We often witness disagreements — indeed, we are present at quarrels that break out in the heart of families of every social condition — and we observe a painful barrier dividing the father from his son and the mother from her daughter. If we search out the cause of this inner tension that tears family relations apart, we find that the scarcity of parents' contact with their children, and their failure to understand them, has the first influence in the decline of the level of affection and devotion between the two sides.

Moreover, everyone has his sacred duties and rights — whether the son's rights and duties toward his father, or the reverse — and they call for corresponding duties and rights on the part of the other side. What grieves those who observe the affairs of adolescents in particular is the unbecoming treatment these receive at home or at school...

The adolescent is not a child like other children, subject to the general laws of childhood; nor is he the young man complete in all his inner faculties, which in principle admit of no modification and no development. What, then, is the adolescent, and what are his true characteristics and circumstances?

He is a marvel in the fullest sense of the word — a marvel that conceals in its mysterious folds the secrets of contents rich in surprises of every kind; contents that keep emerging from time to time, only to fold in upon one another anew and return to their source, leaving those who observe them in a perplexity that lasts until the adolescent reaches the age of young manhood, when he comes within a defined compass, subject to new laws, walking a marked-out road that leads him toward the harbor of maturity — where other bonds await him, and indispensable regulations, which resemble the earlier ones only in certain points that do not directly concern our inquiry.

The adolescent who emerges from the third stage (the length of the third childhood varies from country to country, usually ranging between seven and twelve in the East) is, in the eye of the psychologist — or rather in the eye of one who knows his nature intimately, has observed his particular psychology, and has tried to become acquainted with its various needs and its actual condition in most cases — a person distinguished from others in two respects: delicacy of feeling and strength of nerve. The adolescent is fine of sense, quick to be affected and to take offense, to a degree that would scarcely occur to anyone's mind... And what we say of the adolescent boy — how much truer it is of the adolescent girl! (It is well known that girls precede boys in maturity of mind and

body.) Here let me recall a personal incident that some may call trivial or naive, though it received from me the serious regard it deserves, in view of its psychological importance — and that is the aspect that embraces our whole subject:

The incident occurred last year at one of the girls' institutes where I was a teacher. I once asked one of the pupils (her age, which has a useful bearing on this inquiry, was close to sixteen) to recite her lesson; and how great was my astonishment when I heard, instead of the required lesson, the sound of copious weeping pouring from her eyes with the flow of Nahr Ibrahim!

Poor thing — that adolescent girl who had not memorized her lesson, and who would offer no form of apology save the heat and bitterness of her violent weeping!...

Here are two other true examples, stranger than the first, though no further beyond the reach of logic than it. I knew a girl of fourteen who came to the verge of suicide by reason of the ill-treatment she continually received from her tyrannical father. Another threw herself from the window of her room for a motive no less grave than the cause of the previous incident — indeed exceeding it in weight — namely, the neighbors' assault upon her honor. It is worth mentioning that the unhappy young girl was in fact chaste and innocent!

Let us imagine, then, to what lengths of excess the agitated souls of adolescents may go in their fits, if what is necessary is not done to calm them and to guide them with sober, sound direction, so as to check the current that may sweep them wherever it will — into regret and remorse...

How many a story each of us has read that showed him real social tragedies of this kind or another! Do the newspapers not daily sound in our ears the echo of grave incidents whose stage is life, and whose heroes and heroines are most often boys and girls not yet past the age of adolescence? Some may pause and attribute the incidents just mentioned to a psychological derangement or a disorder of the nerves.

Yes, it is a nervous ailment. But since this kind of ailment is general, arising from a natural heredity that overtakes every adolescent boy and girl amid fearful circumstances falling in the most important stages of their individual and social lives, it is not correct to label this condition a nervous disease or a temporary derangement, except in cases of extreme excess — desperate outbursts, rage quick to explode, states of exaltation and continual agitation, and so forth.

Otherwise, the age of adolescence calls, by the nature of things, for a certain kind of nervousness and psychological tension.

What, one asks, are the motives of this tension — or, more exactly, its causes? And how does there