Religious Education in the Family Part 18

Much that has been said so far has had in mind only the problems of dealing with younger children in the life of the home. Indeed, almost all literature on education in the family is devoted to the years prior to adolescence. But older boys and girls need the family and the family needs them. Many of the more serious problems of youth with which society is attempting to deal are due to the fact that from the age of thirteen on boys have no home life and girls, especially in the cities, are deprived of the home influences.

-- 1. THE GROWING BOY

The life of the family must have a place for the growing boy. It must make provision for his physical needs; these are food, activity, rest, and shelter. Youth is a period of physical crisis. Health is the basis of a sound moral life. Many of the lad's apparently strange propensities are due to the physical changes taking place in his body and, often, to the fact that it is a.s.sumed that his rugged frame needs no care or attention.[35]

It will take more than tearful pleading to hold him to his home; he can be held only by its ministry to him; he will be there if it is the most attractive place for him. Some parents who are praying for wandering boys would know why they wandered if they looked calmly at the crowded quarters given to the boy, the comfortless room, the makes.h.i.+ft bed, and the general home organization which long ago a.s.sumed that a boy could be left out of the reckoning.

The boy needs a part in the family activities. He can belong only to that to which he can give himself. It will be his home in the degree that he has a share in its business. Begin early to confer with him about your plans; make him feel that he is a partner. See that he has a chance to do part of the work, not only its "ch.o.r.es," but also its forms of service. But even a boy's att.i.tude to the "ch.o.r.es" will depend on whether they are a responsibility with a degree of dignity or a form of unpaid drudgery. His room should be his own room, and he should be responsible for its neatness and its adorning. Services which he does regularly for all should receive regular compensation. In all services which the home renders for others he should have a share; this is his training for the larger citizens.h.i.+p and society of service.[36]

The boy is a playing animal. Not all homes can be fully equipped with play apparatus. But no parents have a right to choose family quarters as though children needed nothing but meals and beds. The shame of the modern apartment building is that its conveniences are all for pa.s.sive adults. To attempt to train an active, growing, vigorous, playing human creature in one of these immense filing-cases, where all persons are shot up elevators and filed away in pigeonholes called rooms, is to force him out to the life of the streets. The thoughtless self-indulgence of modern parents, seeking only to live without physical effort, is the cause of much juvenile delinquency.[37]

But play for the boy is more than shouting and running in the gra.s.s and among trees; he needs books and opportunities for indoor recreation. For the sake of the lad we had better sacrifice the guest-room if necessary, and make way for the punching-bag and the home billiard-table or pool-table; here is a magnet of innocent skilful play to draw him off the street and to bring the boy and his friends under his own roof. If possible his room ought to be the place that is his own, where his friends may come, where he may taste the beginnings of the joys of home-living in receiving them and entertaining them.[38]

A workbench in the attic or bas.e.m.e.nt has saved many a boy from the street. Such apparatus truly interferes with the symmetrical plan of a home that is designed for the entertainment of the neighbors; but families must some time choose between chairs and children, between the home for the purpose of the lives in it and the household for the purpose of a salon.[39]

-- 2. RELIGIOUS SERVICE

In the religious family there is valuable opportunity to train youth to one form of partic.i.p.ation in the religious life. Whatever the family gives or does for social service, for philanthropic enterprises, for the support of the church or religious work, ought to be, not the gift of one member or of the heads alone, but of the whole family, extending itself in service through the community, the nation, and the world. The form and the amount of the gifts ought to be a matter of family conference and each member ought early to have the opportunity and the means of determining his share in such extension. The child's gifts to the church should not be pennies thrust into his hand as he crosses the threshold of home for the Sunday school, but his own money, from his own account--partly his own direct earnings--appropriated for this or for other purposes by himself and with the advice of his parents. Family councils on forms of partic.i.p.ation in ideal activities, by gifts and by service, bind the whole life together and form occasions in which the child is learning life in terms of loving, self-giving service.[40]

The boy needs friends.h.i.+p. Not all his needs can be met by the schoolboys whom he may bring into his room, nor can they all be met by his mother's affection. He needs a father. The most serious obstacle to the religious education of boys is that most of them are half-orphans; intellectually and spiritually they have no fathers. The American ideal seems to be that the man shall be the money-maker, the woman the social organizer, and the children shall be committed to hired shepherds or left to s.h.i.+ft for themselves.

-- 3. THE FATHER AND THE BOY

No one else can be quite the teacher for the boy that his father ought to be. No man can ever commit to another, still less to some tract or book, the duty of guiding his boy to sanity and consecration in the matter of the s.e.x problems.

The first word that needs to be said on this subject is that such problems receive safe and sufficient guidance only in the atmosphere of affection and reverence. Do not attempt to teach this boy of yours as though you were dealing with a cla.s.s in physiology. The largest thing you can do for him is to quicken a reverence for the body and for the functions of life. By your own att.i.tude, by your own expressions and opinions, lead him to a hatred and abhorrence of the base, filthy, and b.e.s.t.i.a.l, to a healthy fear and detestation of all that despoils and degrades manhood, and to a reverence for purity, beauty, and life.[41]

Be prepared to give him, on the basis of reverence, the clean, clear facts. Be sure you have the facts. Do not think he is ignorant; he is in a world seething with conversation, stories, pictures, and experiences of evil. The trouble is that his facts are partial, distorted, and unbalanced by positive errors; his knowledge is gained from the street and the school-yard. Only a personal teacher can help him unravel the good from the bad, the true from the false. Do not trust to your own general knowledge; take time to read one of the simple and sane books on this subject.[42] Be ready to lead him aright. Remember this subject has provoked a large number of books, many of which are foolish and others unwholesome. Do not try to deputize your duty to some doubtful book.

-- 4. FATHERING THE BOY

But the boy needs more than instruction on a special subject; he needs personality, he needs the time and thought of, and _personal contact_ with, his father. Men who do not live with boys never know what they lose. And alas, see what the boy misses! He has been his mother's boy up to school age when school takes him and gives him a woman's guidance, while the Sunday school is likely to keep him--for a while only--under the eye of some dear sister who "just loves boys." The system is a vicious one. The lad needs developed masculinity. If he gets it neither in school nor in the home he will find it on the street corner, through the vicious boy-leader of the degrading poolroom or the alleys.

The boy who finds his father eager to talk over the game, to discuss the merits of peg-tops, to walk, row, play, and work with him, finds it as simple and natural to talk with him over his moral and religious questionings as it is to talk over the daily happenings. To live with the boy is to find the youth with you. But it is hard work discovering your young men if you lost your boys.[43]

-- 5. THE GROWING GIRL

Almost all that has been said about the boy applies to the girl of the same years. Let _a special plea_ be entered here against the notion that girls are favored when sheltered from a share in the activities of the home. They desire to express their ideals as much as do boys. Much of the so-called craze for amus.e.m.e.nts is due to the fact that the family is so organized that there is no vent to the ideals there, no chance to have a share in the business of life. Young folks with the sense that "this is our home," not "our parents', but _ours_" bend their energies to its adorning, and find in it the chance to realize some of their pa.s.sion for beauty and for service.[44]

Mothers usually do better than do fathers in the matter of s.e.x instruction. Yet they usually begin too late, long after the little girl has acquired much misleading information in the school. Here, too, the first aim must be to quicken reverence for life, to set up the conception of the beauty and dignity of s.e.x functions before the baser mind of the street has had an opportunity to interpret them in terms of the dirt.[45]

Above all, with boys and girls, the whole subject, including marriage and the founding of a family, must ever be treated with dignity and reverence. Foolish parents jest with their girls about their beaux and boast that their little ones are playing at courts.h.i.+p. If they could realize the wonder awakened, followed by pain and then by hardened sensibilities and coa.r.s.ened ideals, they would sacrifice their jests for the sake of the child's soul. We wonder that youth treats lightly the matter of social purity when we have treated the sacred relations of life as a jest. If this family in which they now live is to be a place of sacred a.s.sociations, of real religious life, the whole matter of marriage and the family must be treated with reverence. Their practice will not rise above our everyday ideals as expressed in casual conversation and in our own practice.

I. References for Study

THE BOY

W.A. McKeever, _Training the Boy_, Part III. Macmillan, $1.50.

_Boy Training_, Part IV. A Symposium. a.s.sociated Press.

Johnson, _The Problems of Boyhood_. The University of Chicago Press, $1.00.

THE GIRL

Margaret Slattery, _The Girl in Her Teens_, chaps. iv, vii. Sunday School Times Co., $0.50.

Wayne, _Building Your Girl_. McClurg, $0.50.

II. Further Reading

W.B. Forbush, _The Coming Generation_. Appleton, $1.50.

Puffer, _The Boy and His Gang_. Houghton Mifflin Co., $1.00.

Irving King, _The High School Age_. Bobbs-Merrill, $1.00.

_Building Childhood_, A Symposium. Sunday School Times Co., $1.00.

III. Topics for Discussion

1. What are the special needs of the growing boy?

2. What are the things that a boy enjoys in his home?

3. In what way does city life interfere with the natural development of the child?

4. What are some of the natural expressions of religion for a boy?

5. How early should the s.e.x instruction begin?

6. What does a father owe to the boy, and what are the best methods of meeting the duty?

7. What are the normal activities for girls in the home?

8. What are their especial needs?

FOOTNOTES:

[35] A good brief book on the problem of the adolescent is E.T. Swift, _Youth and the Race_; another, from the school point of view, is Irving King, _The High-School Age_, which has much material of great value to parents.