, and the Social and Economic Clubs,—the neighborhood which has at least one of these agencies intensively at work may be considered fortunate. And it may be said that such a neighborhood is well on the way to economic improvement as well as social improvement.