A Talk on Childhood

Adolescence ... that stretch of life which swings between childhood and youth. The boy is no longer a helpless child clinging to his mother's skirts, nor yet a mature young man fully grown.

The boy and the girl at this age are a bundle of contradictions. For the adolescent has surging feelings and great hopes. He aspires to become an independent young man, yet he doubts how far his abilities can carry him to what he wants; and so he

expresses this struggle between himself and his own soul by adopting every outward mark of youth he knows, to deny the notion that he is a dependent child — and thus he appears to people conceited, excessively attentive to his dress.

There is another kind of adolescent, inclined to soli-tude and to withdrawing into himself, accompanied in his loneliness by a constant sul-lenness and a certain vague

despair that often carries him to suicide — while his family remains heedless of this neg-ative struggle that has cast him into isolation.

The boy whose growth comes in a single leap — one whose body shoots up four inches in a single year, for instance — is bound to lose something of his energy and the keenness of his mind. Parents ought to be more tolerant and more understanding of the situa-tion, and not heap blame and rebuke upon him every time something escapes him that invites blame and rebuke — falling behind in his lessons, neglecting his duties, feeling no sense of responsibility. When fathers grasp and awaken to the nature of this stage in their children, they will have won half the battle and spared them-selves much anxiety, mental turmoil, and fear for their children's future — the fear that it remain threatened by those unbridled impulses which may lead them to ruin and failure.

In the prayers of fathers and mothers to their Lord, this phrase recurs again and again: "Make them grow, O God, and guard their steps! Make them grow, O God, and guard their steps! ..." They repeat it every evening with the murmur of the humble believer, showing thereby the deep love in parents' hearts, the high hopes, and the good intentions with which they envelop their children through the stages of their lives, step by step, until they become young men and young women ... But were it granted us to uncover the buried secrets and the pent-up feelings of obscure origin folded within parents' hearts, we would be seized with astonishment and strong doubt as to the truth of this prayer and how sin-cerely the parents mean their

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